What example could we follow to regain this democratic culture? That of the women’s cause: “It arises from below” and “has no partisan label“.
A cause made possible by a major democratic resurgence in the ashes of World War II: the creation of the United Nations, the concept of international law, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, etc. Because at the heart of the human rights culture is precisely this self-organization of society, namely the possibility of putting on the agenda elements that those in power do not think about.
In response to these different social achievements, the report of the Trilateral Commission called The crisis of Democracy was published in 1975. According to Edwy Plenel, this committee, funded by the Rockfeller Foundation, sought to limit democracy. One of the authors, economist Friedrich Hayek, actually reduces voting to a technique where only the most powerful are chosen. This limited democracy, based only on electoral voting, de facto excludes the people from the process… at the risk of seeing these powerful people emerge who are against the natural equality of peoples, individuals who advocate for an identity, supremacist, and nationalist culture, an idea towards which the current right-wing movements are converging.
This is the peril of apathetic democracy, where “the will of all is confiscated in the hands of one“… the situation in which we currently find ourselves.
To address this, informing becomes a vital necessity. According to Edwy Plenel, the journalist is the “infantryman” of democracy: they must inform the people about the actions of the leaders and provide knowledge, not opinions. “That is to say, to conquer rights, to defend rights, one must have the right to know,” he argues. An democratic weapon that Donald Trump has clearly identified by attacking universities.
