Madeleine Albright and the Debacle of Western Politics

I am bored by reading people who are allies, people of roughly the same views. What is interesting is to read the enemy, because the enemy penetrates the defences.
Isaiah Berlin

Anyway, distinctions no longer mattered in a dance of death, where all the dancers spun on the edge of nothing.
Anna Kavan, Ice (1967)

The darker the reality, the brighter the speech.
Jacques Ellul

64th Secretary of State of the United States (and first woman to serve in that position). Chair of the Albright Stonebridge Group and Albright Capital Management. Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service. Chair of the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs. President of the Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation. A recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, American highest civilian honor, in recognition of her contributions to international peace and democracy…

With such an impressive curriculum, one could assume that Madeleine Albright is fully capable of providing a satisfying, in-depth analysis of the increasing weakness afflicting liberal democracies all over the world. Brexit, the rise of Trump and the ongoing protests in Paris are just a few examples of an underlying malaise which is channeling popular rage against the traditional establishment. What is happening? The answer she provides in her latest book – Fascism: A warning (2018) – is not clear at all. And she is the first one to admit it:

In my twenty-plus years as a professor, I have learned to ask myself, when I am not getting good answers, whether it is because I haven’t been looking in the right places. I wonder now whether we, as democratic citizens, have been remiss in forming the right questions. (pp. 249-250)

The Loop of Democracy

Irrational Absurd Triangle Escher Triangle Geometry

Back in 1992, American political philosopher Francis Fukuyama published the influential essay The End of History and the Last Man. His main thesis pointed out that, after the end of the Cold War, liberal democracy was destined to become, gradually, the final form of government. After 25 years, we may argue that (somehow) he was right – but probably not for the reason he thought. Even if we certainly live in deeply chaotic times, history is far from being come to an end. Nevertheless, liberal democracies may represent the final (or terminal) form of government (at least in Western countries) not because they are the best option available, but because of the incapability of conceiving something different. In other words, I fear we are not moving forward since we are short-sighted, and not because we have found a settlement so good that it is preferable not to leave it.

“Apes, Together, Strong.”

The people are presented with problems. They discuss them. They decide on them. They formulate viewpoints. These viewpoints are organized, and they compete. One viewpoint “wins out”. Then the people act out this view, or their representative are instructed to act it out, and this they promptly do.
C. Wright Mills, “The Power Elite” (1956)

This is the way democracies should ideally work, isn’t it? C. Wright Mills, one the most prominent American sociologist of the last century, presented this plain description in his seminal essay The Power Elite (1956) and defined it as a “set of images out of a fairy tale” if compared to the reality of the US political system. Mill’s observation was (and still is today) very difficult to contest: after all, the quotation above could have been used much more properly to describe a Greek model of ancient democracy. Such a model entails the presence of a public of free, equal citizens who, benefiting from their specific status, do have the opportunity of debating public issues, adopting decisions and (directly or indirectly) executing them. As discussed in a previous post, in the Greek polis this public domain (koinon) was based on two fundamental elements: speech (lexis) and action (praxis). The former requires communication; the latter implies the will to translate ideas into concrete outcomes; both need data and information.