The complicit comfort that gives rise to soft despotism

Alexis de Tocqueville (19th-century French diplomat, political philosopher, and historian) foresaw that a society focused solely on its well-being would allow a tutelary power to weave its net. Europe is paying the price today and Venezuela, where oil revenues bought years of silence before the collapse, shows what the cost is.

In 1979, 62% of European voters went to the polls in the European Parliament elections; but in 2014, only 42%. Between those two elections, an entire generation withdrew from public life, convinced that nothing could change and preferring the comfort of their private lives to the confrontations of politics. This is exactly the moment Tocqueville anticipated, as early as 1840, as a gateway to a new form of power, more difficult to combat because it does not provoke any visible resistance.

Soft despotism thrives on individualism

Tocqueville distinguished individualism from selfishness because the modern democratic citizen does not hate his fellow men, he forgets them, and withdraws into the narrow circle of his family and friends, leaving the community to its fate. In that void, a tutelary power settles in, he wrote, a power that does not break wills, but softens them, and that gradually covers society with a net of meticulous and uniform rules, almost impossible to pierce.

In Europe, that net was woven during the decades of growth and European construction, among expanded administrations, rewritten school programs, targeted associative subsidies… The victory of progressivism, with threads patiently knotted while a prosperous and calm population (also on the right) saw no reason to oppose, as long as the bill did not arrive.

In just a few decades, values have evolved under the influence of progressives. These values have gradually been incorporated and have become the norm, permanently transforming our Western societies, without any real resistance occurring.

The few political parties that opposed these significant social changes (from mass immigration to social aid or the massive use of debt) have gradually resigned themselves and accepted them. Thus, the so-called “conservative parties” in Europe have a much more liberal discourse, while the programs of the last century are considered reactionary today.

Venezuela, when revenue buys silence

This is not solely a Western problem. For example, between 2004 and 2013 in Venezuela, oil revenues financed Hugo Chávez's social missions (health, literacy, subsidized food), tangibly improving the day-to-day lives of a large part of the population at that time.

During that same decade of material comfort, Chávez methodically neutralized counter-powers and the population said nothing. For example, twelve aligned judges added to the Supreme Court in 2004, the main opposition channel, RCTV, deprived of its license in 2007, an Electoral Council drained of independence. There was little resistance because the standard of living was rising, and with it, individualism.

The bill came after the collapse of oil prices, with hyperinflation measured in millions of percent, a drained economy, and 7.7 million Venezuelans thrown onto the roads, the largest displacement crisis in the Western Hemisphere in a century. The 2018 election, considered neither free nor fair, merely ratified a capture that began fifteen years earlier.

The bill always comes due

Europe is not there yet, but it is already paying its share, with poorly managed and painful migration pressure, widespread insecurity, and anemic growth for the past fifteen years. These are the consequences of an excess of socialism, but also of prolonged neglect, while citizens enjoyed a state that provided everything without them having to take care of anything.

Reversing this is difficult, precisely because that power is not sustained by force, but by habit and administrative inertia.

To improve the situation, a lot of patience will be needed to dismantle everything, but patience does not work today, because people have become accustomed to having everything instantly. We have seen this in Spain, where citizens voted against the PSOE in 2011 due to its poor management, but gave Rajoy very little time to improve the situation. When they saw that changes were not happening as quickly as they wanted, they returned to the PSOE, with the results we see today.

Europe and Venezuela demonstrate that comfort is never free, it is paid for, one day, with interest. Ease is the enemy of good politics.