Originally published in Spanish. «La fragilidad de la política». Máriam M-Bascuñán. El Pais.
It happened, you already know it. The rhetoric that has dominated the public debate, full of mutual accusations, emphasized by the political subterfuge of blame, reached its climax. They have pretended a victory disguised as the impeccable, righteous defenders of goodness, escaping the fictional prosecution by the diabolic forces of evil. The exercise on universal victimhood by Puigdemont, and his so Catholic response, to the delirous “155 silver coins” from the Twitter celebrity Gabriel Rufián, will remain engraved in our minds.
We should know already: the resentment dialectics follows the logic of the derision, and it is modulated appealing to a collective catharsis under the umbrella of the preposterous “heroic mandate” tainted by a secret vote. What would have been logical is to escape moral and entering the mud of politics, specially those who so much claimed for it. But they forgot Russell’s lesson: to proclaim themselves as oppressed does not make them virtuous, nor it is absolutely paramount to the “demand of equality”. We know the reassuring effect of setting one only focus, the root of all offenses, to which is responded with one only unquestionable solution. In the absence of grey tones or painful tensions, the obligation to judge situations with a political approach is eluded.
The blame language is anti-political because it prevents to think about conflicts in terms of responsibility, and invokes a defensive response. The risk is that we internalise political dilemmas as personal offenses emerging as a festering wound. Blame stagnate us in the past; responsibility projects futures that need to be collectively articulated, abandoning the conception of an individual scarred by the committed sins.
To moving forward is the only guarantee to heal past scars. It is from there that political solidarity appears, rather than from some sort of religious fraternity —the latter presupposes an acritical homogenous alignment over inherited traditions, while the former is a compromise between the different. For solidarity links us to alive projects looking to the future. Solidarity is so firm as it is fragile, but without it we will never emancipate ourselves from the fetter of past. It is not too late to do so.
