Postmortem Report by Tomislav Sunic

Author:Tomislav Sunic
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: Europe, Tom Sunic, democracy, Alternative Right, Alt-Right, modernity, racism, New Right, race, Emile Cioran, Paganism, nationalism, multiculturalism
ISBN: 9781912079773
Publisher: Arktos Media Ltd.
Published: 2017-12-09T05:00:00+00:00

Part IV: Liberalism and Democracy

Democracy Revisited: The Ancients and the Moderns

by Alain de Benoist

Translated by Tomislav Sunic from the author’s book Démocratie: Le problème (Paris: Le Labyrinthe, 1985)

“The defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy,” wrote George Orwell.1 This does not seem to be a recent phenomenon. Guizot remarked in 1849: “So powerful is the sway of the word democracy, that no government and no party dares to live, or thinks it can, without inscribing this word on its banner.”2 This is truer today than ever before. Not everybody is a democrat, but everybody pretends to be one. There is no dictatorship that does not regard itself as a democracy. The former communist countries of Eastern Europe did not merely represent themselves as democratic, as attested by their constitutions;3 they vaunted themselves as the only real democracies, in contrast to the “formal” democracies of the West.

The near unanimity on democracy as a word, albeit not always a fact, gives the notion of democracy a moral and almost religious content, which, from the very outset, discourages further discussion. Many authors have recognized this problem. Thus, in 1939, T. S. Eliot declared: “When a word acquires a universally sacred character … as has today the word democracy, I begin to wonder, whether, by all it attempts to mean, it still means anything at all.”4

Bertrand de Jouvenel was even more explicit: “The discussion on democracy, the arguments in its favor, or against it, point frequently to a degree of intellectual shallowness, because it is not quite clear what this discussion is all about.”5 Giovanni Sartori added in 1962: “In a somewhat paradoxical vein, democracy could be defined as a high-flown name for something which does not exist.”6 Julien Freund also noted, in a somewhat witty tone:

To claim to be a democrat means little, because one can be a democrat in a contradictory manner — either in the manner of the Americans or the English, or like the East European communists, Congolese, or Cubans. It is perfectly natural that under such circumstances I refuse to be a democrat, because my neighbor might be an adherent of dictatorship while invoking the word democracy.7

Thus we can see that the universal propagation of the term democracy does not contribute much to clarifying the meaning of democracy. Undoubtedly, we need to go a step further.

The first idea that needs to be dismissed — an idea still cherished by some — is that democracy is a specific product of the modern era, and that democracy corresponds to a “developed stage” in the history of political regimes.8 This does not seem to be substantiated by the facts. Democracy is neither more “modern” nor more “evolved” than other forms of governance. Governments with democratic tendencies have appeared throughout history. We note that the linear perspective used in this type of analysis can be particularly deceiving. The idea of progress, when applied to a political regime, appears devoid of meaning. If one subscribes to this type of linear reasoning, it is easy to

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