The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies

by Ryszard Legutko

The feeling that a new utopia was around the corner lasted a few years and then began to subside. But the ideology did not loosen its grip on the Western mind, though the coarse language of the Paris barricades was softened. The flower children quietly retreated from the stage, and so did the Age of Aquarius and the counterculture manifestos. But the society never returned to a pre-protest identity, and there was neither a scenario nor a desire to move away from ideology. Soon the ideology reasserted itself, this time in less menacing form. Now it was the ideology of liberal democracy, slightly more complicated than that of communism, but comparably simplistic and equally impoverishing people’s range of thought. The ideological man has colonized a vast part of the public life and private thought, and his conquests are not yet over. As did his communist predecessor, he exhibits a mixture of suspicion and enthusiasm, which gives him a comparable sense of self-righteousness.