Political Incommunicability and Post-Meaning Democracy

ENGLISH ABSTRACT - RESUMEN EN ESPAÑOL - RESUMO EM PORTUGUÊS ABSTRACT This paper examines the growing disjunction between democratic imaginaries and the actual conditions of political communication in contemporary societies. It argues that democratic politics increasingly operates under conditions of structural incommunicability, in which discourse, reception, and decision-making no longer belong to a shared symbolic universe. While social media were initially expected to expand public debate and pluralize voices, they have instead contributed to fragmentation, affective polarization, and the erosion of collective intelligibility. The paper advances the hypothesis that this communicational breakdown is inseparable from a deeper socioeducational deterioration that has undermined the development of higher cognitive functions necessary for abstraction, critical judgment, and social understanding. Together, these processes produce a structural short-circuit between politics, institutions, and society, rendering the classical notion of public opinion increasingly unviable. Through comparative references to recent political events in different national contexts, the article shows how formal democratic procedures persist even as shared comprehension dissolves, allowing legitimacy to operate independently of understanding. In this environment, extremisms do not initiate political decay but rather occupy a symbolic and institutional void produced by the collapse of mediation and cognition. The paper concludes that the current crisis is civilizational in nature and cannot be addressed through technical adjustments to political communication alone, but rather demands a profound reconstruction of socioeducational processes, symbolic mediations, and the material conditions that make possible social dialogue and mutual understanding.