Populism and political trust in the age of communication

Democracy is a system that aims to promote pluralism and resolve conflicts peacefully. Its essence lies in debate and active citizenship, but it also requires trust in political processes. Populism presents us with a paradoxical phenomenon: it invokes active citizenship but denies pluralism; it wants to bring people closer to politics but denies trust in representative institutions. Trust in rules and institutions is trust in democracy, and populism, by bringing every decision back to a hypostatized will of the people, is an expression of a generalized crisis of political trust. One reason for this crisis is that politics has been overloaded with tasks and expectations, and politicians have suggested that these individual expectations should turn into rights that politics must realize. Failure to fulfill these promises has generated a widespread crisis of trust in politics itself. However, this generalized crisis has not led to more circumscribed expectations for political action but rather to the spread of populism. This does nothing but promises to fulfill the growing desires of the people, which populists claim have not been met because someone stands in the way of the popular will. Political trust is increasingly operating according to the simplistic dynamics of the perceived similarity between the leader and the people. In a society of communication technology and disintermediation, the ability to express personal opinions and the expectation of making an unmediated contribution to decision-making processes are expanding. The new populisms, by leveraging social media, convey a feeling of closeness between the leader and the people, as well as the illusion of rebuilding lost social cohesion. We are thus dealing with ambiguous and dangerous attempts to deny the “old” mechanisms of trust and to replace them with new (and technological) trust-building dynamics which seem to be more superficial and instinctive.