Editor's Note:
Roberto Izurieta is Director of Latin American Projects at George Washington University.
He has worked in political campaigns in several Latin American countries and Spain, and was an advisor to Presidents Alejandro Toledo, of Peru;
Vicente Fox, from Mexico, and Álvaro Colom, from Guatemala.
Izurieta is also a contributor to CNN en Español.
The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author.
See more opinions at cnne.com/opinion
(CNN Spanish) -
Donald Trump's government always seemed destined to end badly.
With the taking of the Capitol on January 6, that forecast was fatally fulfilled.
Trump cultivated nationalist rhetoric and encouraged various racist groups.
Trump was formally accused by the House of Representatives of inciting the insurrection.
The former president said since his 2016 campaign that he would only accept the electoral result if he was the winner.
He did what he announced, but that does not remove responsibility, but aggravates it.
He denied the results, despite having been confirmed in various judicial processes and even in the Supreme Court, three of whose magistrates he himself appointed.
The worst was when, with the Electoral College proclaiming Biden and Harris completed and without having any more judicial options, he called a large march in Washington to encourage the few stubborn members of Congress who were willing to continue with their purpose of not recognizing the result.
What should have been a ceremonial process on January 6 in Congress turned out to be a black day in US history.
Donald Trump's speech that day was clearly incendiary and even worse was that of his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani: all this ended in violence and insurrection.
Donald Trump will leave power, but what we have experienced requires us to reflect on a series of events that have allowed us to get to where we got on January 6.
According to The Washington Post, former President Trump made more than 30,000 false or misleading claims during his constitutional term.
It is impossible to underestimate the damage that this mixture of falsehoods, lies and deceptions has caused in democracy.
For a democracy to function, it is essential that the representatives of the citizenry respond appropriately for their actions and report on the facts and policies.
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Today we live in the US every day an authentic attack on the truth or, rather, on the truths.
There are several spheres, each of which has different rules, procedures, or ways of selecting texts and authorities to determine their truths.
For example, the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities are spheres that establish the truth they seek, each in its own way.
Of course, this does not mean that in each of these spheres there are no disputes, sometimes irreconcilable, and that what is considered true in one period is considered false in another.
There are other spheres, such as religion, journalism or jurisprudence.
And there is also the sphere of everyday life, according to which we know that the coffee is on the first shelf and that it is false that it is on the second.
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The regime of falsehood is totalitarian, in the sense that it sweeps all spheres.
Totalitarianism does not recognize powers and does not limit itself in its statements, although it does not have the powers at all to dispute any truth in any sphere.
Totalitarianism can declare that any truth is fake news.
If necessary, you can deny climate change simply by declaring that it is a story.
If you want to deny the natural evolution of species, it is enough to say that it is an opinion, and that the Bible has its version, as if those two spheres, science and religion, had something in common about what that can be disputed;
as if the truth they seek is the same, and as if it is sensible to read the Bible as a scientific treatise.
If it is necessary to discredit a judge, it is enough to falsely point out that the judge who was about to issue it is Mexican (or that there is some hidden conspiracy involved).
If it is necessary to say that Stormy Daniels did not receive a payment, then lie.
And to win, even if it has lost, this epistemological terror regime can declare that Biden lost, despite the fact that all judicial and electoral authorities have affirmed otherwise.
This practice of falsehood, lies and deception creates an abyss between people who make social conflicts unsolvable through political, that is, peaceful means.
Divisions become insurmountable.
It is like arguing with someone who has convinced himself that the Earth is flat.
There is no possible evidence that can make a person who really wants to defend that hypothesis change his mind.
What happens is that people who are like that do not accept the rules of the established spheres of truth or those of modern science as those of everyday common sense.
The same epistemological rebellion transferred to politics puts us in front of a gap that, after all, can only be bridged with force, such as the violence of the rebels who stormed the Capitol, such as the force of the State, which is capturing them. .
This excessive use of falsehood is -in reality- the threat of a civil war.
Whether it happens or not, that is something else and depends on us, the citizens.
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It is impossible to unravel causes and effects, at least without a more or less founded theory of history.
But we can point to a central element in this decomposition: the political culture of the far-right media complex.
There is no symmetry here, as a recent study shows.
While today there is a group of media organizations that go from the center to the left, with many cross-references to traditional media that maintain accepted standards, on the other side there are relatively more extremist organizations and less ties to traditional journalism, with the serious and truthful journalistic report.
This far-right media complex generates a torrent of falsehoods, lies, hoaxes and, of course, conspiracy theories.
Rather than putting the blame for the current state of affairs on the new platforms such as Twitter or Facebook, we would do well to understand the political culture of the rank and file and of the elite of that extreme right, which is nothing conservative.
Richard Hofstadter, in The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1954!), Ends the chapter entitled The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt with these words:
“However, in a populist culture like ours, which seems to lack a responsible elite with political and moral autonomy, and in which it is possible to exploit the wildest currents of public sentiment for private ends, it is at least conceivable that a highly organized society, a vocal, active and well-financed minority could create a political climate in which the rational search for our well-being and security would become impossible ”.
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