“But then, how can one reasonably expect that we take a stand against ominous great men and against their ominous consequences?”
(Jürgen Habermas, in Philosophical and Political Profiles, Karl Jaspers, p. 141, Gallimard 1974 for the French translation, reissued 1987)

Haiti’s central problem, in my view—as someone who has devoted several hundred pages to the incompatibility between parliamentary democracy and poverty against a backdrop of illiteracy—is that the country has already produced more than forty years of transition without end or purpose, resulting in the collapse of public order and authority as a (substitute) outcome following the macoute dictatorship. As we are currently witnessing, ten years without elected officials and five years of transitional drift (probably as useless, bloody, and insipid as the 1991–1994 coup period) have led us further into an infernal labyrinth populated by displaced persons, repeated kidnappings, a constitutional vacuum, corruption scandals, murders, looting of public buildings and private residences, foreign interference—in short, massive decapitalization and collective distress. The evacuation of the Transitional Presidential Council (CPT), whose record is as lamentable as that of the monocentric government of Prime Minister Ariel Henry, should serve us all—including foreigners—with a harsh lesson in humility and caution. The real problem with a thousand solutions lies in the creation of functional and robust democratic institutions, which presupposes a “shared development project” or a “national governance pact.” In this vein, I am entitled to pose, without embellishment, the question of the Haitian nation’s future: is it normal to continue down the path of a catastrophist democratization that leads only to recurring failures? Is it conceivable that a failed state could generate the foundations of any kind of national rebirth? Or is it undeniably unthinkable to implement liberal democracy in a poor and disorganized country, without (apprentice) democrats or enlightened political and economic elites?