The insidious mediocrity

There is nothing worse than a mediocre person who believes they are in possession of the truth, unaware of their own limitations. We are seeing it with Trump, with Milei, with Putin... Drunk on power and surrounded by sycophants, they are blowhards who assert themselves through opposition: they see enemies everywhere, they need them. They humiliate them. They are their fuel, like a psychological spring for their grotesque complex of superiority. Behind a grandiloquent national rhetoric grows a virus that destroys their nations. Like a fragmentation bomb, they scatter insidious shrapnel made of bulk hatred, of contempt for the weak, of intolerance for those who are different, of threats to all those who do not follow their lead, from the intellectual and scientific world to any teacher or journalist who wants to feel free. They are sectarian warlords.

It is this kind of mediocrity, this misunderstood, crude freedom as a result of an exacerbated individuality, that is about to fall upon us in the form of Santiago Abascal and closes Spain, which, if the majority of polls are not wrong –the CIS is a case apart– will have the capacity to set the pace in a coalition government for a weakened Feijóo, who has practically already bought his entire program. How far will he be able to impose his unitary, uniform, and authoritarian Spain (they used to call it “one, great and free”)? The only doubt is about the magnitude of the tragedy, not about the direction events will take. How far will political resistance be offered from the institutions, the street, the university, the media, social entities, culture? How will the already crumbling regime of '78 withstand the onslaught?

Resistance. That is the question. How much, what kind, how. The answer cannot be mimetic. The hatred of the far-right cannot act as a mirror. Against this new stale ultra-Spanish nationalism, against the involutionary wave, against the cutting of rights and freedoms, one cannot enter into a competition to see who is more anti-fascist or who is more Catalan. If the approaching disaster offers an opportunity –yes, it will be worse than the first Aznarism– it is that of not falling for provocations, that of joining forces in defense of a model of an inclusive, plural society. This is the challenge: wise unity in the face of vulgar and vengeful mediocrity. Not easy, right?, this matter of serenity. Especially because there will be symbolic (oh, the language!) and economic punishment: they will want us to fight over the crumbs.

We cannot enter a repugnant spiral that dirties and divides us even further. We have been adrift for too many years. How can we get back on course now that rough seas are coming? We know the formula well from other dark eras: Catalanist cohesion, the sum of all the sensitivities of democratic Catalan identity. Only with one self-inflicted exception: the Aliança Catalana party, whose leader thinks it is fine for some of her followers to vote for Vox in the Spanish general elections. She puts Islamophobia ahead of Catalan identity. It is she herself who excludes herself.

There is another danger. That of settling into destructive defeatism, into 'nothing works,' into anti-politics, into the disregard for the entire public administration, into the bogeyman of 'wokeness,' and the blaming of immigration as the root of all evils. All this makes up the usual trick of the speeches of this new far-right populism that turns individual freedom, distorting it, into a dogma against community action, against equal opportunities, against the common good and diversity. It is the 'everything is a piece of crap, you can't trust anyone, and I'll manage on my own.' Too easy and not true at all. Some manage, many do not. Of course everything is complicated!: merit and courage consist of looking for viable solutions instead of handing out insults and pointing out real or supposed enemies, internal or external.

It turns out that, in effect, the friends, family, and acquaintances of Trump, of Milei, of Putin... and soon also of Abascal—suddenly they will have many positions to distribute—are doing well and will do very well. Some will get rich. Who doesn't want that? 'Let everyone get rich,' they lie. They are clever, and how! Hard times are coming, so let us get smart too, but in a different way, please.