Partially in response to Professor Malekzadeh’s post,

Part of the question Professor Malekzadeh describes is simply that the democratic reforms enacted by Allende were too moderate. But moderate compared to what? Election results show that Allende’s reforms were roughly in the center of Chilean political thought, and, therefore, from a political theory perspective, Allende was acting approximately how he should be in a Democatic society. To engage in immediate radical communist reforms would be to violate the will of the people.

Is the problem that we haven’t seen Communist reforms accomplished through Democratic means elsewhere? We talk a lot in class about how small a percent of a population it takes to enact a revolution. Communism is, after all, an inherently radical ideology. It seems likely that we cannot ever find a situation where a majority of the electorate would support (the same) radical reforms.

Part of the problem here is that Democracy, especially, by design, constitutional Democracies, are designed to be inherently moderate methods of enacting change, while Revolutions are of course inherently radical. It seems possible that Democracy can very rarely successfully enact a radical policy such as Communism.

Of course there is also a conflict between a hypothetical communist state and the present institutions in a Democratic society. Part of communist ideology is the focus on Communism as an “End of History”. To continue operating Democratically, Allende would have had to not only run continual elections but also to prepare for the eventuality that a communist regime might leave power, and to preserve institutions accordingly. It’s possible that this is simply incompatible with Communism.