The Revolution at the ballot box

For some time politics has basically been marketing. I mean that in the Western countries, where a politics has taken root that actually wants nothing substantial to change, that operates only in brushstrokes. The great parties have turned themselves into a professional imagine generating macines that dispatch lame messages to the land and fight for the changeable fringe. There are the partisans of one side and the partisans of the other. And, in the middle, the fringe that decides elections and that is the only one you work to win.

This development has done a lot of harm. The worst consequence is that all the nations, following the scheme of the American Tea Party, are imposing a model in which politics doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter to know where a consensus is possible to advance the nation. What matters is just to blow up all the bridges with the other side in order to keep the undecideds from crossing over. The Tea Party ilk don’t want that there might not be the mobile fringe that throws itself in now with one side, now with the other. And, for that reason, they deliver a message of hatred.

I realize that device works quite well throughout the Western world. In the Spanish State the ruling Partido Popular applies it as a mantra and out of this thesis comes characters who swarm newsroom meetings in the hours before deadlines. And that the fellows devote themselves to sowing hatred, as though it may be the best medicine. And alongside these people there is a model of politics that only works “for the moment”, to be able to achieve a moment in which everything rotates around their declaration, their gesture, from their tweet.

The big problem of unionism and of Spain in general is that they have fallen so deep into this hole, they live so submerged in this whirlpool that they are incapable of seeing that revolutions don’t work like this. Still worse: that they are incapable of understanding that acting thus is counterproductive when a revolution is underway; like the democratic revolution that now proceeds in the selfsame Principality of Catalonia., that magnificent “revolution at the ballot box.” The tactics of normal elections simply don’t apply to what we have been living through for the past four years in Catalonia. It is too basic and slapdash. And in this mistake is a good part of the explanation for the oppostion’s noisy undoing.

When a person like Alícia Sánchez-Camacho, head of the PP in Catalonia, says that independentism is going down and that the march Thursday shows this -- it is not possible for her to actually believe that. Nobody is that clueless to think it so. Simply she is excecuting orders that she has received for years: you have to create a narrative and it doesn’t matter if the constituent lies don’t add up. Only the narrative is important.

In a normal election, in a normal country, in a normal situation, the lying and incongruities possibly help to hatch a narrative that stokes doubts in the undecided. But we are not a normal country, nor is the situation normal, nor do we find ourselves facing normal elections. And it’s obvious that the tactics they are using simply don’t work.

One need remember that in the Principality more Spanish television is seen than Catalan programming. And the disproportionate share of screen time that the unionist side gets is an authentic outrage. It’s necessary to recall that in the Principality the two biggest newspapers are against the process. And one must take note that this immense media power was unable to impede the demonstration on September 11, the Catalan national day. Because today neither the television nor the papers can change reality. On the one hand, because Whasapp, Twitter and Facebook are more powerful than whatever mass media and they are not controllable. But on the other, because when a revolution has definitively started in a society it is already almost impossible to stop. And then lies and manipulation don’t count for much.

We are leaving them, then, and they continue placing confidence in what they take for their arms. The fiasco that was so much on display in Tarragona on Thursday is their destiny if they don’t change their attitude. Because they have lost sight of the country and fire blindly at what they know not.

director@vilaweb.cat

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