About ten years ago, chatting on a flight from Barcelona to Madrid with the journalist Lluís Bassets, I made an obvious, banal comment about “the politicization of football”. Luckily I told him the cliché because he gave me an answer that I never stop remembering. “I would rather speak – he replied – of the footballing of politics”.
It was true then and it is truer with each passing day. What Bassets meant was that the political world was becoming as infantile and tribal as the world of football. In football this is not a problem. The essence of what it means to be an amateur is a return to childhood habits of mind. That is, to the simplicity of polarization. You feel unconditional loyalty for your team, the good one, and you hate the rival, the bad one. The decisions of the referee / referee are always correct if they go with yours, wrong if they go against.
In what is supposed to be the adult world of politics this is indeed a problem. Here what is at stake is public welfare, the safety of families, sometimes war or peace. And democracy itself. But politicians, whether in government or in opposition, seem to grow more enthusiastic with each passing day. Not all but many behave like the little child who, in his colossal egocentrism, does not conceive of an objective truth apart from his desires or immediate interests. Maturity consists, at least in part, in knowing how to doubt, in questioning – even if only a little – your prejudices or received ideas. But we live in the age not of truth but of my truth. The one of "Mom, mom, I am good and that child is bad." And point.
The most extreme case, because in the United States everything is always bigger, is that of Trump and his devotees. The House committee that just concluded its investigation into the January 6, 2021 invasion of the Capitol amassed a mountain of evidence showing that Trump fabricated the motive behind the invasion, voter fraud allegedly committed by his rival, Joseph Biden. But Trump and his people insist on their truth, just like the fans of a soccer team when they denounce that the referee was wrong – or was bought – when signaling or not signaling a called penalty. Loyalty to the tribe is above any observable notion of facts.
It wasn't always like this. We are talking about a phenomenon of the 21st century, not the 20th. In democracies, I mean, not in tyrannies like those of Franco, Hitler, Stalin or Mussolini, where the truth was what they said it was. Until the end of the last century there was a general consensus in the United States about what was the truth. When Richard Nixon's participation in the Watergate scandal was confirmed, the faithful of the Republican Party surrendered to the evidence that their president had acted against the law. President Nixon resigned. Trump, whose crimes have been of a hundred times more dangerous order for democracy, is still there, insisting that he is the victim and running once again, with the support of tens of millions, as a presidential candidate.
Despite its extremism, the Trump case is still emblematic. We see variants on the theme in Western Europe, in France and Italy, and particularly in the UK, where the majority of those who voted for Brexit still insist on denying the manifest harm that leaving the European Union has caused them. . We see it in Latin America, in countries like Mexico or Brazil, where the polarization is such that it seems that two different species coexist there. We see it, of course, in Argentina, where after the temporary homeland unity that the World Cup awoke, they are now back to the default mode of tribal enmity. I saw him this week in Spain.
I was on a radio show with the icon and one time messiah of the Spanish left Pablo Iglesias. The subject was Argentina and, specifically, the icon and even messiah of the Argentine left Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the vice president convicted by a court a few weeks ago for defrauding the State. I followed the case in the media, as I followed the committee of the US Congress that investigated Trump, and my perception was that the Everest of evidence against him – Fernández de Kirchner is infinitely richer today than when she came to government with her husband in the 2003– left the judges no choice but to find her guilty. Fernández de Kirchner, as if echoing Trump, says she is the victim of "a parallel State" and "a judicial mafia."
Iglesias was with Kirchner. His was not comparable, he said, with the corruption of the Spanish right, specifically that of the Popular Party. “Cristina”, he insisted, had been “murdered” by the media. The same thing, coincidentally, that Trump and his defenders say. Now, I wonder, if the roles had been reversed, if Fernández de Kirchner's nemesis, former president Mauricio Macri, had been sentenced in identical circumstances to those of the current vice president, with the same evidence to the contrary, would Iglesias have jumped to defend him with the same conviction? I suspect not.
As the most radical right in the United States with Trump, Iglesias is unconditional in his support for the standard bearer of the Argentine left. Loyalty to the tribe above all. Blindness to your flaws always. Corruption is corruption comes from anywhere? No. Corruption is corruption if the other does it.
The problem with the Trumpian right is that it will have limited credibility when it mounts, as expected, an investigation in Congress against the alleged corruption of the president's son, Hunter Biden. The problem with Iglesias is that the nudity of his partisanship or, what is the same, his intellectual dishonesty makes him lose credibility when he accuses the PP, for more reason than he has, of the same thing they accuse Cristina of the.
That's how it goes Politics boils down to my team being good and yours being bad. The truth is only the truth that I want to see from my rostrum. And this is how democracy corrodes and begins its slide, as the child Trump wishes without understanding it, towards an authoritarianism like the Russian one, or the Francoist one in his day, where the truth is the enemy to defeat and the objective is to stop exist.
