Democracy in Peril?

Abstract

The alarm bells are ringing. Journalists, policymakers, and many researchers have warned of the grave threat to democracy posed by the electoral rise of extreme right parties. Either implicitly or explicitly, pundits and partisans indiscriminately weave a coarse historical comparison and warn of the fundamental threat to the principles and practice of liberal governance presented by the rise of the extreme right. Throughout Europe, the extreme right’s relentless scapegoating of outsiders evokes ominous echoes of horrors that are readily exhumed from the archives of collective memory. In this perspective, non- European immigrants are today’s Jews blamed for every ill that plagues European societies, from urban violence to unemployment and including AIDS, much as Jews were once regarded as the source of ravaging epidemics of cholera, typhus, and tuberculosis. Reinforcing the association, the most brutal of today’s immigrant-bashers often proudly sport the badges of yesterday’s Jew-destroyers, while the more respectable mutter about the need to save “the West” from invasion.