There was a time when some of the most prominent representatives of what was then called the new politics often repeated a statement by Gramsci which, in their opinion, perfectly described the situation that Spain was experiencing: the old had not finished dying and the new had not just been born. With the well-known apostille: in that chiaroscuro monsters proliferated. The description seemed to work on the basis of some assumptions, especially that the new was represented by them and the old by the two great bipartisan formations. It was left up in the air who could be the best candidates to play the role of the monsters.
That moment seems to be behind us, and it would be worth drawing some lessons. The first would be that the clearest proof that the new is in serious trouble to be born is constituted by the new policy itself, which has become old at great speed, with its leaders already retired and without having shown the specific novelty that they announced so much. The second lesson would be that it is not advisable to issue death certificates too quickly, not only because sometimes the old still has some way to go, but, perhaps above all, because the need to consider it finished does not immediately follow from its mere antiquity.
There would be a third element to ponder, perhaps the most characteristic of the Gramscian approach, that of those monsters that proliferate in the time of chiaroscuro. It is not obvious that what could be valid for the moment in which the Italian thinker was writing should mechanically be valid for our present time. It is true that having a Manichaean is always of great polemical utility, and that having a bad guy in one piece (a monster, in short) on hand saves countless justifications, because it is enough to be against him to, apparently, ensure success. The problem is that in our days and among us the candidates to take the place of the monsters are several and of very different types. While for some it is clear that no one is more qualified to deserve such consideration than the heirs of Francoism, for others those who tried to carry out a coup d'état or the heirs of terrorist violence deserve this classification, to describe them all as they do their adversaries.
We should not rule out that monstrosity is said in many ways, not all equally dramatic. Perhaps the monstrosity adopts in our days a peculiar profile, different from that of yesteryear. For now, it would be a good idea to start by focusing attention not so much on people or groups as on behaviour: there are no bad guys in one piece, nor are those who can be bad full-time. And if Hannah Arendt was able to affirm that the father of the family was the great criminal of the 20th century, it should not be difficult for us to accept that perhaps they behave like the monsters of the 21st century, in addition to those who have directly abominable behavior (is it necessary to point out in times of war like the current ones?), those others who, without needing to raise their voices, dedicate themselves to destroying the most valuable of what we had built. Perhaps this is precisely what we should pay more attention to: what defines the monster is what it destroys, not in the name of what it does.
