One of the central concerns of democratic forces is how to counter the simplistic and deceptive, yet widespread and seemingly effective, discourse propagated by the far right, especially through social media, which is replacing our traditional ways of getting information and forming our opinions. (The other day, in a shop in downtown Barcelona, a young woman working there was surprised to see me carrying a diary under my arm and exclaimed, naively, "In yours?") Spanglish: "But Mr. Josep Maria, how old-fashioned, reading a paper newspaper!")
In the United States, where the issue is particularly heated, the left is beginning to use online debates and podcasts, hitherto completely dominated by the far right, to combat their arguments, unafraid to be belligerent. The conclusion reached by these sectors, we read in the New York TimesThe problem is that conflict attracts attention, and ultimately, "we live in an attention economy." Naturally, those of us who prefer a more measured—and, above all, richer and more reasoned—debate see a risk in this approach, convinced that you can't fight the other side with the same weapons and because morally we cannot agree with one of the cynical and pessimistic conclusions reached by one of the podcasters consulted by the newspaper. Which is, in fact, what a substantial portion of the electorate that supports Trump does.
The political crisis we are experiencing is, above all, a moral crisis, as was, a few years ago, the Great Recession. I remember the economist Anton Costas telling me then that the 2008 financial crisis was the result of a moral bankruptcy, in which the basic institutions for the proper functioning of the economy had been called into question, while the financier became the new moral hero of capitalism. Now, just as Costas himself feared—he has recently insisted that "economic growth does not, in itself, improve the lives of citizens"—we are living through the political consequences of that moral bankruptcy, with politicians—with Trump and Netanyahu at the top of a list we would prefer to be shorter—who have lost all sense of decency. One need only recall the statement made by the now-president of the United States during the 2016 campaign, that if he killed someone on Fifth Avenue, he wouldn't lose a single voter. Or his leniency towards the "things that happen", referring to the murder and dismemberment of a Saudi journalist.
However, the left desperately needs to recover a more explicit and direct language. In September, Vice President Kamala Harris published a memoir, simply titled 107 days, regarding the brief period in which she was the presidential candidate following Joe Biden's late withdrawal. An Irish journalist, Fintan O'Toole, who is both a literary critic and a very astute political commentator, reviewed Harris's book and said that "against Trump's unbridled amorality, the Democrats offered a sentimental compassion," recalling the candidate's speech at the Democratic convention when she said, "When suffering is heartbreaking." However, as O'Toole himself warns, "being the party that feels all the pain in the world is not a good response to a president who invites his supporters to share the pure joy of being able to inflict it."
Meanwhile, the election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York has reopened the debate about what Democrats need: whether to adopt the new mayor's, shall we say, "radical" rhetoric, or the centrist moderation of the governors-elect of Virginia and New Jersey. This is a debate that concerns left-wing parties everywhere and has already taken place in Great Britain among the leftist Corbyn and the absolute disaster that Starmer is proving to be. But beyond this unavoidable debate, I think there is an equally urgent task, one that has a lot to do with the responsibility of the media, and that is that we shouldn't contribute to artificially inflating the far-right balloon. A phenomenon that I'm convinced is more circumstantial than we think. Because the day will come when the electorate that is currently punishing theestablishment By voting for the far right, without caring about its obscene amorality, he will eventually discover for himself that if you vote for an idiot (Mazón, for example), you will pay the consequences.
