La política de la descalificación

Motivada por el estado del debate político en Estados Unidos, pero con reflexiones plenamente aplicables también para México y el resto del mundo, Anne Applebaum en Slate utiliza el caso del fanático noruego Bhering Breivik para apuntar la luz de la linterna sobre el tunel al que puede conducir el empleo de la retórica de la falta de legitimidad como estrategia política dominante o exclusiva:

This particular form of obsession is not new. Nor is it confined to blond, white, racist Norwegians. Raskolnikov, the hero of Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, brutally murdered a pawnbroker in the name of a vaguely defined "freedom" that was not available in decadent, czarist St. Petersburg. Since then, revolutionaries and madmen of all kinds, from the Russian anarchists to the Irish Republican Army, have justified the murder of innocent people on the grounds that it would hasten the end of an illegitimate government and bring to power some theoretically more authentic  regime.

 Desde mi punto de vista la "prueba de la legitimidad" debe estar colocada como exigencia perenne sobre los hombros de quienes ejercen poder, Applebaunm se refiere, no obstante, a una degeneración que, utilizando torcidamente dicha idea, cancela las vías del debate y de la obtención de soluciones negociadas, postura dogmática que encuentra terreno fértil en intelectos pobres y de tendencias absolutistas, que rechazan las reglas de la democracia:

In the past, left-wing illegitimists were quite common, and in fact Marxism is a classic, paranoid version of this creed. The illegitimist Marxist argument goes like this: Bourgeois democracy is a sham; bourgeois politicians and the bourgeois newspapers are tools of shadowy financial interests. The entire system deserves to be overthrown—and if a few people die in the course of the revolution, it's all for a good cause. Though not every Western Marxist advocated violence, this is certainly the kind of argument that motivated the Weathermen, the Baader-Meinhof gang, and other far-left American and European terrorists of the past. There is also a right-wing version of this argument, one that has been honed to perfection by novelist Charles McCarry (in Lucky Bastard, he imagines that the Bill Clinton-like American president is a Communist agent and his Hillary-like wife is his controller). More recently, right-wing illegitimism has taken the form of birtherism. The attempt to prove that Barack Obama isn't American-born was, at base, an attempt to prove that he is illegitimate and that he therefore deserves to be removed from power—somehow. Birtherism is also linked to other forms of illegitimism, such as the belief that Obama is a Muslim, and is thus controlled by international jihadists, or the belief that he is "Kenyan" and thus motivated by anti-colonial hatred of white people in general and Americans in particular. It is not accidental that the one note of sympathy for Breivik in the U.S. media came from the lips of birtherist and illegitimist Glenn Beck, who helpfully compared the young Norwegians murdered by Breivik to "Hitler Youth." Presumably if they are Hitler Youth, then they deserved to die?