POPULISM IN A DEMOCRACY: ETHICAL CONCERNS

Résumé

The 21st century is an age with twists and turns in political and social permutations and landscape. Every now and then, experts’ failure to predict social outcomes are explained away either by blaming their heavy reliance on wrong paradigms in analyzing those events, or by attributing them to a resurgent wave of populism that defies standard gauge in its processes. This paper found that populism has recently become a recurrent feature of most democracies around the world. Whether leftwing, middle or rightwing, its current manifestations are symptomatic of a deeper fault-line in democratic structures. It further noted that left-liberals are wont to highlighting populism’s historical association with xenophobic ideologies that opened the door to fascist regimes, and in consequence, are happy to create an atmosphere of fear and trepidation for everyone. But beyond this, and to make a sense of the recent surge in populist leanings, we identified that it has to be assessed within the context of a reaction exposing the messy reality of systemic corruption in our democratic systems. We concluded by pointing out that perhaps, more ruinous to the ethics of liberty, equality and freedom is the apparent attempt at forcible homogenization of left-liberal mantras, which in itself, has become somewhat an ideologue akin to the excesses of populism.