Opinion Sur
Privileged minorities would have us to believe that there is only one type of democracy, the one which serves them. This is far from being the case: there is a diversity of possible democratic constructions. A democracy that has not been built to favor the general wellbeing and the protection of the environment is neither solid nor sustainable; sooner or later it generates failures and dangerous frustrations.
A democracy should be built based on the interests of all its members taking into account the context in which it develops. However, most of existent democracies have been built in such a way that minority interests prevail and are transformed in hegemonic. Its raison d’être falls away from the general wellbeing and the protection of the environment but is centered in preserving the privileges of certain power groups.
Privilege minorities want to convince us that there is no other type of democracy, what constitute another of the many scams they use to sustain their power. It is possible to conceive and build very different types of democracies.
While building a democracy it is important the reasons that guide such construction, a good design that should always be singular, the strength of the construction, its reliability, its ability to mobilize energies and develop rights and obligations with a fair distribution of costs and benefits. If the construction serves minorities and not the society as a whole, sooner or later failures and dangerous frustrations will emerge.
Who are its builders? In theory all the citizens are but in practice, powerful groups weigh much more and they manage to impose their interests in the design, organization, and democratic functionality. They eliminate alternatives that could compromise their privileges and impose as the only possible option the one which serves them best. It is a clear expression of ideological absolutism that discards diversities and almost inevitably leads to a destructive democratic fundamentalism. A fundamentalism that universally promotes just one type of democracy serving the concentrated groups.
As with every fundamentalism, the democratic one claims that this particular and peculiar democratic structure must prevail everywhere, whatever the cultural, social, and economic circumstances might be. This imposition is authoritarian and unsustainable as each nation has the right to choose the type of democracy that better serves the interest of its people. It is worth reiterating that there are multiple and diverse ways of structuring and functioning of democracies worldwide. The end struggle is whether to build a democracy adjusted to serving minority interests or one established to consider and solve social and environmental interests of the entire nation.
It must be clear that it is not about giving up on the defense of the democratic ideal, which can be summarized as counting on a government of the people that would serve everybody. What is unacceptable are democracies designed for preventing that the interests of the people prevail in the directionality and impact of the government acts as well as of all the existent social groups. In particular and beyond a better or worse institutional structure, the political and social support of a democracy for everybody is settled between social groups of very different power. The democratic construction reflects the prevailing correlation of forces and, in this sense, a new democratic institutionalization should be established to level and counterbalance the huge power differences. This is not accomplished with wishful thinking but rather through a transforming political action lead by the best leaderships that we should learn to choose, counting on the impulse and support of an increasing popular understanding of what is really going on.
We need to collectively build another type of democracy, one that would consider the society as a whole and include the sum of the many minorities where everybody would contribute what s/he knows and then act accordingly.
