Concern about how democratic systems are becoming internally corrupt runs throughout the West. Norberto Bobbio’s phrase “nothing is more dangerous for democracy than excess democracy” seems to come true… At least if we understand democracy as a series of institutions designed at the end of the 18th century to overcome the monarchical order and generate a system of government in which the will of citizens is administered by elites of different types and origins capable of representing and modulating their different interests.
With the First World War the European monarchies definitively fell, but the 20th century was marked by new totalitarianisms and dictatorships of different types. The nineties opened with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain, which in Chile coincided with the end of Pinochet’s dictatorship. As if this were not enough, the Internet has erupted with the dream of becoming a public square of unsuspected dimensions, where unprecedented interconnection would consolidate “the end of history and the last man”, leaving behind the ideological struggles that marked the Cold War. Fukuyama was unaware that, after defeating communism, capitalism and liberal democracies, in this new historical phase, after three decades of peace virtuous, it would be up to them to deal with themselves, with the new difficulties generated by a world in which consumption, access to information and the massive desire to participate in decision-making processes are expanding. Much more lucid was the Hungarian dissident Árpád Göncz, who, on the eve of Imre Nagy’s funeral in June 1989, said to Timothy Garton Ash: “I am happy to have seen the end of this catastrophe – he was referring to communism – but I want to die before the next one begins”.
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If anything characterized the social explosion that occurred in Chile at the end of 2019, it was the anti-elite discourse, a certain carnival spirit that broke down the structures of authority. Moors and Christians were emotionally involved, each in their own way. During the months in which it lasted, there was looting throughout Chile and public spaces razed to the ground, but the largest citizen demonstration in the country’s memory also took place: invisible worlds came to light, latent questions were made explicit, geeks of all kinds proudly exposed their peculiarities, many entrepreneurs recognized that they had stretched the rope a lot, and a democratizing emotion that pushed us to re-discuss our community agreement expanded to such an extent that in plebiscite on October 25, 2020, almost 80% voted in favor of a new Constitution written by a specially chosen body, without the participation of Congress.
I was part of that constituent assembly. Daughter of the uprising, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to update our democracy. Very few political party activists were elected to make it happen. Of the 155 seats, 103 corresponded to independents, many of whom were members of social movements promoting some cause (ecological, feminist, indigenous or other). “The united people advance without parties!”, many shouted in the chamber.
Voters preferred to elect one that resembled them rather than coherent and bearable projects. The idea that historically displaced people would finally participate in the shaping of our main community agreement sparked dreams of unprecedented democracy. The desire for revenge, however, prevailed over the desire for encounter, and those who came to claim a life of contempt despised those who blamed them for their marginalization. Far from achieving a constructive climate, disqualification was imposed. Instead of seeking the other’s reason, self-referentiality took precedence. In the existing dispersion, full of eccentricities, instead of favoring the construction of a common project, mermaids of different types have made do with each other. They knew how to claim, but not how to build.
Its failure was sensational. 62% rejected this constitutional proposal. What happened there would be enough for numerous novels and thousands of studies. While I had to experience that process, more than once I thought of Moby Dick as a metaphor for democracy, that whale that leaves many dead and injured among those who chase it, and which, full of harpoons and scars on its back, remains unattainable.
His experience made it clear that at any given moment social movements can achieve the representation that parties have lost, but they cannot provide the governability that they provide.
Then another constituent process of the opposite nature occurred, this time managed by political parties and led by the far right. The reaction prevailed and even went too far, but no one remembers it. Besides the enormous size of the former and its frustration – the biggest disaster the Chilean left can remember since the coup – it went almost unnoticed. Today the same Republicans of José Antonio Kast who failed to carry out the second attempt, when they had everything to make it happen, could win the next elections.
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Today, in Chile, all political parties represent a small minority of the population. They are no longer what they were: those intermediate organizations without which individuals who shared an idea of society could not make themselves heard, because almost everyone now has cell phones that allow them at least the illusion of participating in enormous forums; an illusion, among other things, not necessarily more imaginative than that of doing it through a party assembly, although certainly much more chaotic. Since we have not yet imagined the replacement of parties as a strategy of political organization, we can only regret their weakening – which paradoxically coincides with the tendency to multiply – and hope that they improve their presence in the community, their ability to translate their desires, their internal functioning… But perhaps they will not return to what they were.
The main problem of freedom of expression is no longer censorship, but rather its manipulation. Those who seek to manage information have gone from controlling what is said in the media to distorting the truth of the facts they seek to establish. Today, in the name of freedom of expression, journalism is attacked and despised. Human packs compete on social networks. When and how the law will come to this far west ?
These are just a few examples of how it will not be by looking back that we will take care of the democracy to come. The Leopard It is advisable to be open to the necessary changes so that what you are trying to design does not die with its formalities, but in these times of transition and loss the old takes over and the future is delayed.
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In Chile we went in a very short time from the desire to expand democracy to the desire for order. Some call it “the hangover”. The ghost of Pinochet has come back to haunt. Not literally, but that authoritarian impulse that justified the 1973 coup reappears, in a much less dramatic form. The outbreak, the Convention and Popular Unity have somehow become confused in an unconscious and non-explicit game, like a ghostly echo that returns transfigured in the face of the fear of new threats of lack of control. The idea of chaos (Pinochet always spoke of chaos) which justifies the heavy hand. Kast wants to convince us that Chile is experiencing it today, that we are in ruins, that criminals are about to take over everything, that institutional corruption is rampant, that national values are in danger, that Boric is delivering a country to the ground. He promises an emergency government for a country full of pending challenges but far from calamity.
To complete the phantasmagoria, the mirrors and the misunderstandings, his counterpart is Jeannette Jara, a communist in times when communism is dead, an inconvenient communist and against her party who, in her official line, sent condolences for the death of “comrade” Kim Jong-il, lamented the fall of Bashar al-Assad, keeps the defense of the Cuban regime alive and is careful not to condemn Nicolás Maduro. A communist who represents the broadest coalition of center and left parties since the return to democracy, but with less citizen support than ever. The problem of the Chilean left today is not revolutionary desire, but rather the lack of fresh and convincing ideas, the absence of enthusiasm and the lack of self-confidence.
We talk about polarization, but the truth is that society is not tense. Politically, apathy is greater than fury and distrust is greater than combativeness. High-sounding speeches reign in the public sphere, but rarely in private conversations. All candidates agree that the most concerning issues are security and economic growth. The issues that only three years ago were at the center of the national debate (a new pact with nature, women’s rights, the valorization of diversity, social rights…) have disappeared from the agenda.
If in the election of Gabriel Boric many voted for him in the second round so that Kast would not win, it is very likely that this time many will vote for Kast so that Jara does not win. The “against” is more widespread than the “for”. The strange thing is that there is no great concern for the environment. Only yesterday the Republican posed an unbearable danger and today it seems to be accepted as a fact. Rationally, many people think it is disastrous, but they comment on it with a calm that does not convey it. If Boric had not been the revolutionary he threatened to be, they seem to remain silent; perhaps not even Kast is the reactionary he paints. The bombastic speeches have stopped shocking. One gets the impression that no one believes much in anything and that contingent politics is a game of masks. Let’s hope we don’t have a disastrous surprise when whoever wins the presidency takes it away.
