Thursday, August 24, 2017

Every Citizen a King

...in a democracy, every ordinary citizen effectively is a king - but a king in a constitutional democracy, a king who only formally decides, whose function is to sign measures proposed by an executive administration.  This is why the problem of democratic rituals is homologous to the big problem of constitutional democracy: how to protect the dignity of the king?  How to maintain the appearance that the king effectively decides, when we all know this is not true?  What we call a “crisis of democracy” does not occur when people stop believing in their own power but, on the contrary, when they stop trusting the elites, those who are supposed to know for them and provide the guidelines, when they experience anxiety signaling that “the (true) throne is empty”, that the decision is now really theirs.  
Slavoj Zizek, Trouble in Paradise

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