Woke has become the preferred insult of the new extreme right, from Trump to Ayuso. If you are concerned about social inequalities and discrimination based on identity – sexist, racial, linguistic or whatever – you have already screwed up. You are woke up, a naive, an outcast who has had his brains brainwashed by communist radicals and who doesn't know what life is about. Life is about triumph, about power, about the freedom to do whatever you want. The poor should get their act together and the different, starting with the immigrants, have only come to piss us off and take advantage of our good nature. What's this nonsense about worrying all day about minorities? And the majorities, what? And the normal, what?
Until now we had agreed that in democracy the majorities decided, but with respect for the minorities. Not anymore. No more dissimulation: let the majorities sweep away all dissent. The law of the most numerous. If I command, I command and I resolve everything my way. Balance of powers? Don't be old-fashioned, man! And don't make me say women, the whole feminism thing is already tiring. Humanitarian humanism, liberalism of ideas? Things of heavy intellectuals. You voted for me, right? Well, let's go for it. No more public regulations, no more legal guarantees to avoid corruption. All this is useless paperwork, absurd bureaucracy. Castile is wide: from decree to decree, until the final decree.
This is what the new authoritarian democracy will be like, a drift that is accelerating. The revolutionary super-right despises public institutions, contrasts individual freedom with the state – not the state as a guarantee of individual and collective freedoms –, equates solidarity with bureaucracy, believes that all the poor and trans people in the world are opportunists, sees no problem in the obscene wealth of a few – well deserved, of course! –, is sure that by definition private companies work super well and make people work as God commands. Inefficient, bureaucratized companies with leveraged workers and senior managers who take advantage of privileged information and whose main job is to corrupt public institutions can never exist. No, no, this does not happen. And could there be officials who do their job well? Come on, man! Where are you going to end up?
This simplistic Manichaeism is penetrating popular opinion and giving electoral victories to the destroyers of the common good, the social elevator, equal opportunities, the defense of nature, vaccines as a guarantee of public health... An already precarious planetary balance is being put in danger. We did not live in the best of worlds, but on this path we are heading headlong into an unpredictable world, of confrontation at all levels: between countries, between social classes, between identities. It will not be very pleasant. We have examples not so far away in history. We are suffering a full-blown attack by the super-rich barbarians of the north (and the south). Trump has no shortage of apprentices in his unbridled race towards nothing for many and a lot for a few. In the coming months, the drastic reduction of USAID may leave millions of people in the world in starvation.
Not even the fall of the Roman Empire managed to completely eliminate the idea and the need for public powers that would arbitrate and balance. Will Trump succeed? Right now, the woke We are the scapegoat, the woke How to present a cultural battle in a playing field as marked as that of social networks, where an insult scores 10 and a reasoning 0? Should we wait for their spiral of contradictions and lies to sooner or later lead them to collapse? Sad hope. Because things can always get worse. It is so easy to destroy and so difficult to build... The deconstruction of democracy and the public sector that the Trump-Musk tandem has set in motion is lethal. The Milei chainsaw is in fashion. When the time comes to redo everything, if it comes, it will cost. And whether it comes or not, I am happy to be woke: that is, not being an ignorant racist, sexist, xenophobic and insensitive to the misfortune of others.
