Political elites in the epoch of “warring democracies”

Abstract

The instability of the modern world is largely due to its current state – the state of conflict between the “warring democracies”. None of the parties involved in the conflict will ever admit that it (a conflict party) is not a democracy. Therefore, the level of trust/distrust of the society in the authority institutions will depend in many ways on how successfully a country implements its democratic project. The democracies fight for the right to be considered a true democracy and for this they accuse and discredit their rivals of having a false democracy form. The elites successfully use this rivalry for their own purposes, both ideologically and geopolitically. Moreover, the very concept of “democracy” (as the sum of specific values) becomes a victim of axiological decomposition. At the same time, the democratic values themselves transform into victims of political demagogy and numerous political speculations. The political elites abuse democratic values too often, seeing them as some effective mechanism to advance their speculative goals. They use civic “charm of democracy” to achieve their goals that are sometimes undemocratic. On the contrary, the maturity of civil society always shows the qualitative level of democracy itself. Any discrepancy between ideals and the reality leads to intraspecific conflict. In the rivalry, the elites tend to use unconventional means that do not deal with the norms of democracy.