The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies

by Ryszard Legutko

they always demand more power—

Not only do they want to control the mechanisms of the great society but also those of all its parts; not only what is general but also specifics; not only human actions but human thoughts as well. The original message, “we will only create a framework for society at large, and you will be able to do what you want within it” is rapidly turning into increasingly detailed message such as, “we will only create frameworks in education (in the family, in community life) and you will be able to do what you want within them later.” But even this is not enough: “We will only create a framework at this school and you will be able to do what you want within it later.” Then the class follows the school and so on and so forth.

Few liberals claim to be transparent nowadays. Most of them openly stand for a specific worldview, which they believe to be the most adequate of and for modern times, formulated in opposition to other worldviews and held to be uncompromisingly superior to them. They no longer hide themselves under the formula “we are creating only a general framework,” but fight hard for their power over minds and institutions.

liberalism has always had a strong sense of the enemy, a direct consequence of its dualistic perception of the world.

liberalism is more about political struggle with non-liberal adversaries than deliberation with them.

Although such words as “dialogue” and “pluralism” appear among its favorite motifs, as do “tolerance” and other similarly hospitable notions, this overtly generous rhetorical orchestration covers up something entirely different. In its essence, liberalism is unabashedly aggressive because it is determined to hunt down all nonliberal agents and ideas, which it treats as a threat to itself and to humanity. The organizing principle of liberalism—as in all other philosophies aiming to change the world radically—is therefore dualism, not pluralism. The modern stalwart of liberalism, Isaiah Berlin, was absolutely faithful to the liberal spirit when he said that the history of hum...

This opinion, fairly typical, reveals the absurdity of the liberal claim. First, Berlin and other liberal-minded thinkers put duality—monism versus pluralism, closed versus open, freedom versus authority, tolerant versus autocratic—as the primary division, and by so doing had to assume that whoever supports pluralism must be for duali...

This leads to an even more bizarre conclusion: that whoever supports pluralism must favor liberalism, which means that anyone who wants to recognize the multiplicity of social arrangements and the diversity of human experience can accept only one philosophical and political philosophy. Given that in the course of the history of human thought there were dozens of different profoundly nonliberal philosophies—many of them of great intellectual value—such a conclusion can only be compared with Henry Ford’s famous statement about ...

the most important and most valuable fruits of Western philosophy were monistic in nature.

virtually everything intellectually intriguing that the Western mind produced in the field of philosophy had to be classified not only as monistic, but also as nonliberal.

we take Berlin’s view seriously and disregard all monistic theories in the entire history of human thought, we...

The effect of this supposed liberal pluralism would be a gigantic purge of Western philosophy, bringing an inevitab...

The communists, who were the first to use, and with much success, the dualistic perspective to fight their enemies, made us accustomed to a certain practice of philosophical polemic: they evaluated the arguments of their adversaries in the light of political consequences. The arguments were to be rejected not necessarily because of their demonstrated spuriousness but because of their political implications for...

The liberals adopted a similar Leninist practice,

the first and most important question they ask is whether any of these may be dangerous:

Their favorite version of this approach is a slippery-slope argument.

Because most theoretical claims or statements contain an element of unity—which the liberals would call monism—or imply a hierarchy—which the liberals would call domination—these claims and statements can be interpreted as direct or indirect encouragements to some form of political authoritarianism, and immediately become politically suspect. To

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This kind of argument—outrageous, let us admit it—is considered by the liberals to be decisive, and it serves them to disparage opponents by suggesting that by making seemingly harmless theoretical statements they open the gates to totalitarianism, fascism, inquisition, torture, Hitler, and various other horrors.

Liberalism monopolized people’s minds to an extent that would put to shame the theorists of socialism in the communist countries,

Democracy is the most political of all known regimes: none other engages so many people in civic responsibilities, and none other depends so much on them for its own existence.

The democratic politicization is of a special kind, being energized by the spirit of partisanship.

this involvement is a civic duty,

The emergence of liberal democracy strengthened the bad sides, rather than the good sides, of the democratic model.

change the herdlike nature of the demos, and that whatever the initial diversity, democratic tendencies steer society toward some kind of uniformity. Tocqueville, Mill, and a host of others made a similar argument about modern representative democracies.

representative democracy was considered superior to direct democracy

Unfortunately since the transformation of democracy into a liberal democracy, the spectrum of political acceptability has been distinctly limited.

Liberal democracy has created its own orthodoxy, which causes it to become less of a forum for articulating positions and agreeing on actions than—to a much higher extent—a political mechanism for the selection of people, organizations, and ideas in line with the orthodoxy. This phenomenon can be seen especially in Europe, where in the past few decades there has been a major ideological rapprochement of the right- and left-wing parties. This resulted in the formation of what is called “the political mainstream,” which includes Socialists, Christian Democrats, the Greens, Social Democrats, Liberals, and even Conservatives. The mainstream that runs in Europe today is tilted far more to the left than to the right. Within it, the left has made a slight shift to the right in some matters (mostly economic) and made a further move to the left in other matters (mainly moral), while the right-wing movement’s shift to the left was huge.