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The weight of bombastic rhetoric

2023-01-13T17:40:54.753Z


The weight of bombastic rhetoric Current politics could be summed up like this: grand words, exaggerated tone, gestures that replace actions, war language, staging of saving something that the adversary intends to destroy. The abuse of exaggeration in the public space has been studied very well by Beatriz Gallardo in her book Broken Signs. The political scene is full of people who warn us of the seriousness of the dangers that l


Current politics could be summed up like this: grand words, exaggerated tone, gestures that replace actions, war language, staging of saving something that the adversary intends to destroy.

The abuse of exaggeration in the public space has been studied very well by Beatriz Gallardo in her book Broken Signs.

The political scene is full of people who warn us of the seriousness of the dangers that lie in wait for us, of the opposite sign, but equally transcendental.

Fortunately everything is more banal, harmless and mediocre;

it responds to interested strategies that we can guess and a good part of society is learning to develop a corresponding skepticism about the announced evils.

The seriousness of the dangers must always be discounted by the amount of dramatization that is appropriate for those who denounce them.

If in other times the best exercise of mature and responsible citizenship was commitment or mobilization, today we should aspire to be that skeptical citizen who deconstructs the discourses with which they try to mobilize.

The most obvious political fireworks is the proliferation of insults, certainly serious, but the affectation dramatized by its recipients is also part of the show.

The degradation of the insult, more than a problem, is a symptom of a deficiency, a resource when it is not correct to confront, to prove itself as a better alternative through ideas and projects, but only by contrast with how bad the enemy must be. .

The disqualification of the other is a form of self-requalification.

In addition, the insult is not so much to denigrate the adversary (which sometimes even strengthens) as to achieve the applause of one's own troops.

Perhaps this is the sinister reason for his success: if someone insults in Parliament, it is because he knows that there is a public outside that will reward him.

Exaggeration in politics has generated a type of discourse in which coups are denounced, dictatorships are everywhere unnoticed, an imminent civil confrontation is warned, or we learn that terrorists are deciding our collective destiny.

The abuse of the concept "coup d'état" reveals a lot about the way we understand the achievement of power (our own or that of others).

This abuse reached its peak in that judicial hyperbole that condemned the pro-independence leaders of Catalonia in 2019 and has already become a classic for designating the way in which the left seizes power, always devoid of legitimacy for it.

There are some of the most creative modalities, such as the original oxymoron of coups that are given “little by little” and even a whole treatise on “postmodern coups d'état”.

In other times this coup d'état had to do with a violent assault on government buildings or Parliament, at the same time that television was taken over;

Now, if there are, they will have to occur in a way that we are not yet able to identify.

In any case, more than an occupation of the institutions, it seems advisable that the coup leaders seize the truly decisive powers, that they neutralize the social transformations, that they block the way to constitutional reform or the renewal of certain positions that would modify the current majorities. (ie: prevent there being a counterweight to the majorities at all times).

The closest thing to a coup is today an alteration of the rules of the game justified to prevent it.

A derivative of this way of thinking is the lightness with which the expression "regime" is used in Spain to refer to the process that culminated in the Constitution of 1978 or to disqualify the actions of a government that is supposed to be a power that If I wanted.

A change of government is not the same as a change of regime, no matter how much there are those who fear it or want it.

If we speak of "governments" instead of "regimes" we would not exaggerate their provisionality or question their legitimacy.

When what a government does in the name of constitutionalism is also challenged, what kind of Constitution is that that would allow a new government to change its regime?

This way of thinking and speaking reveals a very peculiar conception of power and history.

In the imagination of the most politically inflamed, the rise to power is understood as an "assault" (for better, if it is from heaven, or for worse if the majority of the investiture includes some legal partner who is not fully recognized the legitimacy to participate in such operations).

Judging by what they say, they conceive of history as a sudden chain of extraordinary, abnormal situations, in which exceptionalities occur and an illegitimate government (when the left wins) is replaced by another that would mean a democratic setback (when the left wins). right).

If this were true, there would not be a democratic continuity of better or worse governments, but a frenzied alteration of democratic conditions.

All of this says a lot about ourselves, about how we conceive of democracy and how we handle the rules of the game.

It reveals great impatience and a good dose of laziness.

Those who do not think in terms of alternation but of alteration tend to practice a policy of short-term performance and thus save themselves the effort of making better analyzes of reality and building the necessary majorities.

And those of us who contemplate so much fireworks should not be dazzled by the emphatic speeches, nor frightened by the apocalyptic scenarios that they announce. 

Daniel Innerarity is Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country and holder of the Chair of Artificial Intelligence and Democracy at the European Institute of Florence.

​Copyright La Vanguardia, 2023


Source: clarin

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