The Sánchez-Feijóo standoff, with Trump in the background

MadridThis last quarter of the year will continue to revolve around the debate on corruption, driven by extremely slow police and judicial investigations, which will keep the Socialists and the People's Party in constant conflict. It's curious how this characteristic of political life influences media consumption habits, especially those of talk shows. There are people who don't even want to watch them, who change the channel if they come across a program of this type. But at the same time, audience studies show that there is a very dedicated audience for these types of programs, people who sometimes end up falling victim to genuine episodes of addiction. The same analyses tell us that, in general, viewers don't seek an impartial examination of the facts, but rather to be proven right, that is, the pleasure of identifying with interventions that confirm their own convictions. The conclusion of the last paper I read on the monitoring of political debate programs hosted by journalists and political scientists was that the public neither asks nor expects the participants to provide their perspectives as informants on the issues being analyzed, but rather to directly provide them with doctrine with which to defend their own ideas, that is, to reinforce what they do best.

Later, we can complain about the polarization of political debate, but there's no doubt that in this way we are reinforcing it. Someone said some time ago that the model of parliamentary democracy has shifted toward one of television democracy. In fact, television current affairs programs compete for every second of the public's attention. It's very common for production teams to include professionals dedicated to monitoring what other networks are doing, and for quick script changes to be made if one of the competitors is gaining more viewers with a particular topic. If this happens, what could happen is that radical cuts will be made to track who is attracting the most viewers, always seeking to maintain an intense discussion between the two sides of the table. In this way, current affairs analysis runs the risk of becoming a full-scale repetition of parliamentary confrontation. The parties, for their part, try to encourage this by distributing their own documents and arguments, to continue fueling the aforementioned demand for doctrine.

The Trump Phenomenon

The main protagonist of this period in international life, US President Donald Trump, owes much of his electoral success to this type of organization of his activities and messages during the previous term and the preparations for the elections. Simple ideas, authentic proclamations, consumer material to facilitate confrontation and characterization of his rivals to undermine their credibility. And now he continues to do so. He has managed to capture attention since assuming the presidency on January 20. A famous columnist for The New York Times In the 1970s and 1980s, James Reston defined democracy as "the theory that ordinary, ordinary people can do extraordinary things." Trump's advisors simplified it even further, distorting and slimming down the idea, leaving it with the famous "America First," much more effective for its simplicity. The obvious difference between the two postulates is that for Reston, democracy was a collective task, while for Trump it is individual, reserved solely for the leader.

We therefore note that the hopes and optimism of the 1980s about what new technologies would bring—to bring greater transparency, better control, and faster circulation of information—has not exactly led us to the model of stable and mature democracy we perhaps imagined. What predominates is the pure simplification of messages, the dictatorship of slogans. A dynamic that is projected onto all kinds of issues and debates. The important thing is not to define what a European defense policy should be like, but rather whether spending on this issue should reach 5% of the GDP of NATO countries, without going into any detail or specifics about the effort this entails, or why it should be that percentage. If physicists of the past called for a lever to dominate the world, politicians now ask for less: a word, or a mantra, can be enough to move mountains. If we apply this context to Spanish life, we can see that Pedro Sánchez and Alberto Núñez Feijóo appear contaminated by the pandemic of slogans and catchphrases, fueling what we define as "public conversation," which, as we have already said, often operates with automated bottling plants.

Any common ground?

We saw the results of this dynamic in the last Congressional session on government control. For Feijóo, Sánchez is "a pencas" (a mug), surrounded by corruption and brothel money. It's about getting people to quickly accept that association of ideas. For Sánchez, on the other hand, Feijóo represents "nothingness" (nothing). Here too, it's about denigrating the rival, in this case identifying the opposition leader as someone outclassed, someone who's too big for the suit. I can't imagine either of them wearing a red cap like Trump's, or dyed blonde, but it would be appreciated if they knew how to raise the level of their strategies for the remainder of their term.

Surely there must be some room for agreement. For example—since we've taken the US president as our reference for everything—in defining the objectives and means of Spanish defense policy in response to Trump's threats and nonsense. The United States wouldn't be happy with Spain being out of NATO, not even in a joke. As Defense Minister Margarita Robles says, no one can guarantee where we'll be in 2035. The Americans, Robles asserts, "talk about the period between 2030 and 2035, and I'm talking about 2025," during which Spain has fulfilled the commitments made in 2014, with a 10-fold increase. And now we're going to buy American equipment to help Ukraine. This effort is the priority. Presenting it this way and closing ranks would be the best way for Sánchez and Feijóo to position themselves in the face of the Trump phenomenon.