Legal Basis of the Formation and Functioning of the Democratic Regime: the Antinomy of Liberalism and Totalitarism

The article is devoted to the problems of the legal foundations of the formation and functioning of a democratic regime in its liberal and totalitarian dimensions. At the same time, since the unlimited power of the people hides the danger of totalitarianism, which has repeatedly manifested itself in the past of both our country and the world as a whole, the study of the democratic regime is of an urgent nature. Therefore, the purpose of this study is the legal basis of the formation and functioning of a democratic regime in the context of its interaction with liberalism and totalitarianism. The implementation of the specified goal requires the performance of a number of scientific tasks. The article substantiates that «pure» political regimes have a sufficiently abstract character. It was found that within the framework of the «dual» approach there are two dichotomies of political regimes: depending on the interaction of the state with the individual and according to the affiliation of sovereignty. It is proven that as a result of duality, the regime of «totalitarian democracy» is distinguished, an example of which is the USSR during the era of the personality cult of Y. Stalin, and the regime of «liberal democracy», the example of which is the USA for a significant part of its history. The article concludes that the philosophical foundation of «totalitarian democracy» was formed within the framework of the so-called «theory of collectivist democracy», according to which the people were considered as a multi-headed single collective being, which could often have negative consequences in the form of, for example, the maxim «enemy of the people». It is emphasized that the involvement of the broad masses of the people in the repressive Stalinist system created a certain «democratic surrogate» - the Soviet «totalitarian democracy», under which the Soviet people are involved in the trials of the «enemies of the people» (democratic dimension), and the nature of the repression itself has a mass character, which brings it closer to genocide (totalitarian dimension). It was found that the liberal-democratic regime in the USA was formed as a result of the combination of the fact that the people take an active part in the sending of state power (democratic dimension) and the constitutional and legal declaration, as a fundamental principle, of freedom (liberal dimension). The practical value of the work lies in the need to create safeguards for the revival of totalitarianism in the world in conditions of active use of the postulates of democracy by non-democratic regimes.