Our time is one of abnormal democracy. Some think that a return to a certain political normality is enough for the course of democracy to return to its normal course; others think the time has come to create something different or radical. We may not have realized that on one side or the other they are no longer talking about the same form of government when they say “democracy”.
Both academics and political forces agree that democracy is in crisis. For political actors, the origin of the crisis is either with those who govern (such as the concentration of power in Nicaragua or Venezuela) or with those who seek to take power away from them — in Mexico, for example, the presidential discourse insists that the “conservatives” are preventing the transformation of the country.
While academics have identified three factors that threaten democracy (namely, authoritarian impulses, populism, and illiberal tendencies), the diversity of ideas and concepts that have been coined to explain the current crisis reveals the complexity it entails. In this sense, from the classic term “delegative democracies” we can find, among other aspects, tired, weak, illiberal, authoritarian, fragile democracies.
But which democracy is in crisis? The normal, that is, that form of government on which there was agreement on its basic principles (individual freedom and political equality) and on its representative institutions that make the popular will expressed through universal suffrage a reality.
Normal democracy is one that was consolidated after the Second World War along with the welfare state and that maintains its basic principles in the subsequent global neoliberal state.
In normal democracy, the “who” and the “how” form a consensus. The “who” of democracy was the broadest number of citizens characterized by their freedoms and their right to political participation through the “how”, that is, those procedures that allow them to participate in collective decision-making, for example elections. Electoral campaigns were aimed at citizenship, but today this has changed, as the “who” is in dispute.
Whether they present themselves as opposition or are part of the government, political actors no longer have a consensus on the democratic “who”. Currently, when these actors say “Mexicans”, “Colombians”, “Chileans” and do not say “citizens”, they mean “people”, that is, a fragmented entity of citizenship over which they seek to legitimize their access to power through what they call democracy, that is, elections.
In normal democracy, power is an empty place that sought to be occupied by political forces that “represent” the citizens, even if only partially. In the abnormal, power is a space emptied of this representation and that political parties seek to fill with a part of the whole. In abnormal democracy, political discourse makes this part (the poor, the nationals, the excluded, the offended) the only legitimate part to make collective decisions.
Many have not realized that this means the disappearance of consensus on what we should understand by democracy. But it has become so long that for populists the support (legitimate, of course) of their people is enough to come to power, while for some authoritarians the support of the correct political and social forces is enough to stay in power. It is no longer necessary to talk about rights, freedoms or participation; just say “elections”, “patriots” or “people” to talk about democracy.
We are wrong to believe that to explain the current democratic crisis, we must think of a democracy formed by a nucleus that, if altered, implies its degeneration. But if the solution is to return to normal democracy, this would imply closing the door to the denunciation of exclusions and legitimate injustices, since there is effectively a “people” that has been ignored by the hegemonic consensus of normal democracy.
Some political actors took advantage of this, through polarization and fragmentation, to disfigure democracy. Under the banner of their “people”, they cannot understand that without limits to their power there will be no democracy. Therefore, we cannot help but denounce their threats, but as long as we think that a return to normal democracy is the solution, we will not know how to deal with these threats.
The idea of abnormal democracy, that is, the idea that we have lost consensus on the meaning of democracy, and its dispute over “who”, is an opportunity to attack old inequalities through new powers.
The idea of abnormal democracy seeks to emphasize the fact that democracy, its values and institutions, is the result of its contestations. We are at this point: it is better to know how to transform it, so as not to lose it.
*Translation from Spanish by Giulia Gaspar
