This year’s Hay Festival edition in Cartagena de Indias had as one of its central themes a reflection on the crisis of democracy in the world. Venezuelan Leopoldo Martínez, founder of IQ Latino, a lawyer, a former Venezuelan congressman and a member of the Democratic Party’s national executive in the United States; Peruvian Alberto Vergara, political scientist and professor at the Universidad del Pacífico in Lima; and Spanish Guillermo Altares, journalist and editorialist for El País and a writer, reflected on the possible origins of these crises in the democracies of the United States, Latin America and Europe, and spoke of the new populisms that have resulted from them. Andrea Bernal, director of NTN 24’s Zoom a la Noticia, guided the conversation.
The Crisis
According to Leopoldo Martinez, the democratic crisis in the United States was beginning to be felt before the arrival of Donald Trump due to four factors: 1) the “obscene presence of money in politics”, because of the Supreme Court Citizens United ruling that allowed corporate money and money from other origins to practically “hijack” a good part of politics, for corporate, religious, economic causes and interests; 2) the suppression of voters as the country becomes more diverse in racial and cultural terms, with immigrants of all origins gaining a voice and political and economic importance: In states where this population weights more, Martinez says, people with fewer resources are not recognized to vote; 3) the “social anxiety” generated in conservative sectors by the advance of human rights from the conquest of equality in marriage; 4) and the crisis of judicial institutions in the United States, due to “the politicization of the debate and the appointment of judges”: during the time Trump has been in power, he says, 150 federal judges have been appointed.
Alberto Vergara puts the focus on Latin America. He said that if you look at the region as a whole and compare it to what it was 40 years ago, “you would say that things are not so bad,” because at that time there were dictatorships in all countries, except Colombia, Costa Rica and Venezuela. “But from a liberal republican point of view, if the point of analysis is not the countries but the individuals, I frankly did not think that in Latin America we were going to shoot people in the streets again. I thought that kidnapping, disappearance, exile and murder with impunity had passed, and unfortunately this is what is happening today in Venezuela and Nicaragua above all, which are the most serious cases”. That is why he considers that regional mechanisms for the defense of democratic institutions in Latin America “have failed resoundingly to stop authoritarianism and dictatorships, and in the last 15 years these forms were favored under the idea of national sovereignty and not to be involved in what happened within the countries.”
Guillermo Altares talked about Europe being touched by the resurgence of the ultra-right wing movements and parties, which is more visible in France, and also about the recent shaking of the European Union with the Brexit or the lack of freedoms in countries like Hungary and Poland. Altares’s vision is optimistic. He said that while it is true that “one in five” French people vote with conviction for Marie Lepen’s party, “four out of five French people have also recalcitrantly refused to give up their democracy in the slightest”.
He added that the crisis of refugees in Europe, mainly from Syria, accentuated the rise of the ultra-right in Germany, Sweden and Denmark, but that in return there was also a great reception for them. In Germany, she says, an immense number of volunteers turned to helping refugees to guide them in their arrival and adaptation to the country. Sweden welcomed millions of refugees. “If there is one proof that democracy works, it is that when the citizens themselves embark on immediate and effective solidarity.”
Vergara insisted on distinguishing what happens in Latin America from what happens in the United States and Europe. In the latter two, he said, there is “a crisis of civilization rather than simply the crisis of a political regime. It is an existential issue.”
The post-truth
Andrea Bernal mentioned that it seems that now that the speech triumphs over the facts.
“Facts, science and reason are in the background in the political conversation,” responded Leopoldo Martinez. He elaborated his reflection on what he calls “the desired lie and the post-truth”. “The phenomenon of social media has an impact on the preference for the algorithm. We construct the information we wish to consume, which is very much associated with our belief system and not with the desire to obtain information to make better decisions.” That, he continued, has made the media to tend to compete with social media in order to align with the algorithm. Besides, Martinez insisted, social media tend to polarize society. The important thing nowadays is to be at the extremes.
“That’s deadly for democracy, because democracy is executed in political agreement. Without political agreement, no democracy survives.
“The democratization of social media has given everyone a megaphone,” Alberto Alberto Vergara stated, to many people who had “despicable opinions” but only expressed them in their intimate setting “The phenomenon is like that and, therefore, it is problematic.” Vergara mentioned an example: the most widely shared news on social media during the U.S. election campaign in 2016 was a lie: that the Pope supported Trump.
Optimism and nuances
However, Alberto Vergara does not consider that today we live in a world where “lies and parallel realities have triumphed.” He argued that Trump lost in the popular vote in the elections by a difference of almost 3 million votes, that Emmanuel Macron beats Marine LePen, that there are countries in Latin America where the electoral path has taken away leaders who wanted to stay in power forever.
Andrea Bernal quoted Canadian intellectual Steven Pinker, who has written that the world is better than before and not worse.
Guillermo Altares agreed. Yes, slavery is “practically abolished in the world”, life expectancy has increased, he said. He added that social media “must have something good if the most dictatorial countries of the world [like Iran and China] first cut them off” and disconnect the Internet when there are protests.
Leopoldo Martínez said that there is indeed progress in the economic and social areas, but then there are other threats that these advances bring: climate change and social sustainability. “This appearance of progress and well-being has an existential threat. The sustainability of everything we are experiencing depends on our ability to reconcile economic growth with environmental impacts and sustainability.”
There are those displaced by the climate. There are those displaced by gentrification in the big cities. There are unemployed people due to the impact of technology and robotics on industries.
“You have to remember that things are not always as they seem. That is why the paradox is an interesting figure to address all this. How can we, while seeing these positive developments, not lose sight of the social debt that this produces? If democracy through consensus does not respond to these problems, populists will take advantage of it and build a narrative to mobilize people,” Martínez argued.
Populism
Populisms, from the right and the left, then entered the panel’s discussion. The former, Martinez said, respond to migratory crises and xenophobic and racist discourses; the latter, “to the issue of utopia due to inequalities”.
And in contrast, he added, there are the democracies “dominated by elites” that once in power take measures that distance them from the people who elected them.
“We must not confuse the legitimacy of the voter’s demands for populism with the arbitrariness of the populist leader,” Alberto Vergara added. “I am not referring to the most radical voter, but I do believe that many people who voted for Trump voted for Obama twice. They did not become racists overnight. That’s how it’s happened in various places around the world. They discovered that the incessant and inevitable march towards that progress was not such.”
Did we underestimate this crisis? Andrea Bernal asked.
“Populism is something gelatinous, it is difficult to shape it”, Leopoldo Martinez replied. He reminded that when Trump began to win the Republican caucuses, he was seen as a populist, but Barack Obama said he was a demagogue, a bigot. ” I am the populist, Obama used to say. For England, [George] Washington was a populist. Luther King may have been considered a populist.”
Martinez said that there is a “benign populism”.
Does that exist? the moderator asked.
“Yes, because it has the popular desire as its aspiration,” Leopoldo Martinez answered. “If Bolívar had not converted the cause of independence with the vehemence with which he carried it out, there would have been no independence, seen as a populist project for Venezuelans of the same social class as him.”
Guillermo Altares agreed with Martínez and highlights the power that charisma can have. “The most obvious example is Mandela’s. Would the democratic transition have been possible in South Africa without someone like Mandela? We do not know. I do believe in a certain benign populism. Sometimes the masses are right.”
What happens when they want to change the institutions and stay in power? Andrea Bernal asked.
“When you change institutions, authoritarianism comes,” Martinez replied.
Alberto Vergara reflected on the origin of populism when talking about democracy “in its real sense”. He said that during the last 30 years the concern of liberal representative democracies was to verify the efficient functioning of the powers and that individual rights were not violated, but they left aside public policies that were not reflected in what the popular vote demanded.
“In some sense, the reaction of populism is to say to regimes that were very liberal, ‘now we are going to have a lesser democracies but face a regime that was very liberal but not very democratic (…)’ To think about populism as something that inherently carries with it this importance of style, of the caudillo, simplifies that which is complex. Populism is simple; democracy is complex. Democracy means functioning, making arrangements, negotiating. Populism means someone fixes it for me while I retire in my house. That is why I am talking about the recovery of democracy, of the will of citizens, genuine, sovereign autonomy through their representatives. I don’t think that can be solved by a position in which you delegate public policy to the enlightened leader.”