Representative democracy moderates political conflict. On the one hand, the majority electoral dispute reduces the chances of extreme, always minority positions in the electorate. The competition for vote favors parties and candidates closest to the center. On the other hand, the rule of law and the different forms of brakes and institutional balances prevent the arbitrary exercise of power by the ruler of the time.
This was the consensus between experts and the touchstone of theories that sought to explain the functioning of representative democratic regimes. Until the recent election of.
Victorious with a radical platform, the 47th US President has been trying to abolish long -recognized rights, as well as taking measures that exceed their legal competence. More than that, it invests heavily in the destruction of state organs and usual government instruments.
Adam Przuworski, a political scientist at New York University, has been publishing Adam’s Diary on the Substack. This is a comment to what the new administration does. He notes that the measures announced or adopted to reduce the public machine-and control it completely-represent revolutionary transformation in the relations between state and society, because unprecedented under democratic regime. For to process conflicts peacefully, he argues, the elected government must be moderate and cannot impose defeats that seem irreversible to those who won by vote.
Even recognizing that Trump’s violent measures are unpublished in democracies, Przeworski is cautious and avoids predictions. He does not venture to say that with the ongoing initiatives, he crosses the border that gives access to the universe of authoritarian systems or crossing it is inevitable. It is more cautious than colleagues and Lucan A. Way. In Sheet On Sunday (23), they emphasize that the US is about to join the group of countries living under a model of competitive authoritarianism in which autocrats elected choke the opposition.
With Trump’s return to the White House, representative democracy-which less than a century has asserted itself worldwide as a model of organization of political life-faces a new and unique challenge: because those who dispute it are not countries where its values and institutions are newly deposed, such as Eastern Europe, or had troubled life, as in Latin America. The threat stuck in the largest nation of the rich and liberal West, cradle of the contemporary representative system and its normative reference.
Apparently, it is premature to bet on the ruin of US democracy. After all, its political model is strongly anti -amateur, with institutions designed to limit the concentration of power in the national executive. Moreover, its civil society is well organized and its press, plural.
It remains to be expected that such attributes will be able to contain the monstrous trumpker invested. Also because the collapse of representative democracy in the US would produce devastating effects far beyond its borders.
For Brazil it would be a catastrophe whose dimension educated progressives in anti -Americanism do not see.
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