On the inner connection between liberal democracy and the new right-wing extremism
Listening to façade democrats is a bit reminiscent of Manichean religion: there is a good and an evil principle in the world. The good principle is democracy and the market economy that goes with it; evil, on the other hand, appears in the form of dictatorship, totalitarianism, fascism, racism, etc. The moods and atrocities of the extreme right have nothing to do with democracy. They must have come from the “outside,” from the pre-civilizational primordial ground of the “human beast,” or possibly from a bad upbringing. This naive democratic thinking ignores the fact that democracy and totalitarianism have not historically had a simple external relationship to one another. The more or less totalitarian modernizing dictatorships of various kinds, from Cromwell to Hitler, were not mere aberrations in relation to the “good” principle of democracy, but rather a kind of larval stage of democracy itself. Western democracy after the Second World War cannot be separated from the history that led to the present state of affairs; and this history is written in blood everywhere.
It may seem strange to see modern dictatorships not as the antithesis of democracy, but as the historical-genetic forms in which democracy itself was implemented. But we must not forget that democracy, by its very name, is also a form of domination, and perhaps one of the most terrible forms: namely the self-domination of man in the name of abstract principles, self-subjugation to the laws of the total market. It was the modernizing dictatorships that (under various ideological names) socially implemented this core of democratic domination: submission to the norms of abstract time, to factory and office discipline, to the necessity of alienated “employment” for money. Nowhere have people followed these impositions voluntarily. Democracy in today’s sense means above all the internalization of these constraints, so that people, who have become abstract monads of work and money, strive for and do to themselves everything they used to have to be forced to do. The totalitarian, the logic of total commodity production, which has become widespread, is no longer an external force, but rather resides in the individuals themselves, and this is essentially the difference between (open) totalitarian dictatorship and (internalized) totalitarian democracy in the modern era.
As Ralf Dahrendorf has noted, National Socialism also possessed many features of a modernizing revolution: not only through the new forms of industrial mass consumption (Volkswagen, Autobahn), which were commercialized after 1945 and were bearers of the “economic miracle,” but also through the melting down of the old social milieus, which were brought into line. The uniformed abstract “Volksgenosse” [comrade] was, as it were, analogous to the Volkswagen, the prototype of today’s highly individualized and thoroughly commercialized individual, as described by Ulrich Beck in his book Risk Society. So there is indeed a complex inner connection between National Socialism and post-war democracy, which has only been suppressed by the façade democrats because they do not want to acknowledge the totalitarian aspects of democracy itself. The Nazi provocations, swastika graffiti and barbaric acts of today’s violent children cynically reveal what has been repressed. In its wayward children, a democracy playing innocent sees only its own reflection, in which the ugly, otherwise hidden scars of its own history of imposition reappear.
However, it is not only the scars of the past that become visible, but also the equally ugly consequences of the democratic present. The freedom of liberal democracy is identical to the core of its domination, because this freedom is only ever the “economic freedom” of buying and selling, the freedom of the solvent. No other freedom is envisiaged. The form in which this freedom is exercised is competition, which by its very nature wants to be total: “Every man for himself and God against all.” And is competition not highly praised in market-economic democracy as a superior principle, the only way to guarantee “efficiency”? Democracy is a pure meritocracy in which no handicap is welcome and which (in principle) tolerates no human emotion that cannot be subjected to the criterion of “profitability.”
In this way, the right-wing extremists are actually only speaking plainly about the innermost principle of democracy itself when they denounce all human solidarity and attack refugees, minorities, the disabled and the homeless, who are only seen as annoying “cost factors.” It is precisely in this respect that democrats should not really be surprised and enraged that the new right-wing extremists see themselves as democrats and want to be recognized as a legitimate part of democracy. This is particularly true of the new forms of right-wing extremism represented by the billionaire Ross Perot or the Republican star Newt Gingrich in the U.S., the Berlusconi group or the “Lega Nord” in Italy and the Haider party (significantly, the “Freedom Party”) in Austria. What we are confronted with here is the foul smell of a thoroughly Western-universalist social Darwinism that preaches an anti-social individualism of the “strong,” wants to get rid of the “unproductive” people in the market economy, and wants to administer poverty exclusively using a police state.
The democratic world, in which people are sorted into winners and losers of the market economy, nurtures this social Darwinism according to its own criteria. The populist demagogues even find support among the losers, who are duped into thinking they belong to the “strong” group and that a fantastic winning position is open to them, from which the even weaker can be kicked in the name of competition. And even the arsonists, bombers and murderers of the right-wing extremist underground: what are they doing other than “continuing the competition by other means”? If democracy has made the ability to assert oneself in a total meritocracy its idol, it need not be surprised at all that this mentality, which it has bred itself, proliferates beyond all limits of the legally codified “rules of the game.”
Ultimately, market-economic democracy doesn’t have its own morality that could emerge from within and wouldn’t have to be imposed from the outside according to artificial criteria that are actually foreign to its mechanism. The much-vaunted welfare state, which is supposed to repair the structural social deficits of market democracy, was only ever a luxury product of a few global OECD winner countries anyway. As long as it was possible to delude oneself that these “social safety nets” were an achievable goal for all countries, the ugly side of democracy was provisionally covered up. But the flood of “evil” had to break loose because the economic “operating system” of democracy, namely the social machine of transforming abstract “labor” into money, is threatening to crash. It is precisely the results of the much-vaunted competition and “efficiency” itself that have brought about structural mass unemployment on an unprecedented scale since the 1980s: according to studies by the International Labor Organization (ILO) in Geneva, already more than 30% of the world’s workforce.
The rationalization and automation made possible by the microelectronic revolution, the streamlining of organizational lines (“lean production”), and the globalization of financial and commodities markets as well as the international dismantling of production processes are also making a growing mass of people economically “superfluous” in the core countries of Western democracy. State finances are coming up against hard limits, the welfare state is being cut back and becoming unreliable, and the democratic state is even withdrawing from culture. Democracy itself is beginning to abandon the achievements of civilization because it is being suffocated by its own criterion of “financial viability.” Even before any ideological justification of the phenomenon, the mechanism of the objectified system of market democracy automatically begins to exclude more and more people.
The democratic parties, including the Social Democrats and the Greens, and the democratic state bureaucracy are becoming the political sponsors of this exclusion, even if they wash their hands of it and want to “make the atrocities socially acceptable” according to a phrase from the devil’s dictionary. This hypocrisy is so intolerable that it virtually fuels open right-wing extremist social Darwinism; and the rapidly increasing existential insecurity creates such a potential for social anxiety that every poor wretch is desperately trying to swindle their way into the “elite” and the notorious “high earners,” even at the cost of irrational outbreaks of violence against real or supposed social rivals. The nasty suspicion arises that the good democrats secretly find the street terror and bombings of the right not entirely inconvenient, because they can use it as a smokescreen under pious slogans of an “outrage at inhumanity,” get carried away by the popular sentiment of the extreme right and apply, with constitutional legitimacy, measures that they now even declare to be a kind of homeopathic “remedy against the right-wing danger.” This is how the right-wing extremist hand washes the democratic hand. The renewed rise in anti-Semitism is also growing from the same potential for social fear that democracy itself generates. The hatred of weak people who are racialized as inferior corresponds to the hatred of the phantom of a deliriously evil super-intelligence, supposedly lurking as “the Jew” behind the incomprehensible powers of money that have arisen from the very form of the social fetish. The crisis of the market system and its profitability criteria manifests itself not only as a crisis of the labor market, but ultimately also as a crisis of the financial markets: more and more money capital, which could no longer flow into expansion and job investments under the pressure of rationalization, migrated into the derivative speculation sectors. In the 1980s, the financial yuppies were still applauded and the youth of democratic simulation flourished in the atmosphere of casino capitalism. Since the party is over, the cat’s meow looms and the inevitable bursting of the global financial and speculative bubble is heralded by bank failures (Barings), financial scandals and currency crises. Meanwhile, the democratic public itself is looking for scapegoats instead of admitting the limits of the market-based industrial system: “the speculators,” cry the press hypocritically, are destroying “our beautiful market economy.” This zealous hounding of the suddenly economically respectable democrats differs only gradually from the agitation of the anti-Semitic mob, which (itself greedy to the core) suspects the “Jewish world conspiracy” to be behind the financial crash.
It can no longer be denied that it is the social and civilizational decomposition process of market democracy itself that creates, feeds and allows far-right “evil” to grow. It is therefore absurd to want to defend democracy – as it is – against the “right.” If democracy is not capable of radical self-criticism and the self-suspension of its economic machine, there will never again be inner peace. Either the rules of the game will be fundamentally changed, or democracy itself will turn into barbarism, and right-wing extremism will then only be just one component of its own development.
Fundamental social critique has never been as desperately needed as it is today. But the left, which has always seen itself as the bearer of radical, emancipatory critique, has fallen embarrassingly silent. The collapse of Stalinist state socialism, which was never more than a dictatorship of “catch-up modernization” with bureaucratically “planned markets,” was all too cheaply misunderstood as a supposed refutation of any fundamental critique of the market economy. As a result of the global crisis, completely un-emancipatory fundamentalism and right-wing extremism are now surging into the ideological vacuum left behind by the democratically indoctrinated left. The mixture of the radical pseudo-criticism of modernity with the simultaneous brutal extension of modern performance and competition criteria, which has always characterized demagogic right-wing populism, is taking effect unchecked. If we do not succeed in developing forms of social security beyond the market and (national) state through a new emancipatory social critique, taking resources out of the idling market mechanism and radicalizing the socio-ecological transformation instead of retreating more and more from the dictates of the world market, then democracy will become its own gravedigger.
Originally published in EuropaKardioGramm no. 5/6 in 1995
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