One day, in the days that now seem so distant from the Process, I met an old colleague again, and we inevitably ended up discussing current politics. I remember that, with a condescending smile, he said to me: "You know, when people vote with their feelings..." It was his way of explaining the election results that he, a member of what should be called the right-thinking left, didn't like. Although I can't say it came to me as a new one, the phrase struck me, and it made me wonder if we could seriously establish a clean separation between rationality and feelings when choosing our vote (or when deciding whether to vote). And even more: how do we decide which votes are the result of applying strict rationality and which are the result of falling into the temptation of feelings? Who judges them, and on what basis? (The criterion can't be, of course, that if you vote for "ours" then you're behaving rationally.)
You don't need a degree in psychology to know that, when it comes to choosing, people are driven by a mixture of logic and emotion: advertising and marketing are unequal advertising and marketing, the desire and reason of the consumer. But for some time now, emotions have flooded everything, and have become the source of legitimacy par excellence: if something moves us, it's when we're doing well. Personally, I—who must also be part, to a greater or lesser extent, of the right-thinking left—am annoyed by this constant appeal to feelings. This past Sant Jordi, for example, many publishers' ads pointed in the same direction: literature should move you. Well, as a reader, I have experienced indelible emotions, but I ask books not to pursue, as their primary objective, moving me.
But let's return to emotions in politics. The evolution of these uncertain times we are living in, with the rise of populism, is often explained by a predominance of emotional factors over rational ones. As a historian, this is not an argument that satisfies me much: the resentment of the powerless toward the elites, one of the driving forces of today's politics, may undoubtedly have an emotional component, but it also obeys a political reading of reality, which leads to a dissident vote that is anti-system (insofar as it is against the establishment) but which exists.
For all these reasons, I read in this same newspaper (04/25/2025), and with some surprise, that the former mayor of Barcelona, Ada Colau, has discovered the power of emotions in politics. At the first public event of a new foundation called Common Sense, Colau admitted that the right is "more skilled" at taking people's pulse and that we must find the target of "emotions, care, and skin." She added: "We must provide data and manage, but it's not enough. We must appeal to emotions, which is what mobilizes people the most." Colau's statements, who when she was in power was not known for her ability to listen, reminded me of the statement of a podcaster An American, rather progressive in a universe dominated by Trumpism, who explained that Trump is known for his expressive arrogance, but that perhaps one of his greatest talents was knowing how to listen. And he reasoned it like this: "Democrats tune in to what people ought feel", while "Trump is in tune with what people really being". We can discuss the distinction, but it doesn't seem trivial to me.
And it brings me back to the years of the Process, when you so often heard that we Catalans had let ourselves be carried away by feelings. And I remembered an interview I did in The Advance, in 2019, in Luisa Elena Delgado, a Spanish cultural critic unfortunately now deceased, author of an important book called The singular nation, and who studied the sovereigntist uprising with empathy and "common sense." She told me that, in conflicts "with high emotional tension"—citing the cases of Scotland and Catalonia, and Brexit, but also the feminist wave that emerged in 2017 with the Me Too scandal—"the basic premise is that every significant political movement mobilizes feelings and emotions: no one wins a debate, no one wins a legalistic or technocratic discourse. (The European Union is an obvious example.) The question is what emotions are mobilized, how, and in the name of what. It seems to me a magnificent recipe for beginning to unravel the present."
