the cold peace

The wounds sting if we put salt on them, and they get worse.

When racism and other abuses stemming from the same pattern of supremacist contempt are intertwined with a media and institutional ecosystem programmed to stir up hatred and polarization, the result is an explosive cocktail, the perfect dressing for a sick national culture in serious democratic decline. .

I speak, of course, of

in a busy week.

Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House adviser, is the face of a new shakeup.

With courage, after receiving intimidating messages to do "the right thing", in his statements before Congress he again exposed (and they go...) the main leaders of the Republican Party, who continue to remain silent and, presumably, counting coins .

There are not many doubts: the former White House tenant was the driver of an unprecedented coup attempt in the US, in an assault on the Capitol that was an orchestrated operation to prevent the certification of Biden's victory.

At the same time, after two historic rulings on abortion and weapons, the Supreme Court ruled this week on climate regulation anointed on the cross and the flag, insisting on his particular institutional suicide.

And it is that while Biden walks the ideals of the free world through El Prado, American democracy runs accelerated towards collapse.

The Supreme Court and the sordid sessions of Congress clearly show how a very important fringe of one of the parties that take turns in power in the US is not even remotely democratic, and that implies that the world's leading power could see its democracy die .

Antony Beevor warns today in EL PAÍS about the risks of insisting on polarization, not only between left and right, but between autocracy and democracy.

In his opinion, it is the dynamic that was unleashed with the First World War, and that is why it is difficult to understand why Biden, who is experiencing this radical division in his own country,

insisted at the NATO summit on a vision that many analysts and columnists uncritically adopted when talking about Ukraine and narrating the epic duel between democracies and autocracies.

The reality is worse, and grey: Erdogan, with his society muzzled and a judiciary at his command, is an ally.

Biden's effort to include China as a strategic challenge is evident, and raises questions about whether or not it is an unnecessary increase in the polarizing escalation, a push towards the fragmentation of the international order, precipitating other conflicts that,

, are said to be

want to avoid.

But the world is much more complex than any Manichaean division, and it is precisely the democracies that must work to achieve at least what Michael Doyle calls a "cold peace": foster spaces for cooperation and compromise that, although difficult, seek a more stable and secure world.

We already know the alternative.

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