Thinking about democracy and populism

 

                On 4 October 2013, the Dutch & Flemish Day of Political Philosophy took place in Utrecht, in a hall of the Evangelical Church sometimes used by the university. Stefan Rummens (Catholic University of Leuven) and Willem Schinkel (Erasmus University, Rotterdam) were the main speakers.

Willem Schinkel spoke about Het crisisbeeld, “The image of crisis. Walter Benjamin and the interpretation of ‘crisis’ in modernity”. For Karl Marx, capitalism develops through crises. Friedrich Nietzsche posits a crisis of God and of man. It is said that modernity itself is a permanent crisis. One difference between then and now is that then, we had a crisis in decision-making, now one of indecision.

The main corpus of his treatment of Walter Benjamin, I am afraid I could not do justice to, and it is not really my field nor, I reckon, that of my readers. But what struck me, was Schinkel’s remark about the Occupy/Indignados movement: “What I have against Occupy is this idea of direct democracy, which is populist. The people is allowed to be there, but if they all participated in politics, it would be a chaos. Democracy is not about people’s participation in everything.”

One doesn’t have to be a deep thinker to utter this kind of opinion. Most politicians and chatterati hold it. What it says, is that (1) direct democracy is bad because (2) the common people are too incompetent in political work and too chaotic in their awareness of the goals of politics, and (3) too much popular sovereignty gets in the way of policy-making anyway. It is amazing that such an easy concept as direct democracy is so systematically misunderstood, unless we assume that a certain class of people has every interest in keeping it misunderstood.

The same position was taken by Stefan Rummens. He lambasted the idea of direct democracy, defined democracy as representative democracy, and said: “How are you going to generate systemic power through direct democracy.? How do you anchor power in the Occupy movement?” The neo-anarchist Occupy movement is hardly the best example of a movement for direct democracy, which has realizations to its credit since at least the 19^th century in its modern form, and since millennia in its primitive varieties. It says a lot about the state of our political “science” that a specialist has had to wait for the Occupy movement to prompt him to form an opinion of direct democracy.

Every single argument against direct democracy is a reapplied argument that has historically served against democracy itself. Thus, dictatorship or real monarchy is deemed efficient, while democracy counts as time-consuming and fragmenting your forces. A “republic” is a swearword for a pointlessly quarrelling assembly of divergent minds which only a strongman can pacify and render capable of action. Secondly, people are deemed incompetent while the political class in deemed competent, eventhough politicians know as little as anyone about consequential matters such as nuclear energy. Thirdly, the masses are deemed evil and only aware of their own immediate interests while the political class counts as public-spirited, serving only the general interest and thinking only of the long term. However, the astronomical state debt of Belgium is entirely the handiwork of the political class, with zero input of direct democracy. By contrast, Switzerland with its direct democracy has a better social security, a higher living standard, lower taxes and a tangibly lower rate of tax evasion, viz. because people tend to cheat less on taxes when thezy determine the use of their tax money. So, the facts refute the professor’s theory. (But as Hegel said to the man who pointed out the contrast between the master’s theory and the facts: “A pity for the facts.”)  The story that explains the California budget deficit by the referendum behaviour of its people, voting both for lower taxes and for higher government spending, is a perennial Loch Ness monster and simply untrue. People have their own family budgets to manage and therefore know well enough that the state’s budget is a fragile entity: handle with care!

Rummens’ actual topic was the current rise of “populism”, the pejorative name for democracy. Populist parties reduce complex issues to simple ones – again an argument that has always been used against democracy. Politicians equally reduce complex issues to a push of the “yes” or on the “no” button, often not even venting their heartfelt opinion (as commoners do in the secrecy of the voting-booth) but their party leadership’s commandments.

Rummens also observed that populist parties tend to attract the losers of the globalization process. Well, losers have political rights too, and they are entitled to desire a hearing from the political decision-makers (ideally the people itself). In the past, the socialist parties and the trade-unions took it upon themselves to defend the interests of those who stood to lose from what the upper class considered modernization; but now they have been co-opted by the System.

He also thought that their internal structure is not very democratic as they don’t want discussions to create the impression that the people is less homogeneous than the populists would like to believe. Maybe, but there is also the strategic situation: internal dictatorship is the usual political form in an army or a country at war, and many so-called populist parties find themselves besieged. To be sure, I don’t think a political party should have an undemocratic political structure, but we should keep things in perspective rather than impose stereotypes such the preferred “homogeneity” of the “people”. The Belgian Socialist and Christian-Democratic Parties also have a mock vote to “corroborate” the party president nominated by a small coterie at the top. Populist parties are not more undemocratic than most political parties as such.

The professor further asserted that populist parties need to single out (or create) an enemy. This is a conspiracy theory: first someone creates a populist party, then he sets out to find an enemy. In reality, the common people have been fretting over an existing problem, e.g. those created by their Muslim neighbours, and then found or join a populist party. The professor regularly lambasted the New Flemish Alliance (N-VA), the largest Flemish political party. The financial transfers from Flanders to Wallonia have been going on as long as the state of Belgium has existed, since 1830. They are not a conjunctural phenomenon, explainable by Wallonia’s present-day economic slump, but a structural phenomenon valid even when Flanders was the poorer half. As soon as the transfers stop or are reversed, Belgium will be blown up. Now, the transfers and many other injustices have been with us for many years before a professor tabulated them exactly, and a few more before the N-VA made them into a political issue. It is objectively untrue that the party has “created” this problem, it was there first and then it found political expression – as is normal in a democracy.

Political “scientists” systematically overlook the contents of the populist parties’ programme. The transfer of sovereignty from the national parliaments to the European Union is one of the most pressing issues of the day. In the Netherlands, it is mainly the concern of the right-populist party PVV (Party for Freedom, led by Geert Wilders) and the left-populist Socialistische Partij (ex-Maoist). It was the only subject recently put to a referendum, and the result was telling: a large majority of the people voted against the project of EU constitution, while a majority of the members of parliament were all for it. This proves that the professional of “representative democracy” do not represent the people.  

                Rummens’ killer argument was this. The N-VA argues that Belgium consists of two separate democracies (they still use the conventional classification of Belgium’s parliamentary system as a”democracy”), two civil societies with their own public debates, their own cultural heroes, and indeed their own political parties. To repeat an example given by the pro-Flemish opinion-maker Peter De Roover: the philosopher Etienne Vermeersch is a world-famous authority in Flanders, a household address whenever a journalist wants an enlightening opinion on any issue under the sun – until you reach the linguistic frontier. Walloons don’t know him, and the Flemish don’t know Prof. Vermeersch’s Walloon counterparts. So, we have two separate societies, and they should be entitled to separate political institutions, normally taking the form of separate states. Fair enough, but now Prof. Rummens has discovered a contradiction is this self-evident observation. Europe, he says, consists of many democracies. We don’t watch Slovak television nor know the popular Spanish actors or Finnish singers, and we certainly don’t vote for Greek parties or Irish cabinet ministers, yet the N-VA, like most political parties, says it is all for European integration. Aha, gotcha!

                Note first of all that the professor has no problem with the separate Slovak or Finnish societies having a state of their own. So he does not logically object to the central N-VA demand: a separate Flemish state. Secondly, it is quite possible that the party has contradictory opinions about Belgium and the EU. Let’s assume this for now. But that does not make the N-VA’s position of Belgium any less correct or well-founded. If there is a contradiction, the party should rethink its position on the EU, not that on Belgium. The day when Europe will be properly debated (a situation postponed for many years by the EU’s overruling the negative referendum votes on its constitution project), perhaps the party position will be adjusted, but this makes no difference for its position on Belgium, which has been sufficiently debated by many quarters in our country.

                To sum up, our political philosophers do not think out of the box and are more than ever removed from the fine slogan “l’imagination au pouvoir!” (“imagination for president!”). They merely provide some nice sound-bites to the ruling class, justifying the present system’s status-quo.

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My time in the Senate

 

Last Thursday was my last working day in the Belgian Senate. I enjoyed the so-called Happart statute, i.e. collaborator of a former bureau member of a parliamentary commission. The well-known Walloon nationalist José Happart sat in a commission but his party had promised this post to someone else. However, he didn’t want to leave because one of the perks of the job was that he had a collaborator. So, the Belgian solution was to create a post of temporary collaborator of former commission bureau members. They all henceforth enjoyed this privilege, which normally means the continuation of the serving collaborator for a year plus the number of months equal to the number of years which the member had been on the commission. When Senator Jurgen Ceder quit his party and stayed on as Independent Senator, it sent someone else to the commission (Foreign Affairs and Defence), while he himself could hire someone with the Happart statute. In the event, he cut the job in two and hired two collaborators half-time. Since Health Insurance prohibited me from working more than half-time because of my medical history, this job was as if tailor-made for me.

I also felt sympathy for the particular situation of the Senator who was looking for assistance. He had left the Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest), a party I always disliked. In 1992, I had spoken at a party gathering about Islam, on the assumption that “la vérité est bonne” (“truth is a good thing”, and saying it to people will always be beneficial). Apparently I was bolstering a change in policy advocated by some party leaders concerned about Islam, but that became the party-line only years later. Anyway, at the reception afterwards, when I first met ordinary party members, I was appalled by the ease of some members with tough policies and violence in general, and with the nostalgia for the war years that some evinced. For the enemy it would prove easy to shoot down the good cause of opposition to Islamization by associating it with these elements in the party. At that time it became very clear to me that resistance to Islam would have to come from the mainstream parties (as it has to some extent in the neighbouring countries). Anyway, I was satisfied to see that more of the party’s politicians started to understand this and defected.

Ceder’s analysis was that times had changed but the party had not. It had started out as a radical Flemish-Nationalist party but had broken through once it restyled itself as anti-immigrant. At that time, foreigners were still something to look at. Today they are present in every classroom, and our youth is perfectly used to them. As the Government’s commissioner for anti-discrimination affairs, Father Johan Leman, had said in the 1990s, the political field was polarized between the VB on the far Right and everyone else, either Leftist or forced to follow policies dictated by the Left, while numerous people really wanted to vote for a moderately Rightist party. That party materialized when the N-VA was created, and especially when the articulate conservative Bart De Wever became its leader. In 2010, it became the largest party by far, though the Belgian establishment kept it out of the Government. This move away from the mainstream parties’ failed policies as well as from the VB’s failed opposition seemed to be the kind of political project I wanted to be part of.

The hardest part of the job was to shut up. In the commission meetings, only Senators are allowed to speak, so when I heard something to which I badly wanted to react, I had to keep mum. Otherwise it was fun, meeting all those faces from TV in the hallway or the conference room. Most memorable for me were the interviews with Serbia’s Deputy Prime Minister, who pleaded Serbia’s case for admission to the European Union, and the General Director of the Israeli prison system.

Unfortunately, the Belgian Senate does little of tangible importance, though it meddles in many conflicts. The Syrian government, the Congolese militias or the Somali pirates must have a fit of panic when the Belgian Senate passes yet another resolution about them. It is presently getting worse, as the Belgian Government agreed on institutional reforms that will leave the Senate with fewer competences and fewer members from 2014 onwards. The important politicians found it harder and harder to even show up. Already it was difficult to reach the quorum and hold a valid meeting.  When I started working, the commission met two or three times a week; my last week, it was only once.

Chairman of the Commission was Karl Van Louwe (N-VA, i.e. Flemish Nationalist), with whom I had a good understanding. Also of his party was Piet De Bruyn, a very active committee member. My impression of Bert Anciaux (Socialist, ex-Flemish-Nationalist) improved a lot while on the commission. He was very active, often asking a third or so of the parliamentary questions to the Foreign Affairs or Defence Minister. Likewise his Walloon counterpart Marie Arena (Socialist), a very imposing presence. Not so often present was Christian-Democrat Rik Torfs, a mediagenic law professor, but when he spoke up, he made a difference. He turned out to be a real intellectual, nuanced and with the gift of seeing the larger picture. I also liked Jacky Morael, the avuncular Ecologist who was often the only member to vote against a proposal or even to abstain.

One issue of some real importance for the past year was whether to intervene in Syria or not. Our Foreign Minister, Didier Reynders, usually stays close to French foreign policy, as exemplified by the Belgian eagerness to send troops to Mali to help the French troops on their (so far) victorious march against the Islamist militias. Maybe the satisfaction of this successful intervention in Mali put an end to his enthusiasm for following France into active help to the Syrian opposition. At any rate, I strongly opposed this support, military or otherwise, to the Syrian rebels. They are increasingly dominated by Islamist forces, and they are given lots of money, weapons and mercenaries by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies. If at all they were worthy of support, it should not come from crisis-stricken Europe but from these Arab states, flush with money and unemployed young men spoiling for a good fight. But so far, there is every reason to think that their coming to power will not improve matters, and will unleash a persecution of the Alawites, Christians and other minorities by the majority Sunnis. As Bert Anciaux said: “The present regime is bad, but we have no idea whether the opposition will prove better.” This is not a cause worth risking the lives of our boys for.

All along, Didier Reynders proposed to support the opposition, but the prospect of tangible military losses (i.e. body bags) kept the French Government and him from implementing these ideas. And now he has come to muse how strange it would be “to support Islamism in Syria while we have gone to fight it in Mali”. I feel strengthened in my analysis that, while drones may be a powerful weapon, the Muslim world really needs a thaw. Peace and stability are far more conducive to relaxation and change than the present polarization.

To get a taste of foreign policy, I attended a lot of symposia and workshops of the numerous think tanks in Brussels, and meetings of the many political advocacy groups. India, its province Kashmir, Brazil, China, the Middle East, every topic that interested me regularly featured in our capital. It started with the big event of the Iranian opposition, the Mujahedin-i-Khalq, in autumn 2011. Many veterans of French, British and American foreign or security policy were on the panel, all united in their support for the Iranian opposition, and full of forgiveness for its former terrorist record. If I were the Iranian Government, I would have simply broadcast the speeches, for they constituted the best proof that these Iranian opponents and dissidents are but lackeys of Western imperialist policies.

The biggest surprise of my time as a senatorial assistant was the false accusation against my Senator. In his student days in 1984, Jurgen Ceder had been accused of breaking someone’s leg, leaving him seriously limping for the rest of his life. Someone else did it, and there was no way an honest witness could have confused the black-dressed Ceder with the actual “culprit”, who reacted when a Leftist demonstrator splashed white paint all over him. For the man who was presented as the “victim” was not so innocent. Anyway, Ceder stood trial and was fully acquitted twice. Yet in July, when he had announced his decision to join the N-VA, he was accused of the crime once again in the daily De Morgen and the weekly Knack. He did react once, but I think that after the commotion he should have pleaded the guilt of the journalists who had shown contempt of court and contempt of the truth. Apparently he wanted to avoid further upheaval as it could have hurt his new party, just before the crucial municipal elections of October 2013.

Of course, I know from experience that in the hands of the Leftist media, slander is a powerful weapon. But it is powerful only because they have the bourgeoisie in their pocket. Thus, fearful or opportunistic employers will never employ someone with a negative press, even if it is lies from A to Z, because of the bad name it would give their institution or company. The untruth of the media slander may be obvious but makes no difference. How many times have employers or organizers of conferences not told me: “I know you are right, Dr. Elst, and I know they are wrong, but you must understand that our institution cannot afford to bring in someone controversial like you.”

The whole incident looked very familiar to me. It reminded me that I was lucky to have been offered a job at all. I have never gotten a job by applying for it, all my time in job applications has been wasted, it was always an offer coming my way. After my heart disease and medical operations, I was given a second chance, a fresh start with this job at the Senate. Now, on to new breakthroughs.

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The municipal elections in Belgium 2012

                Nothing is beneath the dignity of our attention, so even the municipal elections of Belgium, last Sunday 14 October 2012, can be deemed to have their importance. I cannot discuss every trend that came out of the results, but a few stand out.

                On the Walloon side, little remarkable happened. All four established parties (Socialists, Liberals, Christian-Democrats secularized as “Humanists”, and Ecologists) held their own, the Socialists even strengthening their dominant position. Some personal issues are of some interest, e.g. how a coalition managed to oust the 20-year mayor of Molenbeek, Philippe Moureaux; this coalition was engineered by the Christian-Democrats in revenge for their own ousting from the coalition in the city of Brussels, where the Socialist mayor Freddy Thielemans strengthened his position.

On the Flemish side, however, something of a revolution took place. The papers were most vocal about the giant victory of the N-VA (“New-Flemish Alliance”). From a marginal alliance partner of the Christian-Democrats in one go to the status of biggest party of the country with more than a quarter of the vote in its own right, it is indeed impressive. Partly, this was a reaction of indignation by the electorate against the latest government formation, in which the classical parties sold out the Flemish nation’s rights badly. Partly, it was because the N-VA has placed itself on the map as a decent conservative party. But it remains to be seen whether they will live up to this new image: the party is as  yet a bit inconsistent and ideologically amateurish. The rightward slant is at any rate undeniable: its rather leftist mayoral candidate in Ghent with a Socialist past, Siegfried Bracke, won comparatively little, whereas their candidates with a right-wing image or past, like Bruno Stevenheydens in Beveren, Karim Van Overmeire in Aalst and party president Bruno De Wever in Antwerp, won hugely.

Not that they can enjoy their newfound power in many places, for the traditional parties have mostly ganged up to keep the N-VA out of power, even if it is the biggest party. In the city of Halle, for instance, the mayoral candidate Mark Demesmaeker ended first but was unexpectedly bypassed by a coalition of the losers. But the N-VA knows how to play the same game: in Bilzen, MEP Frieda Brepoels will be the mayor, replacing her meritorious ex-party comrade (now Christian-Democrat), mayor Johan Sauwens. And in Kortrijk, N-VA supported the coup de théatre by Vincent van Quickenborne, who leaves his ministership in the central government to oust the sitting mayor, former minister De Clerck. For the first time in 150 years, Kortrijk will have a Liberal mayor instead of a Christian.

The Green Party gained somewhat, though a big progress in votes could not save their mayor Ingrid Pira of Mortsel, where yours truly happens to live; the N-VA was bigger there, as in most towns around Antwerp, where they will have a number of mayors. The far-left Partij van de Arbeid (“Labour Party”) put itself back on the map in Antwerp and a few other  towns. The traditional parties all lost somewhat. The victories of the Socialists (at least seemingly, for the real winner was their Green alliance partner) in Ghent and of the Liberals in Tongeren and Mechelen are the opposite of the general picture. But the big loser was the Christian-Democratic Party CD&V.

                In terms of votes, they held out fairly well, slightly better than the Socialists and Liberals. But given their deep implantation in Flemish society, their loss of ground is definitive and a major contrast to their past omnipresence. The decline of the Christian-Democratic party is another step in a long-term decline, combining the structural evolution of people becoming less religious and at any rate less Christian, with the conjunctural disappointment at the party’s selling out the rights of the Flemish people in the latest government formation. Its proverbially incompetent president Wouter Beke tried to put a brave face on his defeat, lying that his party was still the greatest at the municipal level. It is still the dominant party in some rural area, but with the loss of the cities of Aalst, Bruges and Kortrijk, it has very little power in the centres anymore.

This can be compared to that political family’s fortunes in the neighbouring countries. In the Netherlands, the CDA (“Christian-Democratic appeal”) was reduced in the last few years to one-third of its strength, marginalized into irrelevance from what till recently was the natural party of government which mostly furnished the Prime Minister. Its line was centre-left, its tradition and voters centre-right, and once they were presented with an alternative (including Geert Wilders’ anti-Islam party), they left the party in droves. The problem here, as in many parties, is that the voters have their private opinions at ease, while the public figures who sit in parliament are influenced by leftist fashions: either because they really believe these, or because they play to the gallery out of fear that centre-right opinions will be punished by the leftist opinion hegemons. In Italy, the Democrazia Cristiana, for decades in government and the natural partner of the Americans in containing the Communist threat, simply collapsed and disappeared. In Germany  by contrast, the Christian-Democrats profiled themselves as a mildly but consistently conservative party, where Christians and secularized people feel equally at home, so that it survived the secularization of the population unharmed.

                The other big news of these elections was the huge defeat of the Vlaams Belang (VB, “Flemish Interest”, formerly Vlaams Blok, “Flemish Bloc”), also a Flemish nationalist and resolutely separatist party, but known mostly for its anti-immigrant stance. Well, the party spokesmen will say they are not anti-immigrant per se, that they welcome people who are willing to throw in their lot with the natives and become Fleming with the Flemings. But they are perceived as so anti-immigrant that they are shunned by all other parties including the N-VA and kept locked in a cordon sanitaire, i.e. an agreement to boycott them. While increasing its share of the vote constantly, it never took part in exercising power at any level. All kinds of things were tried to counter its influence, including a trial which outlawed the party and forced it to refound itself.

Its presence became counterproductive, as the other parties felt compelled to take the opposite view or at any rate carry out the opposite policies. Thus, the Vlaams Belang was at its strongest around 2004, when the other parties agreed to the Fast-Belgian Act, the most liberal nationality law in the world. More restrictive immigration policies in the European countries have been enacted by the mainstream parties, and all the more so if they had no sizable anti-immigrant parties to define themselves against.

In the nineties, as the Vlaams Blok was going from strength to strength, Prof. Johan Leman, appointed as director of a government centre to combat “racism”, meaning this party, remarked that the answer to the Vlaams Blok was a decent centre-right party which could attract its voters. At the time, there was no such alternative. The parties which the left (and hence the media) likes to describe as centre-right, namely the Christian-Democrats, the Liberals and also the Volksunie (= an earlier incarnation of the N-VA), all rejected that label and pursued centre-left policies. So, they failed to attract VB voters. But now, the new leader of the N-VA, Bart De Wever, managed to give the party a centre-right image at last. He lauds Theodore Dalrymple and Roger Scruton, makes deals with David Cameron, and writes his own conservative column in a leading newspaper. So, his party at long last gave the electorate their decent centre-right alternative. This was just what the voters had been waiting for. Now they want the party to be true to its promises.

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