Liberal democracy, Left democracy
By: Maarten Schumacher
Tags: Liberalism, Leftism, Socialism, Cuba, Politics

Liberal democracy, Left democracy

Photo by Alexander Kunze

Today, the dominant ideology in most countries is liberalism. It’s an ideology which presents itself as the absence of ideology: within liberalism, the state doesn’t offer any vision of how the world should work, but merely guarantees some civic freedoms and leaves to individuals the bigger questions of what the world means and what their role is in it.

These civic freedoms are guaranteed by certain institutions that are meant to provide a neutral frame for society (neutral in the sense of not promoting any particular substantive ideology): Law, Science, Market, and Democracy.

It’s worth pointing out that each of these institutions can’t really be objective, since they have the job of protecting liberal freedoms. For example, there has been a lot of talk lately about Trump being a threat to democracy: but if more than half of the country wants Trump as a kind of strong-man dictator, isn’t that then the outcome of democracy? Wouldn’t it then be much more undemocratic to deny the people what they want? The reality is that Trump is a threat to liberalism, not to democracy.

Liberals have conflated democracy with liberalism, so it’s good to separate the two and look at what democracy means in a non-liberal state: Cuba.

Cuba’s official state ideology is socialism, so unlike liberal countries, Cuba does have a substantive vision of how the world should work. With only one ideology, it only needs one political party, headed by the Leader who serves to personify this vision. Cuba’s government however is elected democratically, with representatives for the legislative branch elected directly, and members of the executive branch indirectly (just like in most parliamentary systems).

These Cuban elections are however not a referendum on different political visions, like they are in liberal countries. Since there is only one political ideology, elections just serve to make sure that local concerns are represented in the government.

So in Cuba, democracy is only allowed insofar as it doesn’t threaten the official state ideology. But, as we’ve seen from the Trump example, the same can be said for liberal democracy. In both cases, people’s individual freedom can be respected as long as they are happy with the dominant ideology.

If they’re not, state oppression is the consequence. The more the state ideology falters, the stronger this oppression must become. We’ve seen horrible examples of this in 20th century socialist (not to mention fascist) states.

Liberalism also had its share of state oppression (MLK assassination, etc) but much less, since it’s a more successful ideology. That might change though, as liberalism is starting to fail.

Liberalism’s weakness is that, precisely because there is no substantive vision, it falls prey to private interest. Because it has no definition of the public good, liberalism simply becomes the arena for different private interests to battle it out, cannibalizing the public sector in the process. This leaves liberalism unable to solve problems related to public property, like the environment for example, but also public health, infrastructure, etc.

As the Left, it is our job to come up with an answer to liberalism, before the Right beats us to it. In doing so, we must not let our liberal frenemies scare us away from the tools we need to make this a reality: state ideology, power, authority, leadership. There is nothing inherently bad about these things: they don’t cause oppression and suffering, a failing ideology does.