The populisms that are emerging in many parts of the Western world are the symptom of a latent crisis of democracy (its inability to represent significant sectors of the various populations), which in turn derive from a now evident crisis of politics itself: a crisis of ideas (of ‘vision’), of quality in the political classes (a generalized mediocrity), and of organizational models (the end of ‘mass parties’). Above all, there is a crisis of effectiveness in policies, particularly evident in the difficulty governments find in countering the economic crisis with solutions adequate to its seriousness and capable of redressing the growing inequalities and the impoverishment of that middle class which had been the basis of democratic stability in the mid-twentieth century and whose depreciation is the origin of the current wave of populism.

The continuation of this ‘latency of politics’ – this is the second focus of the book – is producing a kind of radicalization in the populisms whose distinctive feature is the search for scapegoats and the discovery of them in the most socially fragile figures, in particular migrants (thus leading to walls, barbed wire, the closing of borders, policies of segregation, cutting off routes, etc), in a crescendo which is dangerously shifting the border between ‘human and inhuman’ (the antithetical pair which is steadily replacing modern politics’ traditional pair of ‘left and right’). The book re-examines the features and aspects of this decline of politics (the social effects of the crisis with the extension of the new poverties, the dissolution of the traditional party form, and the geography of the new populisms), revealing its nature as a challenge to the very ‘political paradigm of modernity’.