How to defend ourselves from the Trumpist wave

The brutal attack that the new Trump administration and its techno-oligarchy allies are carrying out against everything that sounds public is so exaggerated that it may seem simply bizarre to us, and as such become part of what we discuss with our work colleagues and friends when we have a moment. But the matter is much more serious, since when public spending, public servants, taxes and all the so-called institutional chiringuitos are attacked, behind it there are essential public policies and services for a large part of the population. On the other hand, it is not just another eccentricity of the new Trumpian era, but in Europe (and in Catalonia) there are many supporters of applying the same logic a public sector that is accused of wasting resources, of caring only about those who take advantage of the system and of having grown in an excessive way.

We have known part of the discourse of Trump and his fellow travellers for a long time. We do not need to go back to the era of Thatcher or Reagan, since much closer to home we suffered the consequences of the application of these principles in the midst of the European response to the financial crisis of 2008. But we would be wrong if the reaction to these blunders is limited to defending the policies and public services that we have as if they functioned on that basis. And that is not the case. Today it is not enough to defend the idea of a public service as that infrastructure that responds to social needs fully recognised as such. We must recognise that the concept of public service and social need comes to us from a time when citizens' problems were well defined and for each specific need there was a service available. It was a time when the social structure was significantly homogeneous and citizens, in general, had social networks that functioned autonomously and reliably. I am referring to family networks, neighbourhood networks, work networks and, in addition, networks with a notably widespread territorial presence. Public services, however homogeneous and specialised they were, saw their shortcomings (personalisation, articulation, complementarity) complemented by the community links that occurred naturally.

Things don't work the same way these days. Many public services intervene to respond to people who, in many cases, do not have the family, neighbourhood or work networks that existed before. The process of individualisation, diversification and social fragmentation has been aggravated, among other things, by the precariousness of jobs, the disappearance of large and medium-sized industries and enormous residential mobility. We have public services built and designed in relation to a social model that no longer exists. And this only burdens these public services with work that does not correspond to their technical or professional profile.

If the conclusion is that we have public services that have been designed to respond to a society that no longer exists, what is the answer? That of Trump and his anti-statist allies is that the answer lies in the market and technology. That of Vox and the reactionary far right is that it lies in the authoritarian and classist state. But there are other alternatives. It is necessary to reconstruct the idea of ​​the public response to social needs (which continue to exist, in a more complex, more diversified form and with a serious risk of generating irreversible exclusion processes) by enriching the necessary institutional response with community and mutualistic components. That is, making sure that when we talk about public responses to social problems we do not limit ourselves to talking about administrations and their institutional responses, but we add the great capital, which we still have and which must be reinforced, of social initiative, of the misnamed third sector (which is rather the first), of community action that lives in family entities, that make a network, and so many associations and entities that articulate, gather, link, act and care.

Defending the public against the privatizing and authoritarian wave that wants us to be passive and consumers requires that public services and servants worry about stimulating and supporting the social networks that already exist and those that can be generated. The reform of public administration that is now so much advocated should lead to the emergence of new civil servants who are not only concerned with providing services, but also with activating social cohesion, neighbourhood, the ability to listen and help in the essential tasks of care. Collaborative public services that understand that citizens are people with the capacity to act with whom we must act together (as stated in article 43 of the Statute). If we do not build and defend this alliance, they will run us over.