Matteo De Toffoli
Università degli Studi di Milano (matteo.detoffoli@unimi.it; OrCID: 0000- 0002-8696-0533).
Abstract: This article critically examines the alleged elective affinity between two widely employed terms in philosophy and social sciences: “populism” and “post-truth”. Although these concepts are often treated as near-synonyms, this study argues that their affinity or convergence is not inherent in the concepts themselves, but contingent on the specific conceptualizations developed over their history. Populism, despite its long and complex evolution, has acquired a predominantly negative connotation within the mid-20th-century pluralist canon, which framed it as a form of pathological otherness to democracy. Post-truth emerged in 2016 amid critical political events, defined as a condition where objective facts have less influence on public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. However, it has rapidly come to epitomize (together with populism) the various epistemic, cultural, and political crises deemed typical of contemporary society. Against this genealogical background, the paper contends that the elective affinity between populism and post-truth depends more on their vagueness than conceptual clarity, and highlights the limits of the uncritical acceptance of this idea: it reproduces rather than challenge prevailing normative assumptions about democracy, truth, and rational public discourse, and boils down to the construction of a radical other onto whom the responsibilities for the crisis of democracy and the public sphere are projected. Therefore, the conclusion calls for a more nuanced understanding of these concepts and cautions against reductionist narratives that risk oversimplifying democratic challenges in contemporary societies.
Keywords: Populism; Post-truth; Democracy; Modernization; Otherness.