National-Populism, Post-Truth, and the Logic of Postmodernism: A Multidisciplinary Insight into the Crisis of Liberal Democracy

Abstract

2024 is said to be a decisive year for liberal democracy in the world. The national-populist phenomenon that has been on the rise in recent years occasions renewed and sustained academic debate on the existential challenges faced by liberal democracy. It is a paradigmatic assumption of the liberal mainstream that the rise of national-populist leaders and their constituency pose a fundamental threat to democratic survival. But are national-populism and the Western model of liberal democracy divorced in any essential way? If, as the liberals maintain, national-populism rests and thrives upon the post-truth condition of societal fragmentation and individual psycho-cognitive isolation characterizing contemporary society, we must investigate whether this condition is something foreign to liberal democracy and therefore removable as such. By mobilizing a multidisciplinary corpus, this article shows that postmodernism, defined as the cultural superstructure of consumerist capitalism, is what underpins and perpetuates the interrelated phenomena of infinitely increasing social fragmentation and individual isolation. In the most advanced contemporary stage, called “late postmodernity,” the subjects of Western consumerist capitalist societies are purely driven by a hedonist-narcissistic pleasure principle that defuses all potential for the radical contestation of the existing hegemonic power structure of the liberal-democratic state. The post-truth condition, of which national-populism is an outgrowth, poses no essential threat to liberal democracy as long as both are sustained and promoted, at the structural level, by the hegemonic mode of production.