Published by Slavoj Žižek on May 19, 2003
Democracy is not merely the
“power of, by, and for the people.” It is not enough just to claim that, in
democracy, the will and the interests (the two in no way automatically
coincide) of the large majority determine state decisions. Democracy—in the way
the term is used today—concerns, above all, formal legalism. Its minimal
definition is the unconditional adherence to a certain set of formal rules
which guarantee that antagonisms are fully absorbed into the “rules of the
game.”
“Democracy” means that,
whatever electoral manipulation actually takes place, every political agent
will unconditionally respect the results. In this sense, the U.S. presidential
elections of 2000 were effectively “democratic.” Despite obvious and patent
electoral manipulations in Florida, the Democratic candidate accepted his
defeat. In the weeks of uncertainty after the elections, Bill Clinton made an
appropriately acerbic comment: “The American people have spoken. We just don’t
know what they said.” This comment should have been taken more seriously than
it was meant, for it revealed how the present machinery of democracy can be
problematic, to say the least. Why should the left always and unconditionally
respect the formal “rules of the game”? Why should it not, in some
circumstances, put in question the legitimacy of the outcome of a formal
democratic procedure?
Alternatively, there is at
least one case in which formal democrats themselves (or, at least, a
substantial portion of them) would tolerate the suspension of democracy: What
if formally free elections are won by an anti-democratic party whose platform
promises the abolition of formal democracy? (This did happen, among other
places, in Algeria a few years ago.) In such a case, many a democrat would
concede that the people were not yet “mature” enough to be allowed democracy,
and that some kind of enlightened despotism whose aim is to educate the
majority to become proper democrats is preferable.
[…]
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