“The right is bad. Therefore, the left is good. And the extreme left, extremely good. Why settle for being on the left — that is, merely good — when you can be extraordinarily good? —ironically asks Spanish columnist José F. Peláez, and then applies the same sarcasm to the other ideological side:— Why limit yourself to opposing Pedro Sánchez when you can do it from the perch of the ultra-good? Why bet on the subtlety of liberal-conservative tradition (the disgusting ‘moderates’) when you can take a stand from anti-system radicalism?” Peláez is a young and brilliant columnist for the Madrid daily ABC, and here he ridicules the “sophistication of Spanish intellectual life,” and then, with an even sharper incision, adds: “The extreme right is not right. It does not assume the worldview of the right nor surpass it. It does not even reach it. In reality, it is an infraderecha.” The neologism is clever and thought-provoking. “One cannot build from a negative — it reminds us. And when someone comes along who clearly understands this and criticizes with equal intensity the illiberal tics of both sides, they call him equidistant. The solution seems to be to criticize only some and stop defending ideas in order to defend acronyms, that is, to stop being journalists and become activists… You’ll see what these snub-nosed critics will think when they hear about this.”
Peláez exposes the increasingly rudimentary and emotional dynamic that dominates politics in the West, attacks the double standard and bad faith, and defends the spiritual and professional freedom not to betray oneself and to think outside the fracture. His commentary resonates with a recent report in The New York Times: several studies show that extreme polarization not only corrodes popular intelligence but also gnaws public morality. A corruption scandal —let’s call it a Watergate— no longer has the salutary consequences of yesteryear: “The sympathetic media tend to ignore the faults of their own side, while those on the opposite side may exaggerate minor incidents or even spread unfounded accusations,” notes the world’s most prestigious newspaper. Many voters behave like unwavering fans of a football club: they back their team regardless of the circumstances. The researcher Tamar Hermann adds there that “when a society is deeply divided, electors tend to forgive the misdeeds of certain leaders to preserve the political supremacy of their own block. Even if they feel annoyed by a scandal, they consider avoiding power falling into the hands of an adversary more important.” A warning to those who perceive themselves as republican at heart: the greater the polarization, the more impunity and the less democracy. That certain Latin American leftists have sought to end “bourgeois democracy” and replace it with a hegemonic one is chilling but fairly predictable. That in the name of liberalism illiberal policies are implemented and liberal democracy is diluted remains, however, a sad and paradoxical novelty. This infraderecha counts on the expectation that any aberration, lie, or fault it commits will be ignored or pardoned by its broadened flock at the mere threat that the opposing team — the enemy — might eventually win the elections. Voluntary political blindness is in fashion. There is a full year —an eternity in Argentina— until those distant votes, but already there are people willing to suspend their ethics in advance and cancel their critical spirit until then, and after winning the ballot, continue renewing that celestial denial so as not to be functional to the devil again. The ever-present danger. The long-term proposal, therefore, is to feign dementia, not as a tactical move but as a lifestyle. This is how, for this very particular flock, the rain of mischief from the Argentine infraderecha does not wet them, even though it is no longer a mere shower but a true storm.
This week, to avoid straying too far, the serial preachers kept silent in complicity or attacked those who revealed the obvious: the government of Javier Milei attempted to slip into the national budget a new adjustment in disability areas, and also in the social plans for the poorest: under the poncho they hid a sharp knife to remove inflation-indexed updates to the AUH and to family allowances. Cruelty is cowardice, Seneca said, but stupidity is a danger to the greater good even more than evil, reflected the German philosopher Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Cruelty and stupidity in equivalent measures radiated from the infraderecha with this display and it backfired on its own ranks, generating discontent among its own allies. How these guys manage to win affection. They do not need critics; they have decided to confirm the worst prejudices and present themselves as clumsy and soulless: they row day and night to sink themselves. Betraying again and again the people with disabilities, and attempting to cut funds for the most vulnerable in this stagnant-economy country is to violate another “sacred cause” for Argentines. A cause with as much unanimity as the sovereignty of the Malvinas. Taking advantage of this last banner, masked as sudden nationalists and patrolling the “English agents” (as Santiago Caputo likes to say about any social-media resister), the libertarians also attempted to sneak in a sly article in a bill that would establish imprisonment for “disinformation campaigns,” a tool of such broad interpretation that it would permit political persecution and effectively threaten freedom of expression. Lawyers say that their deliberate ambiguities and their underlying intent are inspired by Orbán and Erdoğan, among other autocrats they admire in Balcarce 50.
It is clear they have been seeking for months how to discipline journalism and dissent, and the hint that Marco Rubio gave them in Washington remains pending: the State Department gathered in July representatives from seventy countries to coordinate intelligence actions and fight “red terrorism” — today we are all communists — as some members of the amiable league of right-wing populists say. The Trump administration appears to be promoting a new national security doctrine, and to lump any objector into the same bag: McCarthyism of a new kind, operated by “patriots” who play with fire. These same purists —let us recall— were the ones who this year staged a coup in Venezuela and arrested Nicolás Maduro, but not to install democracy but to perpetuate that regime in exchange for infamous gains. Sergio Ramírez reminded us of this recently, echoing a macabre joke that poor Venezuelans in exile tell: “It was about taking the Chavistas away and leaving us the oil; not taking the oil and leaving us the Chavistas.” That is the moral and political character of Milei’s godfather, something that does not seem to scare the “vomiteurs de tibios” so long as they offer lifelines and save us once more from hell. The Kirchnerists, as this week showed, are incapable even of uttering the slightest self-criticism; their opponents are not either. Both can say, at most, that the magic formula does not work because it requires more determination and time, but they are farther from an honest reappraisal than from a therapeutic carnage. Here no one learns from the past, nor revises their dogmas. Clarity is a flower that does not grow in the trenches.
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