The algorithm often suggests content that it itself labels as masculine, which, in the current state of culture wars, means I have direct contact with the most uninhibited expressions of the new right. And this week I had a good laugh with a meme of Ábalos that went viral following the court ruling. The montage consists of mixing a collection of statements by the former PSOE Secretary General and accompanying them with the sad music of Skyfall, the song from a James Bond movie. It alternates Ábalos's phrases expressing helplessness –"I have no one. I feel like I'm facing political power alone"– with the account of an extramarital affair –"She blocked me, and there I discovered the word ghosting, she explained to me what it meant. It hurts, because I had a real romantic relationship with that person. I lost everything, forgive my boldness, for someone I loved"–. The volume of the piano rises, we hear Adele singing "This is the end" and we read some variation of the text "If loving is a crime…" accompanied by the broken heart emoji. It is absolutely impossible not to laugh a little or feel a certain tenderness towards Ábalos.However, how is it that all this sympathy is flourishing in a right-wing cultural ecosystem? Naturally, part of the explanation has to do with the fact that, by humanizing Ábalos, the pressure can be redirected towards Pedro Sánchez, who is the real enemy. But the phenomenon is so organic and the meme spreads so much in apparently apolitical spheres, that I find it a perfect symptom of the left's cultural problem with the language of male desire.Traditionally, the right and the left have offered two complementary ways of channeling enjoyment, those tickles that go beyond reason and that are also an essential part of politics. Simply put, the right provided the pleasure of identifying with authority, and the left the pleasure of fighting it, which are two impulses present in the human soul that constantly compete and that may or may not make sense depending on the situation. However, the institutionalization of a form of progressive power, one of the most particular novelties of modernity, has opened a window for the revolutionary conservative, a new figure who is capable of appropriating both forms of enjoyment at the same time. Unlike the conservative we all have in mind, who calls people to repress excesses, the revolutionary conservative is capable of presenting the fight to return to traditional values as a risky and exciting crusade against progressive tyranny, a masterstroke that confers upon whoever knows how to execute it the monopoly of emotionality and leaves rivals in the burdensome position of the censor.
The success of a meme like Ábalos's represents the triumph of this operation in the realm of male sexuality and affections. Because, although his extramarital conduct may seem the opposite paradigm of what the conservative manual demands, the truth is that nowadays the little voice of conscience that represses young people's desire does not speak of Christian morality, which has been completely abandoned, but with the rhetoric of emotional responsibility and care. In the past, progressivism won the hearts of young lovers who rebelled against the obligation to pair up with someone from a good family, have children, and not deviate from heteronormativity. Today, the cultural imperative has taken on a progressive tone that demands we manage emotions perfectly, communicate every ambivalence, do no harm to anyone, and love only in a responsible, mature, and consensual way. Needless to say, rebelling against "it's done this way because it's always been done this way" is much easier than fighting against "you have to do it this way for your own good and everyone else's."Can anything be done about this cultural somersault, or must we assume that the roles have been reversed and from now on the left will represent containment and the right rebellion? On the one hand, it is important to show how the emancipation proposed by this type of conservatism is almost always accompanied by the proposal to submit to an even more suffocating authority. Think of Ayuso's freedom, which makes you tremble by saying that taxes don't need to be paid, and then it turns out that the richest people take advantage of the money to invest it in houses, and the supposedly liberated majority ends up more disempowered than before, a slave to "the laws of the market".
However, if genuinely emancipatory projects renounce the political potential of transgression and enjoyment, they are condemning themselves to failure. Rather than choosing between rationality and debauchery, it is about assuming that the human condition is irreducibly irrational and contradictory, and that your political program cannot demand that those who join it be unblemished souls, but rather must try to offer paths for the emotional excesses that motivate us to find meaning. In politics, this would mean ceasing to present progressivism as a win-win and remembering that one must take sides: a policy cannot be good for employers and for workers at the same time, and committing to a left-wing project requires confronting this conflict. In cultural wars, it would be necessary to abandon the discourse that describes human relationships as a contractual realm of mutual benefit and allow men and women to relate to each other again as adults capable of running the risk of exposing themselves to the other without guarantees that everything will turn out well, precisely because this is the only way to form real bonds.The meme of Ábalos in love is a perfect example of the conservative instrumentalization of transgression: what is presented as a romantic sacrifice is, in reality, using money from a plot and deceiving the people you are supposed to love without giving up anything, with the sole purpose of providing oneself with individual pleasures and not betting decisively on anything. However, precisely because the idea of romantic sacrifice has enormous potential to awaken commitment to noble causes (in fact, it is necessary), the left should know how to enter the manosphere to fight the battle with a deeper, more sophisticated, and more engaging proposal than what is currently offered by the rhetoric of care and emotional responsibility.
