Democracy and Limits of Democracy

There are many books on democracy. Not everyone, however, considers it in its real functioning, immersed in the life of the State, in relation to the other components of public powers, in conflict with justice, authority, efficiency, in the theory and practice of government. This is the reason for these reflections, at the center of which lies the interaction between the democratic element of contemporary political systems and the other elements that make up this complex structure that we call the state, as well as between national democracy and supranational legal orders. The emphasis is on limits, because, if democracy is a limit of power, it is itself limited, both by its intrinsic nature and by the action of other forces. The limits, therefore, which are reviewed here are of a very different nature: some intrinsic, others deriving from the various components of the systems of government with which democracy must coexist; some necessary, others eventual; some in fact, others in law; some imposed, others occasional; some of a negative sign (in the sense that they deprive democracy of a part of its strength), others of a positive sign (in the sense that they enrich democracy). Democracy is the tool of "limited government". On the one hand, popular sovereignty, on which democracy is founded, is a means of limiting public powers because it implies that the people can exercise effective influence on the exercise of state powers. On the other hand, popular sovereignty itself cannot penetrate everywhere, it is not the source of unlimited cause discrimination that violates the principle of equality). Therefore, the issue of the limits that democracy places and those it encounters is essential for its understanding. A New Crisis of Democracy? Less than a third of the American population knows that the motto "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs", with which Karl Marx described the last phase of socialism, is not written in the American Constitution. In 1964, a minority of Americans knew that the USSR was not part of NATO. Today the majority of that population does not know the political candidate of their district, few know which party controls Congress, 40 percent do not know which powers the United States faced during World War II. In Italy, a good part of the population thinks that there is a number of immigrants that represents 27% of the population, more than three times the real figure. Disturbing Signs around the World Only about half of the one hundred and ninety-three states in the world are governed in a democratic form and the number of democratic countries does not increase; on the contrary, states where elections are held regularly, such as Turkey, Poland and Hungary, become illiberal, limiting freedom of expression, freedom of association or the independence of the judiciary, and therefore undermining democracy itself, which cannot survive without these his tools. Even in countries of ancient democracy, such as the United Kingdom, limitations of democracy are discovered, such as the deprivation of the right to vote for prisoners, whatever the crime they have committed; or like the United States, where democracy is becoming plutocracy, and the representative of the nation is elected by the majority of states, rather than by the majority of the population, so much so that the last president, Donald Trump, was elected despite having obtained almost three million fewer popular votes than its competitor. The decision-making mechanisms of democracies, and not just parties and parliaments, also prove to be weak. The United Kingdom and China have entrusted the same architect with the task of designing and building respectively the fifth te