Comment by Georgi Lozanov:
Mission accomplished, the "four thousanders" are probably reporting. The liberal consensus has failed, and "liberal" - a word etymologically related to free, has already been turned into a dirty one, into a propaganda synonym for snobbish pretensions, sexual perversions and national betrayal.
Anyone who wants to be heard had better not use this word. Pressured by the new stigma, even staunch supporters of liberal democracy are avoiding it. And this is ultimately a retreat from democracy itself. Because apart from liberal, as it happened in the West in the second half of the 20th century, there is no other today.
The stigmatization of liberalism is the key success of post-Soviet propaganda in compromising the "collective West", proclaimed again as enemy number 1 - as during the Cold War. The plan is for it to be displaced in its leading geopolitical role by the dictatorial regime of Putin and his company in the BRICS.
What is liberal democracy?
Liberal democracy is particularly intolerable for dictatorial regimes, because, no matter how brazen they are, they cannot claim to be part of it. Unlike simple democracy (etymologically related to the people), to which even North Korea – the most sinister modern totalitarianism, has become a puppet, calling itself a "people's democratic republic" in a triple tautology. And in our country, during the totalitarian period, everything was "people's" - from the republic to the lokum, from the People's Court, which beheaded the nation's elite, to the innocent game of people's ball. Hitler, after his party won legal elections, became Chancellor of Germany in a completely democratic way, insofar as democracy is majority rule.
However, liberal democracy - let us recall, in addition to majority rule, is the protection of the rights of every person, regardless of whether they belong to him or not. The solidarity of the similar - whatever the sign of their similarity (party, class, racial, religious, ideological, gender) and no matter how many there are, goes hand in hand with tolerance for those who are different, no matter how few there are. Their combination, in turn, makes it possible to form majorities not only on the principle of similarity, but also on the principle of difference. Their purest model is the American nation - a nation of nations, whose rise has proven the effectiveness of the model. The EU also adopts it, in which the solo pursuit of national interest gives way to the community interest and thus achieves its far more reliable realization, unhindered by the conflicts of the past.
Tolerance and solidarity receive their transatlantic projection in Euro-Atlanticism (transatlanticism), according to which the United States supports Western Europe in order to prevent, through joint efforts, more dictatorial regimes and practices (the main danger after the victory over fascism is the second totalitarianism of the 20th century, bringing suffering and death - the Soviet one). As a result, liberal democracy provides 80 years of peace, freedom and prosperity to its citizens - not as a goal and a slogan, but as everyday life, which millions of lucky people eventually accept as a natural state, and for the rest it is a dream and a magnet. In this sense, Donald Trump's intention to make America great again by abandoning Euro-Atlanticism and defeating liberalism is grotesque, like many of his aspirations, because the USA is great precisely as the global guarantor of liberal democracy - the best of possible worlds after World War II.
Liberalism protects democracy in people's minds by respecting the right to any opinion, as long as it is not a crime, and thus does not allow the imposition of a state, official or any other mandatory ideology, whose function is to become a "thought police". The ideology-police includes works by "classics", declared to be bearers of absolute truth. Soviet communism relies on "Das Kapital" by Karl Marx or "The Communist Manifesto" (co-authored with Friedrich Engels). National Socialism - on "Mein Kampf" by Adolf Hitler, but also appropriates "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" by Friedrich Nietzsche. Islamic fundamentalism - on the Quran. Macedonianism and other nationalisms - on distorted historical works. Putinism - on "Eurasianism and Globalization", "Postcapitalism", etc. by Alexander Dugin, but it also encroaches on Orthodoxy. Trumpism - on the hundreds of pages of the anti-liberal MAGA strategy, enshrined in administrative documents and going so far as to ban specific words such as "vulnerable", "diversity", "transsexual"... But the ideologies "taken up into arms" from state power, by itself lead to dictatorship, even without a direct connection with the content of their texts, which are only an alibi for terror, as Hannah Arendt said.
Liberal democracy and reverse discrimination
However, along the lines of ideology, liberal democracy also has a risk of leading to discrimination, but of the majority, if representatives of the minorities it protects (ethnic, sexual, religious) become radicalized. And they demand that liberalism itself be transformed from an "empty framework", in which all kinds of ideologies are possible, into a mandatory ideology with its inherent restrictions on freedom of speech, hostile speech, social privileges (quotas), rewriting of history, etc. The Democrats in the USA, as expected, turned out to be the most susceptible to these minority claims, which foreshadowed Trump's victory. In his person, the settled majority of heterosexual whites sought salvation from the "reverse discrimination" of which they had felt themselves victims.
The subject of an impartial analysis is the actual scale of reverse discrimination in Western societies. And whether it is not propaganda inflated so that everyone can deal with, say, the controversial symbolism of some "living picture" of the opening of the Olympic Games in Paris and forget that Russia was excluded from them because of the thousands of lives actually taken in Ukraine. The question is whether the interruption of one injustice will not lead to another, far more frightening, where Trump was headed in his attempts to replace tolerance and solidarity with force and a deal. And to resemble his colleague from Moscow, who has secured for himself a cult of personality, lifelong power and opponents in prison or directly in the next world. The question is the majority, in order to "rub their nose" of minorities, not to open the door with their vote to a power exercised with violence, lies and fear.
What is happening in Bulgaria?
In Bulgaria, even without reverse discrimination, this door stands ajar and one joke from the inside or outside is enough for it to gape ominously. And because for the generations that grew up after November 10, this sounds abstract, I will end with a quote from Evgeniya Krasteva-Blagoeva's novel "The Rivers of Time" about the time after September 9: "Very soon, horror and fear took possession of the hearts of most Bulgarians. In a matter of hours, they woke up in a new Bulgaria, where people were afraid to speak freely, where property, earned through years of honest labor, was taken away in one fell swoop in the name of the people, where for one wrong word or on the denunciation of a malicious neighbor, you could be sent to a camp, your house taken away, or simply shot dead.
Let's not forget that even now there is someone who can take your business and send to arrest your opponents, and now there are those ready to open the camps again in the name of the people or, as it is more modern to say, in the name of the people.