Pen strokes and felt-tip pens for the people

One can (and must) normally read a great many writings, treatises and studies about democracy, about what it is, what it has been and what it could or should be - i.e. about its theory, its history and its normative ideals. However, one can also take the hopeful and labor-saving view that what it ("really") is can be shown beyond doubt and irrefutably in certain moments, which are then quickly declared to be (often even: "historical") "great moments of democracy". As optimistic and educationally sensible as this may be, the assumption covered by Popper's principle of falsification seems much more reliable, namely that much clearer conclusions can be drawn from actions, acts of state and events that obviously illustrate what democracy is not - even and especially when, on the contrary, they are staged as democratically legitimized and "wanted by the people", i.e. declared to be prototypically democratic "great moments".

The events of the past few days in Washington, D.C., which have been followed with great media attention, present this irritating proximity of "somehow" democratic and obviously non-democratic procedures in a frighteningly vivid way. It must be presented as a "deeply democratic" matter that a "change of power" is peaceful and that an election loser publicly admits her defeat and vacates her position of power, but then this very democratic change of power is immediately characterized by government actions that consist, among other things, of lifting the lawful conviction of the very democracy obstructors and despisers who had been locked up to preserve and protect the democratic order; In other words, the first official act of the democratically elected new incumbent, demonstrated publicly with obvious pride and perfidious satisfaction, is a substantively anti-democratic one.

Beyond that, however, the behavior of the old-new US president manifests with every single gesture everything that has very little to do with democracy in the narrower sense and which is condensed into a public showcase in the media-aesthetically prepared public symbolic acts of signing "decrees". "Look, I'm doing something," is what this is supposed to mean, and the piles of black folders on the desk demonstrate how much has already been "done away with" today. "Can you imagine Biden would do that?" he grunts into the microphone; there has to be enough time for derogatory predecessor bashing so that his supporters have something to gloat about. But what kind of strange achievement is it to put your name under a piece of paper? What kind of achievement is being celebrated here when the tool with which the mythical potentate's name was scribbled becomes a coveted trophy that is thrown into the crowd (see here) so that the fans will clamor for it as they once did for the lances, arrows and swords with which the bitterly evil arch-enemy was killed on the battlefield?

"Can you imagine Biden would do that?" You would have to ask back: "Do what exactly, Mister President?" Of course, signing decrees is a legitimate and democratically legitimized power and task of a president, but this act itself, the "stroke of the pen" with which something is "decided", is in the democratic ideal case only the external, the visible but for that very reason politically least important part of processes whose democratic content and character can only be seen in all the discussions, agreements and negotiations that preceded and precede the final act. Just as the mayor only ever poses for the "ground-breaking ceremony" or cuts the ribbon at the end - the real work in between is done by others. The political preliminaries for presidential decrees are hopefully in all the black folders in the Oval Office, which the president apparently only ever opens to pull out the last page, at the point with the line where it says: "Now please write your own name here". The presidential "doer" image is condensed into a refusal to read (and think) in order to perform the primitive and pompous illiterate gesture of signing one's own name instead. "Getting things done", in a few seconds, with a "stroke of the pen": this is the decisionist ideal in the political understanding of populists all over the world.