Paraphrasing the first line of the text of the Communist Manifesto, it can well be said that a ghost haunts the West and is called the alternative right. Or extreme, radical, populist, to suit the reader. He reaches 20% of the votes in Europe, governs in Poland, Hungary and Italy. They are governing parties in Switzerland, Slovenia, Sweden and Austria, at least. He has contested the presidency of France in the last two elections and dominates both chambers in Brazil, and the House of Representatives in the United States. It constitutes a heterogeneous set, endowed with common features, among which stands out the one arising from the accommodation of Newton's third law to the human order: the reaction. Any ideology that exerts a force that violates a part of the social body develops a force of similar intensity in the opposite direction.
There is, in the examination of this political reality, an error of perspective that is well defined by this sentence of Confucius: "When the wise man points to the Moon, the fool looks at the finger." This is how they act when all the time is invested in disqualifying those parties, without addressing the causes that have led them to grow in votes. It happens when the gaze ignores reality, which, as always, books help to understand. I suggest an essential one about the United States. This is Hillbilly, a rural elegy. Memoirs of a Family and Culture in Crisis, by J.D. Vance, a member of one of these poor families, a former Marine, Yale JD, converted to Catholicism in 2019 and now a Republican senator from Ohio. But there is more: The decadent society, by Ross Douthat, The collapse, by George Packer, and those of two French authors, François-Xavier Bellamy with The disinherited, and a specialist on the subject, Christophe Guilluy, of which I highlight No society.
It also encourages reaction, political and media squint, which only sees populism and radicalism in the right space, but ignores this same radicalism, even increased, in the left; communism, chavismo, revolutionism of the "assault on heaven."
The reaction is also the result of the deterioration of part of the middle class and the impoverishment of the popular classes. The vote for Meloni comes from 30% of the workers, and another 30% from businessmen, especially small and medium-sized ones, and Le Pen gathers 64% of the workers. Isn't it significant that CUP voters are those with the highest income level?
The contempt is not only economic. When the police of Catalonia are sent to stop a bus because it looks like a slogan "Children do not exist", as Josep Martí Blanch brilliantly recounted in "Let us speak and think in peace" (Opinion, 13/XI/2022), it that is pointed out is his expulsion from public life. They make them first countercultural, then dissident, until, perhaps, they become an alternative to gain power. There is in that persecution a supremacist ideology of a certain liberalism and progress that considers that those who do not think like the power have to be re-educated, whether you want it or not, with public money.
The systematic destruction of the great natural identities, the foundation and meaning of our lives, religious faith, the nation or homeland, the family, being a man or a woman, in charge of the latest ideology that the West has given birth to: the gender conception, also has an influence. . And the reaction, or the definition of a cultural alternative to it, constitutes part of the currents that feed the success of the right. And it goes further, because all excesses cause and virtue is in the golden mean.
There are causes that occur more in one country than in another, such as the reaction to the demographic desert, contempt for families with children, immigration or, as in the case of Sweden, the increase in crime.
I do not believe that this ghost that haunts the West is the solution, but I do understand that it is a reaction that is part of it to the great ruptures and crises that are destroying us.
