SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION: COMPLEXITY, MEDIATIONS AND PATHS OF DEMOCRACY

Abstract

In this text, we argue that the consolidation of a universalist and pluralist democracy structured as a rule of law requires overcoming the still-strong populist legacy, founded on the positioning of ideology as the founding and driving force behind the theoretical-partisan self-understanding, the political field, and even the political adversaries themselves. Ideology, driven to absolutization by populist positions, results in the self-subsistence, self-sufficiency, autonomy, and endogeny of these positions, which become directly associated with the universal, rejecting any meta-normative basis of the political field and, therefore, denying political difference, critique, and reflexivity from both outside and within. Thus, a mature democracy rejects any idea of social transformation based on the political dualism-manichaeism inherent in populist positions, which views and affirms political difference and the contradictions inherent in them as absolute evils that must be eradicated. Differences, as a condition for democracy, require self-moderation, recognition, reciprocity, dialogue, renunciations and consensus, something that political populism avoids at all costs, because it cannot coexist with these same differences and their contradictions, that is, with alternatives, with critical thinking, with interaction, with political subject acting as citizens.