The Populist Catharsis: On the Revival of the Political

The upsurge of populist movements and the entry of populist parties into parliaments and governments over the last decade has been condemned as being the cause of the sorry

state of democratic politics in western societies. As populism erodes the liberal political culture of consensus-building through deliberation that achieves inclusive diversity, the verdict goes, it undercuts the very foundation of liberal democracies. Taking my distance from this diagnosis of our current predicament, I will argue that populism is not the cause of the erosion of diversity capital, it is its outcome. I will examine the hypothesis that populism is the symptom of a pathological state of the political in contemporary democracies. Focusing on the process of politicization of social grievances, I will offer a diagnosis of the state of the political in the early twenty-first century, in order to discern populism's capacity to reboot democratic politics.