The Author was having a discussion with a couple following the Eucharist about the upcoming French Presidential election. Thanks to the contribution of the female half of the couple, who was French, I got some very important insights into the condition of the French political scene. The French, it would seem, are given so many choices of candidates, each of them either not being known from a bar of soap, or so fake, or so plain offensive (one does not confine the object of this label to the Right Wing of French politics here), that they do not know who to choose.
The subject of the conversation moved onto the state of Western democracies in general. It seemed interesting that, with the exception of a coup or armed revolution, many of the dictatorships that one beheld in the twentieth century first started out as democracies. Moreover, the despots were VOTED into power. Sure, there were machinations on the part of the despot to ensure he or she remains a despot, but that normally came AFTER they were voted into positions of authority. The most graphic display of this took place in Weimar Germany, which after less than twenty years of being the most democratic state in Europe, ended up voting in one of the deadliest regimes known to man.
Is this merely an anomaly? One must remember too, that Russian President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent, the man now responsible for crushing all forms of opposition in the country (and annoyances outside the country) with all the means at his disposal (who would have thought gas could be such a powerful weapon - bean eaters take note), was voted in by the Russian public, not once but twice.
And it must be remembered too that not all dictatorships that were established via the ballot box, did not become tyrannical regimes overnight, but rather through a slow process of erosion of the checks and balances in parliamentary governance, normally following some kind of catastrophic scenario (e.g. Economic breakdown in the Weimar Republic, the Chechan Wars in Russia). While these means of defending liberty are being chipped away, assurances are given that they are necessary to protect a way of life. Sound familiar...?
On a theoretical note, it is interesting to note Peter Kreeft's How to Win the Culture War. An interesting section is dedicated to the "Interior/Exterior Police" dichotomy. He notes that in the absence of an Internal police, which comes in some kind of social discipline such as culture or religion (and one does not mean this in a nebulous sense of cultural or religious "feeling"), a liberal society underpinned by a narrative of individualistic atomisation, begins to disintegrate as each individual seeks to enforce his or her entitlements against everyone else. The solution to this disintegration, Kreeft argues, is via an increasing reliance on Exterior Police, which come in the form of actual police, tougher laws, more prisons and executive decisions, to maintain cohesion.
Indeed, increasing the efficacy of the means of maintaining the liberal way of life that allows each individual to do anything that he or she wants, paradoxically DEPENDS on building an apparatus of tyranny. In a way it would not be hypocritical, but actually quite logical for the main entrace of Camp Delta in Guantanamo Bay, a place where people can be legitimately detained without trial for want of proper legal jurisdiction, to bear a plaque, the bottom of which reads "Defending Freedom".
Many people living in Western democracies may think democracy to be the antithesis of totalitarianism. But in reality, the slope of liberty is very slippery indeed...
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