5. Democracy, Post-democracy and What Came After

This chapter observes that the current political situation is shaped by politicisation processes (e.g. populist protests) that, contrary to the 1970s (e.g. civil rights movements), deteriorate rather than enhance representative democracy. It thus analyses the reasons for this cleavage and argues that civil rights movements brought the political to the fore while current protest suppresses it. Bringing the political to the fore means to allow the coexistence of more than one representation of one and the same object, highlighting the incommensurability between the people’s sovereign and the actual people. It thus prevents the possibility of a fully fledged representation and allows further contesting in the future. Populist mobilisations, instead, restrict political conflict to the borderline between the people and their ‘enemies’ (immigrants, the elite etc.), politicising without democratising.