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Title: The Delegitimization of Democracy Author: William Gillis Date: October 20th, 2016 Language: en Topics: democracy, USA Source: https://c4ss.org/content/46671
There’s a number of folk celebrating the collapse of the legitimacy of
US civil institutions in this election, but regrettably it’s not so
simple as de-legitimize the state and presto anarchism. Liberal
democracy is an incoherent, ultimately unstable and unsustainable
system, but there are many more stable configurations of society and a
lot of them are far more dystopian.
Our strongest critique against liberalism is not that its founded upon
horrific, unnecessary and intolerable violence — although it is — but
that it is insecure against slow rolls or sudden descents towards
greater authoritarianism and fractious civil war.
When the civic religion of a country withers and the treaty of liberal
democracy is revealed as nothing more than paper, what is most often
released is the mass of fascistic predators who have grown fat slowly
nibbling the democracy’s flesh from within. The state survives on top of
a much broader ecosystem of sociopathic power-seeking that it
encourages. It powers itself on the fuel of constructed tensions and
contestants for power, forces that can burst out of its control
explosively. The collapse of a democracy is most usually a
reconfiguration of power, hardly ever its abolition.
That is not remotely to suggest that anarchists stop or show timidity in
our efforts to delegitimize our current state, but rather that we must
stay steely-eyed about the incredibly hard work to prepare for such a
collapse and survive it, much less guide it.
When one morning in 1936 the president of the Second Spanish Republic
called his ministers, his assistants and secretaries and found that they
had all abandoned their posts — his government de facto dissolved like a
silly dream — the people of Spain were already building barricades and
raiding the armories. Either for the fascists or for the anarchists.
We lost that war.
In part because we did not get to choose its outset. And were not ready
for its vicissitudes.
There are presently far far far more Trump brownshirts in this country
than there are anarchists. An insurrection by white supremacists and
populist authoritarians against a thoroughly corrupt and totalitarian
establishment looking for any excuse to suppress all dissent is a
conflict we are ill-prepared to leverage to our advantage. This is a
plain and uncontestable truth.
Obviously our state must fall. Democracy must be revealed as
illegitimate. But these goals must happen on our terms. And they are
nowhere near sufficient conditions for anarchy to flourish. When they
are brought about on someone else’s timetable we should be concerned.