Studies on the current state of democracy tend to be excessively pessimistic, even catastrophic. That is why it is worth pausing on The Post-Democratic Condition in Chile. Politics on the Brink of Collapse, the book that Aldo Mascareño and Juan Rozas have just published and which is presented today, Thursday, August 20, at 6:00 p.m. at the Center for Public Studies (CEP). It is a serious attempt to precisely name something that almost everyone senses, but few manage to describe without falling into clichés. What does the crisis of democracy mean? Is there a way out or are we destined to fall into the abyss?
Read more Juan Carlos I travels to Barcelona to say goodbye to his friend José Cusí
When thinking about the concept of “post-democracy,” the immediate association is that of a state after liberal democracy, that is, a moment when it has already disappeared or been replaced by something else. Mascareño and Rozas reject that reading. For them, the post-democratic condition is not what comes after liberal democracy, but a manifestation of it. Weakened, in danger, on the brink of collapse, as the subtitle indicates, but a sign that this system is still functioning. There is no break; there is wear. There is no after; there is an internal variant—albeit flawed—of the regime that was born with political modernity.
The distinction is not minor. If post-democracy were a stage after liberal democracy, the correct diagnosis would be death, and the obligatory question would be what to build next. But if, as the authors argue, it is a way in which liberal democracy itself transforms without losing its most intrinsic characteristics, the diagnosis is different and, in a certain sense, more hopeful: there is no collapse already occurred that must be dealt with, but a fall in progress, whose outcome remains open.
The book identifies four ways in which post-democracy manifests itself in Chile. ‘Authoritarianism’ appears as a disposition to concentrate power and bypass checks and balances when they become inconvenient, although it usually coexists with free elections and an independent press. ‘Identitarianism’ subordinates collective deliberation to group belonging and turns legitimate disagreement into a threat; the Constitutional Convention is, for the authors, the episode in which this risk was closest to materializing. ‘Populism,’ far from being a foreign body, emerges from within the democratic system itself, and appears in both left-wing and right-wing discourses. And ‘political indifference’ is not really a withdrawal from the public space: the indifferent also have agency, and that indifference can end up being fertile ground for the other three.
Read more The US aircraft carrier arriving in the Middle East to replace the troubled ‘Abraham Lincoln’
What distinguishes this book from other diagnoses is its comparative vocation. Mascareño and Rozas do not analyze Chile in a vacuum, but in dialogue with countries where the post-democratic condition ceased to be a weakened manifestation of liberal democracy to become something else: Venezuela, Hungary, and El Salvador. They are different cases from each other, but they share having crossed a line that Chile, so far, has not crossed. There has been tension and real danger regarding the plurinationality of the decolonial left or the flat-earth beliefs of the far right, but there has been no transition.
The authors do not offer monolithic answers to explain this resilience. They offer, rather, interpretive reasons to understand why a country that coexists with forces pushing toward authoritarianism, identitarianism, populism, and indifference has managed to sustain the foundations of its liberal democracy. Mascareño and Rozas rightly argue that the post-democratic condition is not fought from outside nor waited out until it disappears. One must compete, adapt, and govern within it, they tell us. Ignoring it is, in fact, the surest way to lose to its threats.
