When, now more than two decades ago, British political scientist Colin Crouch sent to print his Post-democracy, which described the slow and gradual emptying of meaning and substance of liberal democratic orders, the author dwelt mainly on the threats that, on democratic institutions, seemed to loom from the world of economics: multinational corporations and large cartels of lobbyists that move behind the scenes, sheltered from any interference by citizenships. Crouch, who crosses the threshold of his eightieth year this year, could not yet have clearly foreshadowed what today we might call "the ideology of the cordon."
The ideology of the cordon
I define ideology of the cordon as the new tendency applied by "system" forces (in Europe mainly Christian-social, social-democratic, liberal and, later, environmentalist) towards the real novelties in the Western political landscape of the last decades: the populist and national-conservative parties that have gradually established themselves in almost all European countries, in some cases, as in Italy, the Netherlands and Hungary, even reaching the government. The cordon ideology, despite being theorized and applied by political forces that boast claims of inclusiveness, is in fact an ideology of exclusion, when not ghettoization; the cordon they speak of is in fact a cordon sanitaire.
What is not progress
Replacing politics and ideologies, which are now on their waning eve, with the more ambiguous concept of governance, cordon ideology primarily qualifies as denial. Proponents of cordon ideology, in short, before they know what they are, are perfectly clear about what they are not . On a progressive horizon, that is, aimed at progress (or whatever they label themselves as such), the proponents of this ideology, even before they cannot tolerate any point of view that expresses skepticism or denies the "beneficial" character of this teleological mirage, cannot even conceive of it.
A belief in the inescapable
Fervent believers in the exquisitely Hegelian and later Marxist concept of "reason immanent to history," the proponents of cordon ideology would run the risk of self-sabotage if they conceived of their Utopia only as a point of view, thus downgrading it of the status of the ineluctable terminus of historical travail. It follows obligatorily that, for the proponent of cordon ideology (i.e., for the progressive), tolerance of conservative thought and the parties that express it in its most diverse forms is not only politically counterproductive but is also and above all morally reprehensible, as well as an illogical absurdity. Populists and conservatives thus do not represent, in this Weltanschauung, an alternative point of view with which to dialogue, but a veritable sphere of "not being," a worrying undefined blob that gnaws at the foundations of Utopia in a manner, if you will, similar to the conception that twentieth-century conservatives had towards nihilism. It is not surprising, among other things, that one of the accusations that progressivism hurls at those who are "outside the cordon" is precisely that of "nihilism," with the same derogatory meaning that the old clerical traditionalists poured on the young students who were brash readers of Turgenev and adherents of the anarchoid Sergey Nečaev.
The Nothing cannot have space
Those outside the cordon are not entitled to representation of any kind because and they want to be the Nothingness that devours Being (represented, of course, by Utopia and its representatives). To those who are outside, one does not shake hands because, precisely, they are outside, they do not exist. Anyone who does not recognize the inevitability of the supposed inclined plane leading to Utopia is not only an abject individual but is first and foremost a madman, a person who refuses to acknowledge a supposed manifest reality. And for the insane there is no place; on the contrary, they must be cured, at any rate silenced, since insanity is contagious.
The space of anomie
Outside the cordon, the laws of inclusive morality do not apply, for in the sphere of Nothingness anomie prevails: the conservative, like the no vax and the citizen of countries geopolitically undesirable to the believers in Utopia is agambenially homo sacer, of him anything can be said and done: insults can be addressed to him that, if addressed to other "minorities" would cost a translation to prison, and he can be attacked, because all in all he himself is the one who is asking, with his stubborn nihilistic incredulity, to crash against the unstoppable locomotive of historical processuality. The conservative is the equivalent of the colonial subject for whom, in Carl Schmitt's thought, the guarantee categories of the Ius Publicum Europaeum did not apply ; he is meat for the slaughter, a sacrificial victim.
The Necessary Nothing
However, the conservative, as a member of this anomic space, performs a function that is absolutely necessary to the functioning of Utopia, probably the fundamental function, which serves as the lintel to the entire ideological apparatus of cordon ideology: that of discriminator. Just as the only necessary condition for thinking Being is the existence of a Non-Being and a Nothingness from which to separate it, so too he who is outside the cordon, in his rejection, delineates the boundaries of Utopia and endows it with ontological status. In the same way that, in order to define a community (state, social, religious, etc. ) it is necessary primarily to define those who are outside it, so today those outside the cordon outline and "concretize" the identity of the members of Utopia, who locked up in their ideological pomerio create a new community, that of progressive Utopia, endowed in turn with its paraphernalia and liturgies (see the recent opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics), which are - and nothing else could be - but a continuous and violent remarking of what one is not. Not even the ideology of anti-discrimination can do without the concept of discrimination: in fact, it does not intend to abolish it at all but claims a monopoly on it.
Existing is not enough
Since we are talking about a progressive (i.e., messianic) perspective, unlike a normal community, whose purpose is only to continue to exist, the Utopia in question, we have seen, cannot agree to coexist in peace with other communities, as a genuine liberal and liberal-democratic approach not hybridized with the waste products of Hegelisms would provide; the Utopia in question must, in order to substantiate itself, destroy all others, little matter whether by phagocytosis or by open and declared war.
The Death of Democracy
Democracy dies when the law of alternation dies: if all the forces legitimized to govern merge into Utopia and are substantiated by the cordon ideology, democracy as we know it could only continue to exist if a regime of alternation, in government, in the media, in culture, between those inside the cordon and those outside it, existed, but, as we have said: such alternation would kill the very idea behind Utopia, that is, its ontologically absolutist perspective. If the only ruling ideology, fortified by the cordons sanitaire that despise, isolate and disqualify millions of voters, what happens to alternation, and with it democracy?
Research fellow at the Machiavelli Center. A philosophy scholar, he has been working for years on the topic of the revaluation of nihilism and the great German Romantic philosophy.
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