Minorities push us in the right direction. They do this when they set out to instigate social, political, religious, scientific and artistic change. They challenge the status quo and offer an alternative that the majority then adheres to.
Only one person, a small group of non-conformists, can trigger a global civic movement. History is full of examples. Perhaps the most significant of our era is that of the scientists who first warned of the climate crisis. They were discredited, but they were right and today almost all states are trying to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases.
There is no progress without quixotics, without people who put their face and invest in windmills. The Nobel Peace Prize committee has awarded quite a few. The Iranian engineer Narges Mohammadi is this year's laureate. She is serving a long sentence for defending the right of women to think for themselves and decide how they dress, to be at the head of a peaceful and momentous uprising, the biggest challenge the Islamic republic has had to face since the proclamation in 1979.
Dissidents are always brave and in the minority. It is not easy to go against the grain, risk your life and, if the opportunity arises, leave the country to live in exile.
More than a million Russians have left since February 2022 and last year more than 300,000 young Chinese also left never to return. The exodus accelerates in the face of the intransigence and repression of the authoritarian elites. Refugees, those who have fled wars, pile up at the borders of Europe and the United States. They are the future.
But the future does not come by itself. The future is imposed. It is the result of a struggle between minorities. One advances and the other resists. Between the two, the silent majority watches and waits for its moment. Decide or get carried away.
The guardians of the Iranian revolution are not so different from the guardians of elites in a democracy. Both try to preserve pre-eminence.
The white, rural and conservative minority in the United States, for example, is trying to maintain a hegemony that it is about to lose, and is resisting under the protection of a system that favors it, by an anti-majoritarian democracy.
The House of Representatives has 435 seats and this week eight Republican deputies were enough to dismiss the speaker, a Republican like them and the third most important position in the country.
The ultimate reason for the rebellion is not to contain public spending as it has been argued, but to sustain the privileges of the white, religious and conservative minority against the multiracial, secular and urban majority that is denied fair political representation.
The Senate is undemocratic and has great power. California, the most populous state, with nearly 40 million people, has two seats, while the 20 smallest states, with similar populations, have 40. In the last election, the Republican majority in the Senate received 13 million votes less than the Democratic minority.
Donald Trump, who became president without winning the popular vote, appointed more than 200 federal judges and three Supreme Court justices with the help of a Senate that does not represent the majority of citizens. The charges are for life. In other words, the judicial elite, responsible for resolving cases at the penultimate level of the judiciary, is conservative and will be so for decades.
The elites cannot be better protected, because changing the Constitution is almost impossible. A two-thirds majority in the Senate and House of Representatives is needed, as well as ratification by 38 of the Union's 50 states.
The Constitution is a stumbling block to the democracy of the United States. Millions of citizens have risen up against it in movements like now
Minorities push us in the wrong direction when they are elitist and set the rules of the game. They should not appeal to enlightened despotism. To accept it is to camouflage its immobility and justify its fear of the loss of national identity.
Minorities are transformative when they join other minorities and together they form a new majority, a new balance, fairer because it is more equal.
There is nothing more unfair in a parliamentary system than an absolute majority, because there is no future government that is not for everyone, and there is nothing sadder than being in the hands of political leaders who do not speak to each other, unable to 'reach the pacts that society demands.
Society is always ahead of politics because it has quixotics engaged in a thousand altruistic causes who are not afraid of prison, torture and death, as is the case of Narges Mohammadi, inmate in the infamous Evin prison, in the suburbs north of Tehran, and of so many other prisoners of conscience around the world. Gandhi and Mandela show them the way.
To those who asked him how to resist, the Mahatma explained to them that "first they ignore you, then they mock you, then they fight against you and then you win".
