A New Victory of Democracy

I have long noticed that whenever I decide to write about something I consider important and significant, some nasty thing is sure to happen—one that I simply cannot avoid writing about, given my duties. This puts me before a difficult choice—whether to stop writing about important things so that nasty things stop happening, or… the thought stops there.

So, as you have already understood, the talk will be about today’s session of the Rada, where the state budget for 2014 was adopted at breakneck speed, along with a whole series of wonderful and necessary laws for the country¹—for example, the “no more than three may gather” law applied to cars, the “extremism” law (we are all extremists now, in case you didn’t know), the slander law (so now you can’t say anything bad about your bosses), the law allowing criminal cases to be opened and tried without your knowledge, and so on in the same spirit.

The public, which for some reason believed that such laws could not exist in nature, was terribly indignant. After talking with the public, I found that the complaint can be formulated roughly as follows: the laws are illegitimate, since the regions voted with procedural violations—using their hands, which makes one suspect that they did not actually have a majority of votes.

A question immediately arises—now, if the regions had voted honestly with cards while simultaneously raising the state flag, performing the anthem, and with appropriate patriotic fervor in their eyes—would that have been good and correct? After all, this is considered honest—they “won” against us in the elections, obtained a majority, and now are passing whatever laws they want. What is the problem here? This is called “democracy,” isn’t it? And this is what the “progressive forces” fight for, right?

“The Hitler problem”—the fact that one of the most outstanding dictators of the modern era came to power peacefully, and then, just as peacefully and legitimately, by democratic vote in parliament, abolished various constitutions (although, in principle, he could have refrained from doing so)—has always been unsolvable for theorists of democracy. In my time, when I could still call myself a democrat, this question also gave me no peace. Eventually, I took the trouble to find out what the problem actually was. It turned out that democracy and the “Hitler problem” are simply a particular case of a more general problem: the question of by what right some people decide how others should live and compel them to act accordingly using force. And it does not matter whether this is done by a single autocratic dictator or by a certain group of people considered “representatives of the people.” The main question is precisely this. Democracy differs from dictatorship only in that it creates the illusion of some representation and some game (our side beat your side, but your side can beat our side in the next round), but the problem remains the same. It is completely unclear why “your side” should forcibly impose restrictions on “our side’s” freedom.

I will leave aside for now all these talks about laws, their necessity, and what they should be like if someone proves they are necessary. There are answers to these questions too, but today we are only discussing democracy.

And in connection with democracy, the last question—or rather, the answer to the popular remark: “But it works in the West!” If, again, one takes the trouble to look into this matter, we will see that the West is wealthy not because of, but rather despite democracy. We will also see that in the case of the West, democracy arose and expanded simultaneously with the expansion of state regulation and was, in fact, its form. All this happened gradually and imperceptibly, and Ukraine, by the way, is an excellent model of this process. The expansion of state powers was ongoing throughout all these twenty years and was often accompanied by approving shouts from progressive public opinion (after all, these measures are against the bad people, not the good ones), and now—voilà—welcome to Kafka’s world. What happened today is by no means some extraordinary surprise; the absurdity of what is happening is simply much more visible against the backdrop of the political crisis.

And one more thing about democracy “in the West.” The West has a decisive difference from us: civil society there was not destroyed by tsarists, communists, famine, and terror. This means that horizontal connections and the structures they generate are still sufficiently strong there, although the local state, of course, tirelessly works on solving this problem. A society atomized by years of collectivism, in which we live, differs from the civil society of the West in that, to put it simply, Western people first and foremost use horizontal connections—that is, they turn to each other, not to the state. In practice, this means that Western democracy is severely limited by civil society both in real practice (society simply does some of the work itself that our people consider state work) and, which is much more important, is limited by the ideas of citizens and politicians themselves about what the state can and cannot do. Our state, however, can do anything. Worse yet, our state, in the eyes of Ukrainians, should and must do everything. And it does exactly that. This is the fundamental difference between “us” and “them” and the answer to the question of why it “works” there but not with us.

Well, and the conclusion, in my humble opinion: instead of being indignant about the quite logical and predictable actions of the authorities, we should finally think about the reasons that make such actions possible.