Caring Democracy as a Solution Against Neoliberalism and Populism

Abstract

Many countries around the world are experiencing a crisis of care. It consists both in challenging welfare state spending and in international migrations from the Global South to the Global North to perform poorly paid domestic work. Care is considered as not a productive activity and as overly feminized. There is a great risk in many countries of restricting care to only a part of the population: those who are rich or powerful in neoliberal regimes, nationals in populist regimes. This chapter analyzes an alternative to these regimes that separate insiders and outsiders. A “caring democracy” (Tronto, 2013, Caring Democracy. Market, Equality, and Justice, New York University Press; 2017, International Journal of Care and Caring 1 (1): 27–43) can be understood as an inclusive society based on the idea that we are all more or less vulnerable, that all relations have to take into account collective responsibilities and to criticize hierarchy, verticality, and individualism.