The Post-Political Democracy of the Distrustful: Commentary on Essays by Ivan Krastev

Abstract

In his essays, collected in In Mistrust We Trust: Can Democracy Survive When We Don’t Trust Our Leaders? and Democracy Disrupted: The Politics of Global Protest, Ivan Krastev questions the state of contemporary democracy. He describes it as ‘post-political’ because while procedures are observed, democratic elections take place, and governments are sometimes replaced, nothing of substance changes in politics and voters lack any sense of having influence or that their votes actually matter. Democracy is obviously in crisis and a variety of solutions to this predicament have been proposed: even more elections more direct democracy, or more transparency. Or perhaps a remedy to the crisis of democracy will stem from protests and from ‘taking to the streets’—these being ‘alternate means’ of doing politics? Krastev criticizes all the above proposals, concluding that none is satisfactory or likely to restore trust in democratic institutions. Perhaps democracy ought not to be superficially improved, but instead rethought from the be ginning? The author points to several questions that should be taken into account in thinking about a new form of democracy. She also considers whether the mass protests of the 2010s were a new phenomenon and involved new ideas for doing politics, or were typical modern social movements, only on a global scale and employing novel instruments of mobilization.