In his piece for the London Review of Books, “Berlusconi in Tehran,” about the danger of authoritarian power within democracies, Slavoj Zizek examines the possible similarities between the victorious Iranian Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
In light of the recent unsettling events in Tehran, Zizek challenges readers to confront the possible flaws in parliamentary representative democracy and cites Walter Lippman’s coined term ‘manufactured consent’ to describe democratic elections based on supposed free will.
According to Zizek, while voters in a democracy act as though they are free, they are still dependent on an elite to tell them what to do and think. In a sense, an election merely asks people to pretend that those in power aren’t already so and then to ‘freely’ grant them power again.
Unfortunately, this may mean that true democracy is losing power while authoritarian capitalism is gaining it. As Zizek sees it, just as Berlusconi may be ruling Italy with popular support, his actions have increasingly neglected democratic principles.
