Alain de Benoist on liberal democracy versus participative democracy
Breizh-info.com: How is liberalism incompatible with participative democracy, while it is perfectly married to representative democracy?
Alain de Benoist: From a liberal point of view, the advantage of representative democracy is that it substitutes parliamentary sovereignty for popular sovereignty: as Rousseau saw well, in this system the people are only sovereign on voting day; the day after, it's the elected representatives who have the power to decide. The problem, today, is that representative democracy no longer represents anything. Thus the generalized defiance towards an oligarchic system completely cutoff from popular aspirations.
But we must not fool ourselves: liberalism, in the very measure where it advocates the submission of the political to the impersonal forces of the market, is actually hostile to any form of sovereignty. More exactly, the only sovereignty that it recognizes is that of the individual. Nations and peoples don't have an existence as such. As the very liberal Bertrand Lemennicier wrote, the nation is only a “concept without a counterpart in reality.” So any collective identity is fantasy. Methodological individualism, hostile to any form of holism, is thus the only means to analyze a society that “doesn't exist” as Margaret Thatcher said in all seriousness.
In the measure where participative democracy allows power to return to the people, thus akin to the freedom of the Ancients, in contrast to that of the Moderns, which consisted of giving the citizens the possibility of actively participating in public life (and not losing interest in it in order to seek refuge in the private), it can only collide with the opposition of liberalism.
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"This is your country. These are your houses. These are your cultivated fields and gardens, and your memories lie here. You are not going to leave your country, are you, just because you live hard there or because you have been weighed down by the injustices and humiliation? It has never been typical of the Serbian and Montenegrin people to yield before obstacles and to become demoralized when facing a problem, when coming upon hard times."
Slobodan Milošević
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"The Bolivarian Movement was born in the barracks some 15 years ago when a group of soldiers came to the conclusion that the enemy was not communism, but imperialism. For many years we worked carefully and gradually to develop a nationalist, patriotic movement with one hand in the barracks and another on the street... We pose the questions of independence and sovereignty by calling for a new continent-wide independence movement. The current political model is mortally wounded and no viable alternative can exist without breaking the bourgeois, neoliberal system that has operated in Venezuela since 1945... There are no half-measures in terms of sovereignty. There has to be direct democracy, people's government with popular assemblies and congresses where the people retain the right to remove, nominate, sanction, and recall their elected delegates and representatives."
- HUGO CHÁVEZ, 1996
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"It was convenient for the Western media to characterize Chavez as a radical socialist, a “red,” and his friendship with Fidel Castro, whom he called “my father,” is all the evidence long-out-of-work cold warriors require to condemn him as a Marxist “revolutionary.” Yet he was a profoundly conservative man, whose policies proceeded from a regionalist nationalism: Bolivarian populism, as originally conceived, is closer, ideologically, to the American revolutionaries of 1776 than to the Bolshevik revolutionaries of 1917. He laced his rhetoric with leftist rhetoric, and even changed the name of his movement to include the word socialist, and yet this was mainly window-dressing for what was, essentially, a radical nationalism with conventional social democratic overtones. He was, in essence, a patriot, and not a revolutionary at all.
Which is, of course, precisely why the globalists in Washington had every good reason to celebrate his death."
Credit to Raphael Machado
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”With their advertising they’ve made us forget about our own abilities and we only look to the west. We no longer value the things we can achieve and have completely forgot about our own interest and look only to the west. We don’t see ourselves. We must find ourselves; the east must close it’s doors to the west. As long as the west has influence in the east, we will never truly be independent. And until these western worshipers amongst us don’t leave the country or reform their ways, we will never have true independence!”
-Imam Seyed Rohulla Khomeini
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