Nostalgia is a powerful wall.
And yet, today it is unlikely that a politician, or those of us who give opinions from places like this, openly and hopefully claim the future and progress.
Instead of formulating critical accounts of the past, we prefer to sweeten it, reduce it to a single and unalterable meaning.
That is why our political consciousness is constantly associated with a loss, with the feeling of something irreplaceable.
This is how fear and the reactionary response appear.
I propose an imaginary tour to prove it.
Let's start in a UK in free fall, with a population floundering in grief in its tradition, as if conservatism defines its inevitable destiny of greatness.
Perhaps for this reason, the prime minister of the cradle of parliamentarism (elected not in Westminster, but by 172,000 members of a party made up mostly of elderly and wealthy Englishmen) has decided to lead the planet's fifth largest economy into adrift.
Her commitment to lower taxes like never before in 50 years has pushed the pound and the country's credibility to record lows.
Liz Truss's problem is her detachment from the present, her nostalgic dogmatism clinging to Thatcherite delirium.
The next stop is the triumph of the ultra Meloni.
The magic recipe is to have found a discourse for our aging populations, who remember an ideal past of traditional family values, with happy and decent “natural” couples inhabiting the purity of a lost civilization.
The urgency to preserve the Christian and white West pervades the political language of reaction in the West.
But what is most interesting is that Meloni's threadbare emblem ("I am a woman, I am a mother, I am a Christian") contrasts with the rallying cry of Iranian women, condensed into the opposite slogan: "Woman, life and freedom."
Just as the essentialism of Italian fascism seeks to reconstruct the consciousness of an entire nation, of an aging continent, the howl of the young women of Iran points to a suffocating regime:
it is a vital force that is already a collective struggle.
Her slogan, says the Franco-Iranian novelist Sorour Kasmaï, carries a joy that reminds us "that there will be no freedom without the freedom of women."
It is a beautiful emblem for the future, also for American women, our last stop.
Understanding women's freedom as the main obstacle to the reactionary project is the fundamental reason for the expected great mobilization of women to defend their right to abortion in the November
midterm
elections .
Because while we, melancholy, strive to create happy memories of something that never happened, in other parts of the world we are taught that loss does not have to be experienced with anguish: it can also activate positive mobilization towards a possible unexplored future.
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