Very often, politics is analyzed from the strict sphere of power.
There, institutions, as factors that regulate human interaction in order to avoid uncertainty, play a very relevant role.
The analyzes revolve around the elections and their results when it comes to shaping the powers of the State and their usual confrontation.
Political parties centralize attention, as well as the different leaderships.
Ideologies in terms of sets of values and comprehensive elements of the world are also the object of interest.
In short, public policies that meet demands, to a greater or lesser extent present, constitute a fundamental axis of study of politics.
With all this, typologies are built and advance or regression is known according to certain parameters.
Thus we speak of the erosion or wear and tear of democracy and we even envision its bankruptcy.
Such is the concern in these aspects that, however, on many occasions the specific area that is made up of people where the exercise of power takes place tends to be left aside.
The overexposure of visions strictly focused on the political-institutional aspect therefore requires addressing reality from an interdisciplinary perspective.
Demography, for example, helps to explain social change by pointing out how variations between different age groups, in fertility rates, and what migratory movements imply are closely connected.
All these aspects have a substantial impact on political processes today.
In the same way, the changes produced in society, under the protection of the technological revolution in which we find ourselves inserted, have caused a profound shock like never before in the history of humanity due to the exponential speed with which they have occurred in both time as in space.
In addition, these transformations show a clear imbalance in their development towards the private business sector.
Works such as Heinz Bude's Fear Society or David Riesman's The Solitary Crowd have been completing Zygmunt Bauman's premonitions about liquid society and its effects.
The ideas that one goes from the promise of promotion to the threat of exclusion, that emotions replace reasons and that what moves us to move forward is no longer the positive message but the negative one, have been occupying the stage.
A panorama, then, in which fear leads to impotence, where we are solitary individuals while the idea of “us” is in crisis due to the almost unlimited multiplication of the identities in which we fit ourselves.
Byung-Chul Han has also theorized about this new state of affairs when referring to the fatigue society.
Using the swarm metaphor, he alludes to the human being's capacity for self-exploitation towards an existence in which new technologies multiply tasks making time, as never before, a scarce commodity.
Being permanently connected also contributes to burnout.
If we add to all of this that, under the protection of the proliferation of identity politics, also clearly fueled by the digital revolution, the politics of resentment dominates the public square, the perspective cannot be less rosy.
The tiredness society consolidates the weariness with respect to formulas that, although in temporal terms they are not so old, seem to drag an unbearable longevity.
If in the Latin American countries the currently implemented democracies have been in force for less than half a century on average and their performance has been reasonably positive, it seems that the speed of social and cultural changes makes them appear as unbearable old things.
The flowering of multiple identities, promoted by social networks, is complemented by the dissolution of traditional ties in a context in which the gestated expectations are not reached.
Not living better than parents is evidence that exhausts the promises of the great media circus that politics has become, which is entering a phase of fatigue reflected in discontent with the institutions and with democracy itself, as well as in the crisis of political representation in which the parties appear as the main responsible.
The discontent and the underestimation give ample account of the demoscopic analyzes.
As a recent sample, it is enough to remember, for the two countries that monopolize media attention these days, that 37% of Brazilians are in favor of a coup d'état that would evict Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva from the Presidency and that only 20 % of Peruvians approve of Dina Boluarte's management, while 14% approve of the Congress of the Republic.
For its part, the intermediation function, key in the representative facet in which the really existing democracy is expressed, is seen to be disjointed.
In itself, all intermediation today is absolutely upside down;
but, in addition, the parties have lost all capacity for identification by the electorate.
Today it is easier to identify with individuals who are adored (or hated) who are the ones who come to define the political arena.
In this sense, Gallup has just revealed that 41% of young people in the United States identify themselves as independent, while in 1990 they were 33%, so there is a tie between Democratic and Republican affinities.
This being the case, the panorama that correlates societal fatigue with political fatigue is not strange.
In medicine, asthenia is the state that follows fatigue when things are not getting better because the lack of air, the sensation of suffocation, invades the person who suffered from it.
The question, therefore, is whether the democracy of the Latin American countries is on the verge of falling into this chronic situation that jeopardizes the undoubted progress that has occurred in the majority during the last four decades.
Manuel Alcántara is a Spanish political scientist. Emeritus Professor at the University of Salamanca and UPB (Medellín)
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