Article: Democracy has junk status

Erich Kofmel - Google+ 
Article: Democracy has junk status

Presseurop, a Paris-based website that compiles articles from hundreds of European newspapers every day, was quick to translate into English an article by one of the co-publishers of the major conservative German daily, "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung", Frank Schirrmacher, originally published on that paper's website on 1 November 2011 under the title, "Demokratie ist Ramsch". This was translated, not entirely accurately, to "Democracy has junk status" (actually, "Ramsch" is "junk"; "has junk status" would be "hat Ramschwert").

Excerpt: "[T]he moral conventions of the postwar period are being wiped out in the name of a supposedly higher financial and economic rationale. Such processes occur gradually ... until out of them a new ideology comes forth. That was invariably how it went in the incubation phases of the great crises of authoritarianism in the Twentieth Century. ... Europe is going through ... a power struggle between the primacy of economics and the primacy of politics. The primacy of politics has already lost ground massively. And the process is speeding up."

Original article: http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/der-griechische-weg-demokratie-ist-ramsch-11514358.html

Democracy has junk status