The word of the year?

On their own, words don't mean anything. Some of the most heard questions this year are "border", "polarisation" or "humiliation". In reality, they are categories of thought that acquire importance because they affect us personally by projecting political or social aspects. Trump demonstrated, for example, that "a higher wall" was more than just a physical wall. It is a political plan of zero-sum and bunkerization, the imposition of a "we" through scapegoats that threaten our well-being, our identities, our values. This wall that Trump wants to erect in the United States is being erected by Putin against the West, which is a geographical reality, but above all an idea. That's where the Russian authorities' public censure of a party where attendees were almost naked fits in. Across the globe, autocracies promote traditional values such as family or religion and extol authority and homophobia. The curious thing is that this war between autocracies and democracies will take place in 2024 within the oldest democracy in the world. Democrat Biden against autocrat Trump, the reflection of our times. But is the word "polarization" adequate to explain what is happening?

I confess that I like that concept less and less. To present political reality as the result of a fossilization of blocs with electoral universes enclosed in bubbles is to speak of what happens as the result of a natural catastrophe, evading our responsibility for it. It has to do with the fact that our representatives think that, in order to win elections, it is more effective to crystallize antagonisms, and also with the fact that from columnism we have become fond of tearing apart Goya's paintings, deepening the gap between the world we inhabit and the responsibility we have to build it from public discourse. That tearing, with calls to insubordination or the denunciation of moral bankruptcy, or the infallible recourse to humiliation represent more the reflection of our privilege than of that reality that we have the moral obligation to observe in an attempt to dissolve negative motivations. Also to be open to the undercurrents that, from the margins, manage to reach the heart of society.

They appear as syncopated rhythms, and they are the new realignments moving forward to the disorderly sound of action-reaction. That is why this year was also the year of Jenni Hermoso and the year of the unmasking of some "sacred monster" in the style of Depardieu, as Isabel Coixet says. In Meloni's Italy, the emancipatory consciousness of women is reawakened in There Is Still Tomorrow, a film that triumphs by calling for a rebellion, this one necessary, against patriarchy, and where the sexist crime of the 22-year-old Giulia Cecchettin, which shocked the country, resonates. And let's look again at the U.S. because, while Trump navigates legal hurdles, every vote on abortion after the Supreme Court suppressed this right confirms the intensity of the mobilization of women and young people against the reaction. Of course, there is reason for hope.

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