Sydney Jard da Silva *
Among the conditions of democracy, the least remembered is that wrong ideas about democracy lead democracy to wrong. Giovanni Sartori
The act of reading the “Letter to Brazilians and Brazilians in Defense of the Democratic Rule of Law” on August 11, which brought together thousands of people in the passages of Largo São Francisco, and the millions of signatories of this historical document, the heterogeneity and complexity of the democratic concept in its most diverse economic, political and social dimensions.
“Democracy is a controversial concept,” philosopher Frank Cunningham told us. Although Western civilization recognizes democracy as the highest form of political organization, there is little consensus on what the term means, what it defines, and what it commands. In the words of another great democratic theory thinker, Giovanni Sartori, we live in an “age of mixed democracy.”
This means that no matter how great our intellectual effort to understand and define it, this understanding and definition will always be subject to criticism, questioning, debate. The meaning of the word democracy and the political regime it defines, represents and regulates are highly debated.
For over 2000 years, philosophers and political scientists have been devoted, among many other thinkers, to theorizing what democracy “means”, what “is” and what “should be”. However, to use Norberto Bobbio’s famous distinction, the democracy of the ancients and the democracy of the moderns have little to do with each other, both in their descriptive essence and their prescriptive assessment. A philosopher of classical forms of government would not call democracy the political regimes that prevail in the modern world. With a little generosity, these would simply be mixed forms, also called polyarchies.
At this point, the model of analysis of democratic theories proposed by Frank Cunningham seems particularly useful to more precisely represent our multifaceted concept. According to the above-mentioned analytical scheme, democracy can be thought and theorized in three different dimensions. The first is the semantic dimension, which is limited to a literal or etymological definition of the word. Despite its clear, objective, concise meaning, there is a relative consensus among theorists that such a definition does not help us much to understand that democracy “is” descriptively and “should” descriptively. To say that democracy is “rule by the people” helps little in understanding “true democracy” and proposing “ideal democracy”. Beginning with the trap of the polysemous definition of “people”: the multitude, the poor, the mass, the rabble.
The second, descriptive dimension proceeds in the sense of investigating what democracy actually represents. What governments, political institutions, social organizations can actually be considered democratic? How do real democracies work? Who manages, what manages, and how? The hidden risk in such a definition is to reduce democracy to majority-forming and decision-making tools. It’s just a procedural democracy.
At this point, it is important to emphasize that we cannot say “what democracy is” without saying, as Giovanni Sartori does, that democracy “should be”; this is equivalent to accepting that no matter how “scientific” we are in our definition, it will always be contaminated by the political, ideological and moral values we share.
Finally, the prescriptive dimension refers to the evaluation of democracy as a political regime against authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. Definition of evaluative norms to reach the best form of government, real democracy, ideal democracy; No less dangerous is the risk of transforming democracy into an inaccessible theoretical and methodological inspiration, a political utopia far from reality and human possibilities.
Considering these three possible dimensions of democratic epistemology, our object of analysis is by no means limited to the literal meaning of the word democracy: “power of the people”, which is theoretically harmless but not empirically harmless. On the other hand, we do not have the normative ambition to say “what should be” democracy; As Giovanni Sartori warns, our reflection may inadvertently deviate from this seductive path. But in this case, it’s a matter of conscious risk-taking, not an unconscious goal.
Therefore, it remains for us to explore what democracy really is, a subject of study to the liking of political science, but far from philosophical reflections; what it represents, how it works; how it relates to other relevant dimensions of society and who its main enemies are today. In this respect, it will also be important to consider the organizational dimensions of democracy outlined by Giovanni Sartori in political macrodemocracy and economic and social microdemocracy; the second is represented by an infinite number of sub-dimensions subject to the first.
In line with the same argument, Norberto Bobbio has chosen the expansion of the democratization process from the political field to the economic and social fields as the main task of the modern world. In this author’s optimistic view, the fundamental challenges of political democracy would have already been achieved: universal suffrage, freedom of expression, the right to dissent, stable rules, and variable results.
The modern challenge will therefore be to extend democratic methods beyond political democracy, that is, to areas of economic and social activity and organization that still resist or only partially and only partially assimilate democratic principles.
This theoretical proposition is an interesting way of thinking about democratic relations in the contemporary world. As a citizen full of civil, political and social rights, how much is it to respect the ideas of the other and, above all, to discuss politics and society effectively guided by democratic principles? Or, conversely, to what extent is this debate driven today by positions that oppose the extension of the (political) guiding principles of macro-democracy to micro-democracies (economic and social)?
In summary, as noted, the challenge is to think of the interaction between economics, politics, and society in its descriptive dimension, in the sense of capturing how (if imperfectly) democratic methods drive and (albeit imperfectly) drive discourse and action in economics. democratized). Obviously, it is about seeking the democratic content of their interactions rather than establishing hierarchical and heteronymous relationships between these different dimensions.
In fact, until very recently, the great theoretical and methodological challenge of contemporary democracies seemed neither greater nor less than those before them; however, while proposing as a task the creation of an explanatory axis that brings together the concepts of economy, politics and society in a single descriptive dimension, it is a bit more complex and assertive, able to capture the trend and meaning of the democratic interaction between these three multidimensional elements. human experience. In the words of Norberto Bobbio, walking “from the democratization of the state to the democratization of society”.
However, this challenge becomes very complex when anti-democratic forces emerge in different parts of the world. From the wealthy northern hemisphere to the poor southern hemisphere, nationalist and populist leaders are spreading disdain for the Democratic Rule of Law principles: Donald Trump in the USA; Vladimir Putin in Russia; Marine Le Pen in France, Matteo Salvini in Italy; Narendra Modi, India; Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey; Viktor Orban, Hungary. And many, who often refer to extremist André Ventura to use a Portuguese phrase, “doesn’t deserve it”.
Thus, after a short hiatus, when many democracy theorists bet that he no longer has enemies; once again democratic theory needs to be reconsidered. In today’s world, our main struggle is not to extend the methods of political democracy (macrodemocracy) to the sphere of economic and social activities (microdemocracies), as the famous intellectuals of the last century naively thought; rather, once again, to defend the democratic regime itself against the systematic attacks of its internal enemies. Enemies we mistakenly believe are part of a distant, undemocratic past.
* Sidney Jard da Silva, Political Scientist, Professor of Public Policy at Federal ABC University (BPP/UFABC).
source: Noticias
