Democracy Disrupted: The Politics of Global Protest

Chapter 2: The Democracy of Rejection

C h a p t e r 2 The Democracy of Rejection In The Watcher, one of Italo Calvino’s early novels, the great writer spins a tale of an election suffused with madness , passion, and reason. The protagonist, Amerigo Ormea, an unmarried leftist intellectual, agrees to be an election monitor in Turin’s famous Cottolengo Hospital for Incurables—­ a home for the mentally ill and disabled. Taking on the role is Ormea’s circuitous way to join the struggle. Ever since voting became obligatory in Italy following World War II, places like Cottolengo had served as a great reservoir for right-­ wing Christian Democratic votes. The hospital thus serves as a vivid illustration of the absurd nature of bourgeois democracy. During the election, newspapers are filled with stories about invalids being led to vote; voters eating their ballots; and the elderly, paralyzed by arteriosclerosis, pressured to vote for conservative candidates. It is in Cottolengo Hospital that leftist critics of democracy can show that in bourgeois society elections are less about people governing than about elites manipulating them. The image 34 Ivan Krastev of mentally ill people voting has been used by critics of democracy at least since Plato to demonstrate the farcical nature of democratic governance, a system in which the “sane” and “insane” enjoy equal powers. Ormea is in Cottolengo to do what he can to prevent the sick, the disabled, and the dead from influencing the election’s outcome. His responsibility as an election monitor is to keep pious nuns voting from in place of their patients. It looks like a simple job, but with the passage of time Ormea starts to doubt whether it is the proper thing to do. It is in this very place that the young leftist intellectual, attracted by Marxism and sympathizing with communists, falls under democracy’s spell. He is mesmerized by the ritual of elections, of ceremonial pieces of paper folded over like telegrams triumphing over fascists. Ormea is fascinated with the ability of elections to give meaning to human life and make everyone equal, and with how a Christian Democratic senator puts his fate in the hands of Cottolengo’s nurses much like a dying man places his fate in the hands of God. What he finds most striking is the unimaginable egalitarianism of democracy—­ the fact that rich and poor, educated and illiterate, those ready to die for their ideas and those who have no ideas, all of them have just one ballot and their vote has equal power. Elections resemble death because they force you to look both backward and forward, to judge the life you have lived so far and to imagine another. That is one reason Ormea is struck by the transformational power of democracy. Both Christian Democrats who believe in a divine order and Communists who believe in the dictatorship of the proletariat should have little faith in democracy, but they are its most 35 Democracy Disrupted zealous guardians. It is in the hospital for the incurables that Ormea detects democracy’s genius to turn madness into reason and to translate passions into interests. It is not in democracy’s capacity to represent citizens but its talent at misrepresenting them that makes Ormea a believer. The vote gives every citizen equal voice, which means that the intensity of a voter’s political opinions are irrelevant. The vote of the fanatic for whom elections are an issue of life and death has the same power as the vote of a citizen who barely knows for whom to vote or why. The result is that voting has a dual character—­ it allows us to replace those in power, thus protecting us from the excessively repressive state, but it also takes no measure of popular passions, thereby defending us from the excessively expressive citizen. Democracy allows mad people to vote and it could even elect them (though it surely would not tolerate them for long), but it also disarms their madness. Democracy at once restrains the intensity of political actors while overdramatizing the stakes of the political game.It tries to inspire the apathetic to interest in publiclife while simultaneously cooling down the passion of the zealot. Mobilizing the passive and pacifying the outraged—­ these are two of the primary functions of democratic elections . But elections also have a transcendental character. They ask us to judge politicians not simply on what they have done but...