The world is in the grip of a new political messianism. The new messiahs have two things in common. They have all embraced a new religion of self-worship. Secondly, they all promise to make their countries great again without making them good first. They have all become systems themselves. Our future history books will record our time as a cesspit of lies and delusions and a golden age of conspiracy theories.

The left-right binary is no longer a dominant political dialectic of the 21st century. With cultural identity assertion gaining ground, political contest is around competing ideas. Today there is a growing disconnect between the demos and the cratos, that is, between society and the democratic political system which the new messiahs are exploiting. However, they commit the folly of detaching economy and markets from society which is bound to fail. Democracy is not what governments do; it is what people do. Democracy is also about dignity.

As Francis Fukuyama says, “a great deal of politics is really not about contest over material goods, it is really a contest over respect.” Plato and Aristotle used the Greek term Thymos that connoted pride, demand for respect and recognition. Today the poor, the marginalized and the minorities have begun to imagine themselves through their own eyes. Dignity issues have acquired a new salience. Dignity has found expression in protests and resistance movements launched by Marxists, anarchists, feminists and citizens’ groups.

The trend seems to be more pronounced in southern Europe and Latin America. There is another defining trend. While there is a breakdown of traditional party system and rise of new parties and movements, anti-politics has created space for politics of an alternative kind.What is also growing is a disinterest in, disaffection with, and disengagement from conventional politics among citizens.

Political columnist Steve Richards wrote in The Independent in 2015 that we are now in “the age of anti-politics” as voters feel disconnected from politics and angry with politicians, while politicians feel insecure in the face of such anger. Spain’s Podemos (We Can), Italy’s Five Star Movement (M5S) and India’s Aam Admi Party (AAP) are the products of a new style of political engagement. It follows from new fields of conflict, new sites of power, and new geographies of organisation and belonging. Latin America has its own share of novel experiments. Podemos, M5S and AAP are the products of citizens’ movements that swept major parts of the world. AAP and Podemos were founded in 2012 and 2014 respectively.

Pablo Iglesias, one of the founders of Podemos, believed politics was not something to be studied; it was something you either did, or let others do to you. Iglesias’ brilliance helped change the vocabulary of politics and the horizons of political discourse. Spain witnessed a series of Mareas (tides) movements against privatisation. In 2012, over half a million people took to the streets in a protest against budgetary cuts in public health services. The marea blanca (white tide) was against government cutbacks in public health services.

The blue, red, orange, yellow and black tides followed. Some of the catchy slogans flowed from similar movements in Italy and Latin America like “it is not a crisis, it is the system”, “no one represents us” and “we are not merchandise in the hands of politicians and bankers” etc. These movements questioned the status quo as a whole through a political jargon that cut across left-right divide. Arvind Kejriwal is politically ambitious and an astute politician. He puts on a show of constant internal consultation, but everything is decided by Kejriwal or the Kejriwal-Sisodia duo.

Like Podemos, AAP has become institutionalised and it is no longer a movement. Podemos transformed social indignation of the 2011 Indignados movement into an electoral machine. Like Podemos, AAP is media savvy. Podemos says, “if the media doesn’t come to you, become the media.” Kejriwal has done precisely this. He continues to charm the media at a time the media is too busy singing paeans of the ‘maximum leader’.

Kejriwal and AAP are not theoretically and ideologically grounded like Podemos and M5S.He appears close to Brazil’s Janio Quadros. Quadros had mastered a wide repertory of theatrical tricks. His triumph brought into startling prominence an unpredictable personality who owed allegiance to no party. He talked like a demagogue insisting that his intellectual formation was based on Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln.

When Quadros fought and won the presidential elections in the early 1960s, he used the broom as a campaign symbol. Seven months after taking office as President, he resigned and threw the country into an institutional crisis. Quadros followed his own individual political marketing model and his communication skills were based on self-enhancement. Kejriwal seems to have taken a page from Quadros’ book. Latin America has long been a laboratory of political experiments.

Today, a whole new range of actors are on the national scene. If the millennial Gabriel Boric, a former student leader, is president of Chile, Peruvian president Pedro Castillo is a former school teacher. In Brazil former president Luis Inacio Lula da Silva is on a comeback trail. In Colombia, a former M 19 guerrilla leader Gustavo Petro is a front runner in the presidential elections in May. In Latin America a new social geometry of power has emerged.

The rights to be heard, to be seen, to be recognized, and to be respected are at the core of new movements across the region giving a new meaning to democracy. What is significant is that there has been a displacement of power upward, downward and outward. Latin America has rejected old political parties. For long, power alternated between Christian Democrats and Social Democrats. Then a time came when Latin America had only two political parties ~ the civilian and the military.

Today Gabriel Boric (I Approve Dignity coalition), Pedro Castillo (Marxist Free Peru Party), Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (Party of the Democratic Revolution) are brand new parties. A few years ago, voters in Peru’s presidential election gave the most votes to Ollanta Humala, whose Nationalist Party was formed only a year earlier. Apparently, voters are not just looking for a new message but a new messenger.

In Peru there are now 36 parties, or one for every 450,000 voters, and only six of them are more than a decade old. A major part of the world is witnessing dignity movements pitted against predatory majoritarianism. AAP’s success aside, India is under a magical spell of a politics of distraction. The journey from ‘We the people’ to ‘We the Republic’ is the way forward.

(The writer is director, Institute of Social Sciences, Delhi)