The question of the factors that facilitated the emergence and consolidation of the Trump phenomenon is essential. If it is not understood how right-wing dogmatism is strengthened as a political option, it will be difficult to defeat it. Worse still, despair can lead to a fight against this extremism that ends up turning the defenders of democracy and the rule of law into what they hate the most: into authoritarians. The fight against right-wing populism cannot be fought using its techniques, and in this the means are as important or more important than the ends.
When the polls, a little more or less than a decade ago, began to show global disenchantment with institutions and democracy, no one paid the necessary care. Hiding the old premise that democracy is the ‘least bad’ of the political systems we have, we all turned a blind eye and sat waiting for discontent to heal itself. We reclined in comfort in the pulpit of the liberal superiority to observe patiently how the people were going to end up getting used to the failures of the regime and its institutions.
And meanwhile, the right found in that discontent an electoral gold mine. They realized that if they could articulate a political discourse that condemned with the same force and vehemence the inefficiencies of the rule of law and democratic institutions, if they turned skepticism into a creed, and if they lashed out at the rules of the game, then they would convert each a person to whom the political system had failed, to each citizen who felt the institutions as distant entities and almost enemies, to each individual who felt the bridge that linked him to his representatives and the State was broken, into a potential voter. And, unsurprisingly, they became an unstoppable political force.
The problem is that they did not notice that the consensus had been shattered before or that Trump’s populism only came to turn the division into a political platform.
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Meanwhile, the liberal democrats, with some disdain and laziness, insisted on a poorly elaborated ethical argument: it is not correct to build a political discourse against democratic institutions. That speech, they said, is a betrayal of a liberal consensus that took decades to form, and the new right-wing dogma was crossing a line by criticizing it and trying to replace it with another. The problem is that they did not notice that the consensus had been shattered before or that Trump’s populism only came to turn the division into a political platform.
In other words, Trump is more of a symptom than a disease. And the disease, to be brutally honest, was generated by the political elite who underestimated the animosity that little by little was brewing among citizens against political institutions that did not respond to their interests and needs. The democratic institutions ended up as a castle surrounded by a high wall. Inside, the political class began to run the State as if it were private property, for their own benefit and that of their friends, and ignoring that those who stayed outside the wall are those who pay for the maintenance of the castle. They forgot that the State is there to process the interests and needs of citizens and, in a tour de force, they turned his back to the people.
It is not surprising, then, that today many want to tear down the walls by force and destroy the castle. And those who are in the castle cannot continue shouting from its heights that it is wrong, that it is not correct to try to tear down its walls. At this point, that’s a very poor defense. If they do not open the doors, if they do not return the State and its functioning to its citizens, if they do not renew our social contract, they will be the main culprits that right-wing populism continues to strengthen and return to power.
Sandra Borda G.
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