Conceptualizing Politics

7.   Global troubles for democracy
The ability of today’s politics to stand up to global threats and transform them 
into challenges leading to a rethinking of government or governance under the 
new conditions is severely limited by a number of factors. Finding answers to the 
challenges may fail, and traditional politics remain powerless before them, as long 
as actors are incapable of shedding their particularism and short-termism in favour 
of a time universalism that is careful of global commons. All these dangers, while 
related to politics in general, have a heavy impact on democracy, because they 
compound with specific downsides that this regime shows under the pressure of 
global threats. Let us first examine these factors one by one, starting with a premise.
Threats, challenges, problems, policy indications are not yet politically relevant at 
the time in which they exit the mind of their formulators, like Pallas Athena being 
born full grown and armed from Zeus’s forehead. They become it in the moment 
in which they are received, endorsed and transformed by real political actors, com-
mon citizens and/or elites. This is what I have dubbed the subjective moment of 

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146  World politics and the future of politics
politics; in it the way how issues are communicated is crucial. Communication is 
a constitutive element of politics, especially in modern polyarchies, and without 
keeping this knowledge in mind, all discourse about politics must fail to grasp its 
reality. Reasons of space make lamentably not possible to reconnect diverse themes 
present in this book (political identity, symbolic language, public sphere/opinion, 
and – with due scientific caution, given the slippery terrain – imagination) into 
a discourse regarding political communication, in which analytical and empirical 
contributions overwhelm anyway what philosophy has to say.
The first reason why objective, (highlighted by science) lethal threats have so 
far been neutralised in their possible impact on subjective perception and on pol-
icy is their abstract nature. The atomic bombing of 1945 lies more than seventy 
years behind us, and the new generations have fortunately a paling image of what 
nuclear war would mean; tales of MIRVs (missiles with multiple warheads), mega-
tons, nuclear winter and crop shortages require a degree of concentration on the 
issue that few can be expected to show. Climate change is a statistical entity made 
of measurements of phenomena happening now and even more figures resulting 
from a mathematical projection of present processes into the future. Mass migration 
comes onto TV monitors, but only in the Mediterranean and (some) European 
countries is perceived as a problem affecting everybody, while its causal link with 
the changing climate is indistinguishable from the causation of migration due to 
pending civil wars. For the rest, climate change has so far been poor in sizeable, 
impressive phenomena that hit large populations in the highest GHGs-emitting 
countries. This abstract appearance of the two global threats, so different from the 
event-based communication style of TV journalism, has sidelined them from public 
attention for decades. Since the Internet has so far failed to dispossess TV as the 
preferred source of political information, things have not changed much. Only the 
interventions of powerful communicators such as President Barack Obama and 
Pope Francis with his Encyclical (2015) Laudato si’ have had some effect on public 
opinion.
A second factor neutralising the political effects of global threats are the denial 
mechanisms actively or unconsciously set in motion. The campaigns launched by 
the oil industry or the military-industrial complex in previous decades belong to 
the first type, actively playing short-term interests (industrial jobs, nuclear security 
by supremacy) against those of future generations. Groucho Marx’s famous quip 
‘What has posterity ever done for me?’ represents a counter-argument based on ad