Pablo Hiriart
A couple of years ago, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson, asked Queen Elizabeth II to close the Parliament for five weeks. The Supreme Court’s answer was negative and unanimous. Incidentally, it recalled what was expressed to James I in 1611: “The king has no prerogative except that which the law grants him.”
In other words, even for kings, the law is the law.
Here in Mexico, the Morenistas, who seize power in the name of the majority and democracy, follow the script of the populists who destroy liberties and the rule of law, so well described by Yuval Noah Harari in Nexus, his most recent book (Debate).
In the subchapter ‘The Dictatorship of the Majority’ he points out that “it is usual that, to undermine democracy, strongmen attack one by one its self-correcting systems, often starting with the courts and the media. The typical strongman either deprives the courts of their powers or fills them with trusted people and tries to wipe out the independent media while building his own ubiquitous propaganda machine.”
The Cambridge professor points out that “a populist is defined as such when he claims to represent the people and considers that anyone who disagrees with him is either a victim of false consciousness or is not really part of the people.”
Harari notes that “that is why populism represents a lethal threat to democracy… No group, not even the majority group, has the right to prevent others from being part of the people. That is what makes democracy a conversation. Having a conversation assumes the existence of several legitimate voices. On the other hand, if the people have only one legitimate voice, no conversation can occur. Rather, that voice will dictate everything. Therefore, no matter how much fidelity it declares to the democratic principle of ‘people power’, populism empties democracy of meaning and seeks to establish a dictatorship”.
That is precisely what President Sheinbaum and her appendages in the chambers of Congress are in the process of establishing: a dictatorship.
Harari notes that “in the imagination of the populists, the courts do not really care about justice: they only protect the privileges of the judges… The media do not care about the facts; they spread false news to deceive the people and favor the journalists and the cliques that finance them.”
Having declared that they alone represent the people, Yuval Noah Harari adds, “The populists claim that the people are not only the only source of legitimate political authority but the only legitimate source of all authority.”
Therefore, “any institution whose authority derives from something other than the people’s will is undemocratic. As self-proclaimed representatives of the people, populists seek not only to monopolize political authority, but all authority, and to take control of institutions such as the media, the courts, and the universities.”
If you want to see what’s next after this assault on the Judiciary by Morena legislators whipped up by President Sheinbaum, I suggest you read Nexus. What follows is the control of the elections and the media.
And if you do not want to read or learn about so much bad news, you will not be an exceptional case: you are also in the script that Morenistas follow, assailants of democracy and our institutions:
“Democracies die not only when people lack the freedom to speak, but when people do not want to or cannot listen”.
Further Reading: