The Collapse of Democracy 1

“If Germany had long prided itself on being the land of poets and thinkers, in the 1920s it seemed to surpass itself. And yet in that enlightened, creative, ultramodern democracy grew the darkest regime in human history.”* This paragraph is part of the introduction to the book, “The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic,” by American Benjamin Carter Hett, who, in addition, transcribed the apodictic phrase of a German journalist: “First the Reichstag burned, then the books, then the synagogues … ”*

The United States probably cannot be proud of the same thing, but it is witnessing a similar outcome: First there was the election interference, then the assault on the Capitol, and now the neutralization of sentences in which the judge does not know whether to uphold or overturn the conviction, by virtue of an ineffable decision of the Supreme Court on presidential immunity. Not without reason, political scientist Adam Przeworski, a professor at New York University, expresses fears about the Donald Trump administration for its repeated campaign promises to dismantle social welfare agencies, shut down the fight against climate change and take revenge against his political opponents, starting with those in his own party.

Przeworski then added something even more worrisome: In 2016, Trump and his team won the election, but they had no aptitude whatsoever for governing. Now they are highly prepared, have detailed plans and the will to execute them — beyond the principle of control. Behind the figure of Trump, with his lengthy speeches, an unprecedented project is being assembled toward the development of a plutocracy.

Democracy, whose raison d’être guarantees freedoms, equality, property and controls over power, has ceased to function fully. Its institutions have ended up prisoners of discord, somewhere between inevitable and forced, that simultaneously produced economic growth and social inequality. It has fallen into the realm of plutocracy. The phenomenon has become structural and destroyed the great idea — the force — of democracy, which depended on a balance between the social rule of law and the social market economy.

Such balances were the product of political, economic and social considerations that were applied almost universally in the previous century. In Colombia, they were consulted to adopt the reforms of 1910, 1936, 1968, and the 1991 constitution. But the new century worked against them and fractured those institutional balances: Politics became a mechanism to win elections, economics became dogma and law became theory. The first two became divorced from each other and both from social reality; the latter reduced its virtues to what the jurist Mauricio García calls symbolic effectiveness — that is, it is not necessary to produce the best law; it is enough to legitimize the rulers in any way.

By all appearances, the new gringo government will favor policies that legitimize decisions to benefit 1% of the population, whose wealth is greater than that of the remaining 99%.

*Editor’s note: Although accurately translated, these quotes could not be independently verified.