Oldal 119 [119]
OCR
Democracy and distrust | 117 representatives are cynics who promise ‘the people’ the ‘simple solutions’ they crave, even though they know that there are no alternatives to the complex solutions of the technocrats. (Streeck 2017, 12) He concludes that one important lesson from the politics of the past two or three decades is that whoever puts a society under economic or moral pressure to the point of dissolution reaps resistance from its traditionalists. Today this is because all those who see themselves as exposed to the uncertainties of international markets, control of which has been promised but never delivered, will prefer a bird in their hand to two in the bush: they will choose the reality of national democracy, imperfect as it may be, over the fantasy of a democratic global society. (Streeck 2017, 18) CONCLUSIONS: TOWARDS A PLURALIST DEMOCRACY The very idea of democracy is that it is the people who can decide about their own future, and it is the people who are the ultimate source of political power. This principle does not promise ‘good’ decisions, but mainly acceptable ones for the given electorate. It is a quite fashionable idea nowadays, especially after a series of unexpected and astonishing results of popular votes in different European countries, that democracy can be dangerous and people cannot decide directly on important issues. Therefore, not only constitutional liberalism but also technocratic expertise must control and limit democratic decision-making - especially in the age of COVID-19, a global pandemic that shocked the whole world and raised again the question of technocracy over democracy. According to Mounk, this seems to be a trap: This is one of the deepest—and most rarely heralded—dilemmas that developed democracies will have to face in the twenty-first century: Either they return power to the people in a manner that is liable both to violate some of the core liberal values of our political system and to lead to an even greater crisis of legitimacy when government performance suffers as a result. Or they maintain key technocratic institutions that both violate some of the core democratic values of our political system and are liable to make a populist rebellion even more likely. (Mounk 2018, 111) Berman also warns that “although it is certainly true that democracy unchecked by liberalism can slide into excessive majoritarianism or oppressive populism, liberalism unchecked by democracy can easily deteriorate into oligarchy or technocracy” (Berman 2017, 30). I think that this dilemma is false. Some level of technocratic expertise has always been present in the daily mechanisms of human governments,
