WORLD WORLDWIDE ARGENTINA News Journal Update - (en) Argentina, FORA, Organizacion Obrera #100 - DEMOCRACY AND HORROR (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 

"They will find nothing outside of democracy but horror." ---- Raúl
Alfonsín on national television, May 12, 1989. ---- Next December 10
marks the 40th anniversary of Alfonsín's inauguration. It is the
commemorative date of a democracy that came after the most brutal of the
Argentine dictatorships. And it came in the 80s, with the curlers, the
shoulder pads and the death of ideologies. ---- Democracy appeared in
that context as a bearer of humanist values that claimed legitimate
exclusivity. Since 1983, all political controversies seemed to be
subordinated to an absolute binary contradiction: dictatorship or democracy.

The radical youth of the 80s sang " we are life, we are peace ", in a
controversial gesture of arrogance. They say that the devil works more
because of progress than because of the devil. The dictatorship had
brought death and horror, undoubtedly, and democracy was offered as the
only way out of such a disaster.

There is no doubt that it was: I refer to the facts. Surely the only
viable solution in those times was democracy, and in fact it is what it
was. But since 1983 the only virtue of democracy was that, and the
antagonism with the dictatorship made it eternally dependent on horror.
It was always said that democracy was the least bad of the possible
systems, trying to dress pragmatism in a conservative progressivism that
never had the courage to come out of the closet like the conscientious
capitalist liberalism that it has always been.

It's not that we are good, Perón said, but that others are worse. This
structural minusmalism is a yeite, a folksy pirouette that seeks to find
complicity in cynicism to justify the unjustifiable. Once again that
apparent pragmatism that has nothing pragmatic about it, because it
simply misses the objective in the name of possibility. And it is never
pragmatic to miss the goal.

Of course, the one who loses the objective is always the interlocutor:
neither Perón nor "radical" progressivism lose their objective when they
argue with lesserism. What they seek is for any aspiration to overcome a
frankly bad state of affairs to be postponed in the name of the only
possible thing. If it is not democracy it is horror , they tell us. The
others are worse . It is not love that unites us, but fear .

Horror has the dubious virtue of ruining thought. It is an emotional
impact intense enough to inhibit any rational mediation. When socially
devastating experiences such as those of the dictatorship's plan are
lived, with disappearances, torture, the theft of children, death
flights and all the infernal paraphernalia of that perverse orgy
systematically launched from the power of the State, when such
atrocities are experienced, I mean, trauma ensues. And trauma does two
things: we can't think about it and it comes back again and again. Both
things are sadly useful to defend democracy.

It must be recognized that Alfonsín was a convinced democrat. That
phrase: with democracy you eat, you educate and you heal , he intended
an intrinsic legitimation of democracy, a legitimation that does not
depend on horror but that brings with it its own virtues. One would say,
if one thinks deeply, that the virtues of any social system are three:
order, freedom and prosperity. But these three virtues depend on the
only essential one: equality. Democracy failed to consolidate any of
them, and the more it consolidates one, the more it abandons the others,
without ever seriously putting the fundamental question of equality on
the table. Inequality is intrinsic to democracy when it is representative.

It is important to emphasize that when we talk about democracy we talk
about this democracy, that is, representative democracy encrypted in the
mandates of modernity. This is not an abstract concept like government
by the people, or anything like that. We speak of a democracy in which a
representative system, articulated with republican institutions, serves
as an administrative model for a capitalist society. And this is
precisely what has been failing in the original aspirations since 1983.

This is the main reason why the heroic figure of an irresponsible
psychopath who spits in the face of everything sacred emerges, within a
ruined representation. Because the sacred failed in the promise of
salvation. The sacred has been secularized, representation is no longer
effective. You can already see the strings on the puppets and the
fiction is over.

Democracy is the system of irresponsibility. All democrats tear their
clothes when the electoral ritual is trivialized, but in everyday life
all responsibilities are transferred. Democracy is the fantasy in which
the representative delegation pays the price of subordination with the
honey of impunity. Democracy is the social systematization of the I was
not .

That is why it is traumatic that the sacred does not save us. Who can
help us? Who can save us? If the mechanism does not save us, the hero
will have to save us. The only thing we are not willing to do is take
the bull by the horns and assume the daily responsibility of addressing
the common dimension with direct action on public affairs. Organize the
economy and social life with the effective participation of the partners
of society, and not with delegation to that superimposed entity that
they call "politics" and that is always at a distance from the social
fact. Society demands us , say the representatives. Politics owes
answers to society , progressives tell us. And what is this thing, I
ask, that at a distance from society rules over it? What is this thing
they call politics?

The caste, the son of a bitch tells us. He names it as the
revolutionaries of France called the nobility and the clergy. Will Milei
be the new messiah, savior of us, those condemned to plunder due to the
public administrators, the politicians who rob us?

Milei takes the sign back to times before workers' thought. He takes it
to the times when capitalism appeared on the scene and the modern
currents of socialist thought had not yet been consolidated. She takes
it back to when unionism had not yet been born and egalitarian thought
had not reached its fullness and maturity.

Milei is a hero who promises us a salvation that is inexplicable because
it is incomprehensible, encrypted in a code that claims authority
through a false technicality, and that confuses science with dogma,
hiding the premises in fallacies and gibberish. But he found the key to
the current moment, he took the pulse of the era: it is time to spit
against everything sacred because faith has been lost. And the only
person responsible for the loss of democratic faith is, precisely,
democracy.

We have clung to a moralized and dogmatic idea of democracy. All we can
say is that its archenemy, the dictatorship, is horror, and horror is
not thought. Democracy formally and systematically excludes any
discourse that denies it. It is not allowed to think outside of it. To
achieve this, it traumatizes with the dictatorship, and pretends that
the eternal return of the traumatized experience is the ghost of horror
that legitimizes it forever. If only they had governed more or less
well, perhaps this infamous mechanism would have lasted longer. But they
have made such a mess that a delirious person comes and with one breath
opens Pandora's box.

Now all the ghosts are loose in a mindless carnival that seems difficult
to explain, but it is not so difficult. They have emphasized so much
that the other thing about democracy is horror, from a shitty democracy,
that they have made us lose our fear of horror. None of this can go well.

Maybe we have time to stop this madness a little and think. Perhaps we
are in time to change course and abandon the frantic search for
salvation and the imagination of a problem-free and effortless world.
Perhaps we are in time to look for the path in which direct action on
common issues will little by little displace the miraculous idea of a
redeeming Christ into the outdated figure of a perverse messiah. Perhaps
we are in time to abandon the fantasy of family consecration in the
imagination of a protective father sitting in Rivadavia's armchair.
Maybe we are in time to take charge of society itself. Who knows.

https://organizacion-obrera.fora.com.ar/2023/11/13/la-democracia-y-el-horror/
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