Once again, we have started the year with images of enraged citizens invading the headquarters of popular sovereignty. If Three Kings Day in 2021 moved the world with the assault on the United States Congress, 2023 began with a failed coup in Brasilia. Contrary to what progressive optimism had predicted for the 21st century, it seems that Western democracies –and their fundamental principles– are far from being established as a benchmark and guarantee of freedoms and progress. It is irrefutable that Russia has failed again in its convergence with Europe, just as China, India and the United Arab Emirates are going to follow their own path towards the purpose of a better life. To be happy, these states do not believe it is necessary to have read Locke, Adam Smith, or Montesquieu. In addition, as the soccer World Cup has made clear, we Europeans maintain the maxim of “a powerful gentleman is a gift of money” in force, so that, with petrodollars in your pocket –and no matter how murderous you are– there is no regime that cannot aspire to to join the club of good guys, if you wish.
As if that were not enough, it seems that everywhere the middle classes are preparing to embrace without complexes more those who promise security than those who continue to trust in freedom as the engine of progress. The success of state intrusion during the pandemic has cracked the floodgates of respect for individual liberties and the promotion of our moral responsibility. The arrogance of the left in the face of the culture clash with those who claim to review sensitive issues such as abortion or the role of religion leaves the liberal parties in the most absolute weather, at the mercy of the scavenger pecking of the extreme right and populism leftist, who only need to delve into the limitations and contradictions –which there are– of the old democracies to get a piece of it.
No one seems authorized to doubt the goodness of equating the rights of a human being with those of a dog, to question what principles should be promoted socially or to criticize the frivolous legislation on the possibility of an adolescent changing his sexual identity if he does so. pleases, on feminist fundamentalism or on the lack of protection of private property. If you do, you're a facha!
Of course, hysterical and hypersensitive as we have become, when some young people have fun dancing in a disco with no more malice than that which is typical of the puppy who plays at being an adult and insolent, we leave scandalized and in a riot with the usual clichés: that if our young people do not have values, if we objectify women, if sex and drugs corrode our society... It is still shocking that those who are scandalized in this way are the same ones who starred in the Madrid scene in the eighties or the posh liberals who one day dreamed of making Catalonia the Denmark of the south.
A few days ago, I was fortunate to be able to talk that same afternoon with two people I admire, key figures in the success story that our country has led over the last fifty years –and very distant ideologically, by the way–. I mean Manuela Carmena and Miquel Roca. From the conversation, I was disturbed by his severe analysis of the times in which we have had to live: politicians who have forgotten their vocation for service, who have turned their political representation into a vile sectarian profession, and who have turned Parliament and institutions in general This is a true insult to the citizen, who contemplates the partisan fight in amazement, aware that the Manichaean schemes and simplistic analyzes are a seed from which only confrontations can sprout. From the gruesome panorama that both described, I prefer the advice that the former judge and former mayor of Madrid snapped at the thirty young people who listened to her that night with their mouths open: the key to the future will be in your nonconformity, in convincing yourself of how much you have inherited , but also that the future belongs to you.
Liberal democracy and the market economy are obviously showing signs of exhaustion. But in no sacred book is it written that revolt is better than reform, or that Democrats have to give way to authoritarians, whether they are leftists or extreme rightists. And the eyes of those who listened shone!
