The scorching summer invites us to delve into the most poetic corner of our personal library: with the Morella Document, by Vicent Andrés Estellés, or The test of the Mallow flower, by Jordi Llavina, I could almost forget about the ultra-international, one of the most reactionary and dangerous operations we have known, now infiltrated in classic liberal and conservative parties, which have believed that they had to approach their frameworks and strategies to retain the electorate.
I won't, but I could be carried away by the easy dialectic of we will fight the far-right and fascism, without further specification, as I agree that democratic institutions with power must be defended from the great partyof anger which is being configured before our eyes. A match that we could also call of social anger. A rage fueled by an anti-political discourse that seeks to control politics as if the far-right were not part of the system: they are not only the system, they are representatives of some economically privileged minorities who want powers that do not regulate markets, that do not establish controls, nor try to balance scales. An absolutist power of modernity.
Delving into the poetic corner would be a pleasant refuge from the sun that burns at all hours, but I cannot stop thinking about those who point to an enemy guilty of all evils. In the democratic societies around us, and in our own, this enemy is the politics of recognizing the great complexities of citizens and the-one-above-valued-from-afar. Hence, the events in Ceuta are extraordinarily complex and fostering fear is abundantly profitable. This is why the nefarious international is taking the form of the part of social anger, a rage that feeds itself in every bar conversation, in every waiting room or casual encounter comment.
The affected social anger must be combatted with one of the most difficult tasks to carry out from public governance: the correct precision of the functioning of public services and the careful and specialized defense of every bit of what we have managed to evolve to approach the free and fertile societies that have been consolidated democracies for eighty years (and that a half-century of military dictatorship prevented us from being before).
Democratic societies have advanced women's rights, recognized new family structures, gender identities, and expanded the list of rights to protect. However, it is necessary that in every home, street, neighborhood, city, school, health center, and transport system, services operate with Swiss precision. The proper functioning of public services in new societies (which are more complex) is the best wall to block the far-right.
The left must embrace the efficiency that safeguards the prestige of public services, rather than promising to expand benefits: it is in waiting rooms that votes for the part of social rage. This can only be combatted with precise, accurate, scrupulous, and detailed functioning of services (even those linked to border and migration management).
The part of the anger grows up in a society that no longer remembers the effort it took to create these social services: it simply demands them and holds the enemy responsible –the-one-above-valued-from-afar– of its inefficiencies or deficits.
The perception and venerable respect that other generations have had for democratic institutions has changed. The brains of older generations still remember the emotion of recovering these institutions, of adapting them to a citizenry that valued every advance as its own.
Perhaps what is happening is that society and politics no longer speak so much of hope, and now only long for consumerist happiness. For a very important part of the citizenry under 50 years of age, supposed happiness is linked to consumption and consumption to the envy of what others have. But it is not possible to achieve this happiness, to be satisfied, because mass consumption is openly encouraged and has no relation to need. Therefore, there is a part of the citizenry that is difficult to satisfy and is at the same time easy to capture by populist solutions that tell them they cannot have everything they desire because others are preventing them. This is the great change of the 21st century: our condition as consumers weighs on us more than our condition as conscious citizens. Consumers of random videos, too.
The main task of those who want to win over the far-right is to recover the prestige of the public, solidarity in collective life. Institutions and their services must work to create a respectful relationship with what is the authentic collective heritage: the proud feeling of being part of it. And this will not be possible without the involvement of those who are to restore brightness to the school, give tenderness to the sick, or dignity to humble housing. In this respectful and firm defense, we must incorporate the enemy –the-one-who-arrives-helpless-from-afar–: without him we will not save either words or values.
