Socialists of yesteryear

There have been eminent male writers who fervently praised women writers on the condition that they had been dead for a long time (now a similar but inverse intellectual and manly trend is detected, which is to praise women writers who are photogenic and are not over 30 years). The mechanisms of praise are always complicated in Spain, because they often come more from a certain calculation than from enthusiasm or true admiration. There are right-wing politicians and journalists who allow themselves, with an air of grandeur, to praise people from the left, only on condition that they have already become at least as right-wing as they are, and if possible they also deny their previous loyalties with the appropriate vehemence of recent converts. Thus it is the case that nostalgia for the socialists of yesteryear is usually expressed by people who would never have voted for them when they were active. Years pass and the enemy of that time, who was reviled and, if necessary, slandered, is now invoked as a man of integrity and a great statesman, unlike the trash-talkers who have usurped the noble acronyms of other times. As I remember well how politicians and the right-wing media treated Felipe González in his last years of government, between 1993 and 1996, when they no longer controlled the desire to oust him from power in any way, I am now surprised by the reverence that many of those same characters they show him. I am also surprised by Felipe González himself, who has always been a somewhat stratospheric man, looking out from the heights of the historical pedestal on which he settled very early, like someone settling down after retirement in the anatomical chair of a board of directors.

I have nothing against changes of opinion, nor of voting intention, nor of party. I like John Maynard Keynes' gentle question: “When the facts change, my opinions change. And you, sir, what do you do?” When I was young I was convinced that the German Democratic Republic was democratic, and Fidel Castro's Cuba was not a dictatorship. Now my political model is that social democracy that in the post-war period of 1945, collaborating with the center-right of Christian democracy, built the welfare state on the ruins of Europe. One of the most thorough socialists I have ever met, Mario Onaindía, had been a member of the ETA gang in his early youth. My maternal grandfather, who had been a socialist sympathizer and member of the Assault Guard during the Civil War, became a Francoist out of inertia or distraction over the years, and because he was grateful for the health insurance and retirement pension that he received. he enjoyed in his old age. But in the 1977 elections he voted again for the Socialist Party, just as he had voted for the last time in the elections of February 1936. In the early eighties, after the excessive victory of October 1982, many former militants of the extreme left and from the Communist Party they joined the ranks of the PSOE, many for the beneficial approach to power, and many others out of true conviction, out of a desire to contribute to the transformation of the country, just as the professionals of the Communist Party had done a few years before with full integrity. very varied knowledge that participated in the UCD.

There are pragmatic forms of idealism much more useful for the common good than grand gestures of ideological purity. And perhaps the most sterile and self-destructive drifts of the left come from an ideological obsession that has a lot of religious fever and ends in catacomb activism, fueled by the expulsion of the deviated, who are also usually those who show disaffection to a messiah. of egocentric intransigence.

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First-hand knowledge is the best antidote to nostalgia. I saw up close the attitudes of some of those victorious socialists whom the right now celebrates so much and I found in them an arrogant drunkenness with power, a lack of scruples that was often justified by the need to quickly change things, overcoming obstacles. of an inefficient and hostile administrative apparatus. But the haste, the lack of consideration, the arrogance of being right, caused them a blindness that did not allow them to distinguish the corrupt, and sometimes a cynicism that led them to accept them as a side effect, small confidential gestures to reward loyalty.

Celebrating the socialists of yesteryear, as well as dead writers, is a not-so-subtle way of calling into question the legitimacy of those who carry out their work in the present. Those were socialists. And they were so much so that over the years and in the name of that distant integrity they have become propagandists of a right-wing quarrel that, by welcoming them into its fold, congratulates itself for a lack of sectarianism that this left would be incapable of. now: with meanness, with resentment, the Socialist Party expelled Joaquín Leguina, for no other reason than his ardent electoral support for Isabel Díaz Ayuso; With a generosity that the former co-religionists of Leguina would never have, the regional government rewards his many merits with the presidency of the Council of the Chamber of Accounts, in which the beneficiary confesses that he does not know what he will have to do, without this ignorance prevents accepting an annual salary of more than 100,000 euros. That a government so supportive of extreme austerity in spending on public health and public education is so generous with who, after all, was its adversary, is a gesture that the perhaps still socialist at heart Joaquín Leguina will appreciate. Perhaps that is why he has been so elegant in expressing his reaction to the criticism he is receiving from the left. He says they sweat it.

It is easy to be exasperated by the nonsense of the left. The danger is that this satiety leads one almost imperceptibly to accept the nonsense of the right. I am fed up with a large part of the established left for its complacency, its abandonment of the critical spirit in favor of an orthodoxy that disguises itself as rebellion, its surrender to linguistic papanatisms and the fashionable jargons of identities. The ecological conscience brings me closer to the most radical left, but its fascination with anti-Spanish nationalisms and even more so its disdain for the formalities of democracy and its romanticism of political violence and of leaders who declare themselves anti-imperialist separate me from it. I don't understand what the defense of equality and the environment or the dignified treatment of animals has to do with the inability to condemn terrorist crimes or Russian despotism. But I look at the other side and I see intelligent people whom I appreciated celebrating the festival of the slaughter of the bulls and the epic of the conquest of America, and joining the extreme right and the oil multinationals in the denialism of climate change .

I believe that the greatest political learning of my life was that personal freedoms and social justice are inseparable from each other, and the legal formalities of democracy the best guarantee against human irrationality and the propensity for despotism and servility. Like some socialists of yesteryear who barely appear in the newspapers and who are neither claimed by the right nor ignored by the left—some of whom I am friends with—I like to think that lucidity without sectarianism is still possible, and that the old progressive cause still deserves to be defended.

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