By Simone Bandini
“Every bourgeois, in the ardour of youth, even if for a day, for a moment, has believed himself capable of immense passions and extraordinary deeds. The most incapable of libertines has dreamed of sultanas, every notary carries within himself the ruins of a poet.
“Gustave Flaubert, “Madame Bovary” (1856)
I start by answering a question we asked at the end of a previous editorial, written after Donald Trump’s inauguration in the White House: will he himself lead the necessary reform process of capitalism?
It seems so, and specifically, facilitating the divorce between capitalism and democracy celebrated by contemporary myths of American freedom and prosperity. A marriage that is extinguished after a century and a half of happy cohabitation.
But is it democracy that saves itself, or rather capitalism that finds different political applications?
Let’s try to answer using the Bible of modern political thought, “Democracy in America” (1835) by Alexis de Tocqueville, noting how the attempt to annihilate the ‘intermediate bodies’ of the nation, especially those that do not conform and align, is now the order of the day. For the French author, a fine connoisseur of the American political system and the human soul, intermediate bodies – such as associations, religious, cultural and productive communities are fundamental in democracy – because they prevent what he calls the dictatorship of the majority, protecting the universality of rights, therefore also of minorities and preventing the individual, isolated and without the ability to communicate in democratic society, can lose the immediate and visible sense of connection with power, falling into existential loneliness and social alienation.
In a robust democracy, intermediate bodies therefore have an orchestral role, acting as a mechanism of guarantee between the individual, the state and society – promoting participation, freedom and the protection of universal rights. Well, it is clear how the tip of the pyramid – Mr. President made monarch – works to cancel the dispersion of power in a thousand bodies of influence and representation, returning to more immediate and direct decision-making and operational mechanisms, eminently personal pro domo sua. On the other hand, there is no doubt that the base, the people with the right to vote, looks favourably on a charismatic return of power, capable of making its values and aspirations visible.
“The claim to eliminate the distance between those who govern and those who are governed directly threatens the representative function, which has gradually been structured and strengthened within liberal democracies especially through intermediate bodies”, the essayist Antonio Campati comes to our aid, shedding light on the political theory of democratic distance, understood as that intermediate area between representatives and represented within representative government.
I don’t have to explain to you how the American audience is an advanced laboratory on the ‘trends’ coming to the Old Continent: from technology to cinema, from music to costume, from economics to politics. It is clear to everyone, regardless of their background and personal orientations, how these conflicts, this sort of civil war – we remember the recent murder of Charlie Kirk – and this new autocratic air, are already landing in Europe, dazed by long years of ‘economic’ and ‘bourgeois’ peace, today grappling with the problems of uncontrolled immigration and a war on the doorstep. It is not democracy that makes men, but rather the opposite. It will not be representative democracy, as we know it, that will make our day.
Recommended listening: “Brown Sugar”, Rolling Stones