When democracies tolerate forces that seek to destroy them, a deeper question emerges: who truly holds power?
– The dilemma of democratic tolerance
– Power outside the democratic circuit
– The structural fragility of popular sovereignty
In our recent articles we have been examining the responses of different countries regarding the legalization of political organizations that sustain conceptions contrary to the democratic system.
Thus we asked ourselves whether a democracy that bans Nazism and Communism loses its legitimacy.
Would this contradict the right to freedom of expression?
Where would those words carved into the founding texts that guarantee the various forms of exercising freedom remain?
Would liberal constitutions end up “feeding on the wind,” as Ecclesiastes says?
We reviewed the positions of authors such as Popper, Schmitt and the Uruguayan thinker Rodolfo Fattoruso.
The central idea we explored is that if a democracy is unlimitedly tolerant it eventually ends up being destroyed.
Even worse: it commits suicide.
The intolerant will end tolerance.
These are movements that deny pluralism, reject democratic rules, justify violence as the “midwife of History,” and use the freedoms of democracy to suppress them.
This is how Popper reasons about the need for institutional self-protection.
A democracy cannot endure if it does not possess strong institutions, clear rules, effective possibilities of alternation in power and proper protection of minorities.
But Popper warns that the danger invoked must be real and must not become a pretext for persecuting dissent.
For Popper the problem lies in the external threat posed by intolerant actors.
The question then becomes: what exactly constitutes a real danger?
Does the saying “a barking dog does not bite” apply here?
A proverb that also has the opposite reading: if it does not bark, does it bite?
Would it not be better to prevent rather than regret?
John Rawls sustains a different criterion.
It is no longer the friend-enemy logic proposed by Schmitt.
The American philosopher approaches democracy by asking what kind of society could combine justice and stability.
Thus he introduces the concept of reasonableness.
There are reasonable doctrines and others that are not.
Like Popper, however, he addresses the problem of tolerance mainly from the perspective of the state, as if it were the only source of power.
Fattoruso approaches the issue by looking at concrete historical practice in Uruguay and in the region.
The core of his argument is that liberalism did not defend itself only through laws, but also through coercion, exception and organized force, even while proclaiming rights and freedoms.
Even if it did not openly acknowledge it, liberalism was always defensive.
That is the position he develops in his concept of “Armed Liberalism”.
This does not mean denying the existence of other forms of power that are less visible.
Do economic corporations not possess power?
What about media apparatuses, transnational NGOs, ideological lobbies, criminal networks or “technical” organizations without democratic control?
And the multiple combinations that can arise from these different sources.
They undoubtedly exercise power that does not pass through the state.
A power that exists outside the democratic circuit.
And each category has its own form of coercion.
From the narco logic of “silver or lead” to financial strangulation or social cancellation.
Where then does popular sovereignty remain?
Is voting every four or five years enough?
Does partisan alternation produce any structural change?
Power, after all, can be exercised without declaring itself as such.
And that makes even classical criticism difficult, because it is no longer clear to whom that criticism should be directed.
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