Opinion – Latinoamérica21: Tired societies and tired democracies

Too often, politics is analyzed from the narrow scope of power. Here, institutions, as factors that regulate human interaction in order to avoid uncertainty, play a very relevant role. The analyzes revolve around the elections and their results in the formation of State powers and their usual confrontation. Political parties centralize attention, as well as different leaderships. Ideologies in terms of sets of values ​​and elements of understanding the world are also an object of interest. Finally, the public policies that meet the demands, to a greater or lesser extent present, constitute a fundamental axis of the study of politics. With all this, the typologies are built and we know the progress or retreat according to certain parameters. Thus, we speak of the erosion or erosion of democracy and even predict its collapse.

Such is the concern with these aspects that, however, on many occasions, we tend to leave aside the concrete scope that is constituted by people where the exercise of power takes place. The overexposure of visions strictly centered on the political-institutional demands, therefore, approaching reality from an interdisciplinary perspective. Demography, for example, helps to explain social change, pointing out how closely connected variations between different age groups, fertility rates and migration movements are. All these aspects now have a substantial impact on political processes.

Likewise, the changes produced in society, under the protection of the technological revolution in which we find ourselves, have meant a profound transformation like never before in human history due to the exponential speed that has taken place both in time and space. Furthermore, these transformations show a clear imbalance in its development for the private business sector.

Works such as “La Sociedad del Miedo” by Heinz Bude or “La Muchedumbre Solitaria” by David Riesman have completed Zygmunt Bauman’s premonitions about liquid society and its effects. The ideas that we are moving from the promise of upward mobility to the threat of exclusion, that emotions are replacing reasons and that what moves us forward is no longer the positive message but the negative, have taken center stage. A panorama, then, in which fear leads to impotence, where we are lonely individuals, where the idea of ​​”us” is in crisis due to the almost unlimited multiplication of identities in which we place ourselves.

Byung-Chul Han also theorized about this new state of affairs, referring to the weariness society. Using the swarm metaphor, he alludes to the capacity for self-exploration that human beings have towards an existence in which new technologies multiply tasks, making time, as never before, a scarce commodity. Being permanently connected also contributes to burnout. If we add to all this the fact that, with the proliferation of identity politics, also clearly fueled by the digital revolution, the politics of resentment takes over the public square, the prospect cannot be less promising.

The tiredness society consolidates the exhaustion in relation to formulas that, although in temporal terms they are not so old, seem to have an unbearable longevity. If in Latin American countries the democracies currently implemented have been in force for less than half a century on average and their performance has been reasonably positive, it seems that the speed of social and cultural changes makes them seem unbearable antiquities.

The flourishing of multiple identities, driven by social networks, is complemented by the dissolution of traditional ties in a context in which the expectations generated are not met. Not living better than your parents is evidence that exhausts the promises of the great media circus that politics has become, entering a phase of fatigue reflected in dissatisfaction with institutions and with democracy itself, as well as in the crisis of political representation in which the parties appear as the main culprits.

Demoscopic analyzes provide ample evidence of this discontent and underestimation. As a recent example, it is enough to remember, for the two countries that today monopolize media attention, that 37% of Brazilians are in favor of a coup d’état to remove Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva from the presidency and that only 20% of Peruvians approve the administration of Dina Boluarte, while 14% approve of the Congress of the Republic.

For its part, the function of intermediation, key in the representative facet in which the really existing democracy is expressed, is disjointed. In itself, all intermediation today is absolutely upside down; but, in addition, the parties lost all capacity for identification on the part of the electorate. Nowadays it is easier to identify with individuals who are adored (or hated) and who are the ones who define the political dispute. In this sense, Gallup has just shown that 41% of young people in the United States identify themselves as independent, while in 1990 they were 33%, so that there is a tie between the democratic and republican affinities.

In this way, the panorama that correlates societal fatigue with political fatigue is not strange. In medicine, asthenia is the state that follows fatigue when things are not improving because the lack of air, the feeling of suffocation, invades the sufferer. The question, therefore, is whether the democracy of Latin American countries is on the verge of falling into this chronic situation that jeopardizes the undoubted advances that have been made in most of them during the last four decades.