Down with “Down with Janšism”

The title may surprise some and lead them to think that I have finally broken my rule of not commenting on day-to-day and party politics in Slovenia, or even that, a few months before the elections, I have opportunistically decided to jump on this or that bandwagon. That is not the case. I have already expressed my disagreement with calls for “death to Janšism.” Not because it is a death threat, as the prosecutor’s office has also concluded, but because it is a crude form of political discourse, of which there is already far too much in Slovenia. Today I will go a step further and explain why calls of “down with Janšism” and other -isms do not appeal to me either.

Ever since independence, Slovenia has held a very stubborn belief that most of our crosses and troubles are caused by Slovenian disunity. We experience division as a curse placed in our cradle by the wicked witch of fate because we didn’t invite her to the christening and party at the birth of the state on June 25, 1991. And since it is a curse, there is of course no shortage of princes convinced that with their magic kiss they can reawaken us into unity and lead us into a brighter future, for ever and ever, amen. First among them is the President of the Republic, who constantly tries to bring the nation together in a warm, but value-indifferent, uncritical, everything-is-equal embrace. And after all these years, he has evidently not been very successful. From the despair of the Slovenian obsession with division, a real industry of party-political platforms has been born, promising us heaven on earth in the name of overcoming differences and in the much-vaunted center, which here has been emptied of ideology. Many politicians and parties, with a few sincere exceptions, would like to be in the center and claim to be in the center, because there, in their view, you can be ideologically nowhere and anywhere at the same time. Because there you can promise everything and do nothing, or whatever suits you. They would all connect and unite us so that we would no longer wander left or right but just march smartly forward.

My thesis is not that we are not divided, because we evidently are. Not only that: after almost two years of the pandemic, we as a society are not just divided but scattered, and we have serious trouble functioning as a civilized and rational community of people. But I am firmly convinced that it was not division that got us into this mess, but the fact that we divide over the wrong things and in the wrong way. The curse of Slovenian (and not only Slovenian) society and democracy is not that we are not united, but that we don’t know how to be disunited in a civilized and rational way. Remember the kind of regime we lived in in the former state. There was no room there for any division whatsoever. Anyone who had a disunited thought quickly got a rap on the knuckles or on the head. We lived, breathed and thought as one. At least in the official, public and permitted sphere. One nation (OK, a few nations), one regime, one ideology. Given that the end of political uniformity of thought was one of the main motives for independence, it is a tragic paradox that today we put a variation of that same uniformity on a national pedestal.

The functioning pluralist democracy we fought for thirty years ago and protected in our Constitution requires, as the name says, pluralism. A space based on constitutional values for the exchange and contest of different programs, ideas and ideologies. It also requires a political culture that guides and binds politics to competence, integrity, transparency and accountability, and of course a system of safeguards that protect democracy when politics fails to respect these imperatives. Instead of such democratic pluralism, in Slovenia (and not only in Slovenia) we are sinking into the swamp of tribal cultural polarization, in which ideas, proposals and programs do not count or decide anything; only identity does. Who you are, who you are with, who you are against. In this paradigm, the aim of political action is not to obtain a democratic mandate to implement programs approved in elections, but complete and permanent dominance over the political opponent. By any means and at any price. This is the result of compromising with authoritarian populism, which we are witnessing in many parts of Europe and the world. Populism is not an ideology and does not need ideas. It requires warriors and enemies and does not tolerate critically thinking citizens and political competition. It operates with labels and slogans that serve as targets and instructions to the infantry on whom to sink their teeth into and whom to attack. Commies, Soros hirelings, feminists, faggots, multi-culti traitors. Those who respond to labels and insults from one side in the same way are walking into the trap that populism sets for them.

The British Guardian recently published the findings of a survey conducted by the YouGov-Cambridge Globalism Project, which show that political conflicts, or the culture war as it is called in the West, in many democracies are based not so much on differences in people’s views and political opinions as on blind tribal loyalty to one’s own camp and hostility towards those who support the other side. If things have gone that far in countries with a much longer historical experience of democracy, then it is clear that where there is less such experience, and where the institutions and safeguards of pluralist democracy are consequently weaker, the situation is all the worse and more dangerous.

And here I want to return to my disagreement with politics reduced to a fight against -isms of one kind or another. If we want to dig ourselves out of the mess and finally start building the civilizational social model because of which and in the name of which we became independent thirty years ago, we too must give up labels, generalizations and ad personam political warfare. The answer to the devalued, everything-is-equal pursuit of unity, which is an ally of populism and objectively paves the way to uniformity of thought, cannot be an uncritical and absolutist digging into our own trenches, our own labels and slogans, because that leads to accepting and legitimizing the culture war as the only form of political action. Whatever my political beliefs, I would never want to live in a society in which everyone thought, or even had to think, like me. That does not mean, of course, agreeing to everything and respecting everything—quite the opposite—but pluralist democracy needs a competition of ideas, not a war with people, however much we dislike them.

In Slovenia, we should build unity on respect for the Constitution. In it we wrote down the fundamental values on which, three decades ago, we were determined to build our future. The rule of law requires respect for the Constitution and the laws, and an independent judiciary that is not and cannot be the tool of one side or the other. We wrote into the Constitution that Slovenia is a welfare state, which is no obstacle to different political options pursuing this goal in different ways, but they cannot ignore or nullify it. We wrote that we are a state that respects human rights and political freedoms. This is an imperative that cannot be subject to the goodwill of the current majority or to political horse-trading. We must fight for effective democratic oversight mechanisms, independent media and an engaged and critical civil society, without which there is and can be no functioning democracy. We must resist the argument of “first it was you, now it’s our turn,” because it leads to clientelism, corruption and the defeat of democracy. We must resist balancing one partial interest against another, one indecency against another, constitutionally protected democratic values against their authoritarian alternatives, knowledge against stupidity, culture against nationalist iconography, critical thinking against blind obedience, facts against emotionally selected “truths” collected on social networks, solidarity and responsibility against selfishness. Let us stop accepting the thesis that this is a choice between left and right. Perhaps we will manage to take a qualitative step towards democracy when we are able to distinguish between a personality disorder and a political idea and program.