The sword that democracies need

I must reiterate. Such repetition is inevitable and can be tedious, yet it is occasionally necessary. Speaking of Trump’s authoritarian rampage in America, after reading a conversation between Paola Peduzzi and Leon Wieseltier – not even two years ago, in October 2024 – I wrote a short piece here on ‘democracy without a sword’, which still holds up as a modest attempt at reasoning, following the victory of the Nazi-style AfD in Saxony and the applauded funeral of an executioner, perceived simply as a nationalist general, in Serbia, and perhaps also following the British march of the black shirts against immigration and the farce in Cernobbio involving General Catenacci. “Democracy without a sword – that of Weimar, to be clear – is tailor-made for the Machtergreifung, for the seizure of power by those who deny it. In short, when you do not assert your democratic power and do not ensure that its rules and spirit are upheld by something other than, and more solid than, proceduralism and the rule of law, then you must expect the strongman – the inveterate cheat – to overtake and break through the weak, fair, rights-protecting but powerless democracy. If a man who has faced two impeachments, who has sought to fraudulently and flagrantly invalidate elections – through the 6 January 2021 riot at the Capitol and much more – and who has presented himself as a sacrificial lamb facing heavy sentences in a non-politicised court, if a scoundrel of that sort is allowed to proclaim that he wants to fight the enemy within, to send the army against them, and that he wants to deport millions of immigrants to their countries of origin on the very first day of his presidency.

“That it intends to persecute its political enemies, abandon the country’s historic alliances, and engage in other follies such as praising the genitals of an admired golfer whilst he is in the shower, means that democracy is ready to be swept aside, that it is weary, and that the mechanisms of the separation of powers and the Constitution no longer function.” I am, of course, not interested in the Latin-style vanity of the ‘heri dicebamus’ (as we used to say). It seems right to me to return to the liberal illusion.

Trump is gone. For now, America is gone too, caught up in one crusade or another against universities and Venezuelan gangs. It has all gone in the predictable direction, given the circumstances or the starting point. In our small-yet-big world, from Kyiv to Tehran, things have taken a turn for the worse. Ukraine has been deliberately plunged further into trouble by the collusion between an autocrat and a ballroom-style would-be autocrat. The ayatollahs reign supreme over a regime that hangs dissident girls after subjecting them to thorough torture, and there is no other politically relevant issue apart from petrol prices per gallon. Israel, heading to the polls after three years of war, has never been so isolated, and anti-Semitism is far more prevalent than it was eighty years ago – a fact the Saxons wish to ignore, if it means they can call a Democratic MP in Washington a ‘monkey’ and a ‘sell-out’ under the banner of Palestine. Merz’s appeal to the Constitution and shared values, his very correct point about the democratic legitimacy of the elections whatever the result may be – well, if this is the political lesson to be drawn from a vote that rehabilitates Hitler by disguising him as Bismarck, then we’re in for a rough ride. I’ve got nothing against the voters in Magdeburg. I am not interested in whether they have studied or to what extent. I am not sure the problem lies in identifying ‘good’ populism, as they say, to counter ‘bad’ populism. What worries me is the liberal illusion, precisely: the notion that what is merely legal in terms of the procedure for ascertaining consent is legitimate and inevitable – something a driving force risks sweeping away simply because it is confronting a weakness. Democracies did not come into being in this way, nor are they meant to be treated in this way – with generic appeals to constitutional values, which do no harm but solve nothing. In both America and Europe, democracies are the offspring of war; they are nurtured by principles founded on faith; they are born of organised force standing against the all-consuming myth. It is probably too late even to discuss this; perhaps there is no point at all in speaking of the famous ‘principalities that have never been seen nor known to exist in reality’, and the misunderstanding surrounding the establishment, preservation and defence of democratic power is illusory in itself, as well as inextricable; yet democracy without force, without the sword, is but a feeble whisper from ageing generations against the vigorous, unyielding insurrection of the masses.