It happens like in Shakespeare’s theater. It is necessary to create absurd characters, beyond all logic, secondary characters locked for life in their irrelevant role, to justify and mask everything that is absurd and contradictory in what is told.
A long time ago, the PSOE was a left-wing party. No one can say for sure when it stopped being so. In fact, there are still those who consider that the Socialist Party remains a traditional party that is fairly left-wing. Readers of Spanish history books, including those by Ricardo de la Cierva, return to the collusion of the PSOE with the soft dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera to discredit, from start to finish, the leftism of this party which, in looking closely, it is the only left-wing party that has governed our country.
But there are no more readers of Spanish history books, because our history disappeared from bookstores when the creations of Pío Moa and César Vidal became bestsellers. This happened during Aznarism. Manuel Vázquez Montalbán called this period of our recent history aznaridad; But at that time, Aznar’s way of doing politics was not yet petrified. This was happening in real time, like bird flu mortality. Today, it is a geological layer, a substrate. It ends in “ism,” like everything studied.
In the Aznar years (blue shirts with white collars, mountaineer bracelets, pharmacy mustache), they presented on public television a documentary series on the history of Spain, based on a book by García de Gortázar, which began with Big Bang, the original cosmic explosion. It was the neoliberal way of reminding us that we are a unity of destiny in the universal. Among the components of this generation of ultras, because they were ultraliberal, some are still active, like Miguel Ángel Rodríguez. They were modern gin and tonics in a glass (the chalice of the alliance with golf) and, culturally, they were closer to the Cosmosthe series by Carl Sagan, which by Ernesto Giménez Caballero, the content creator of Phalange and his craziest sentences. I mean, they were only close to Carl Sagan visually. On TV, everything fits. Ideologically, they came from the extreme right, both the secret one, which now ensures their employment, and the approximate one, which they created by telepathy, that is to say the Alvis of the world.
There, it happens like in Shakespeare’s theater. It is necessary to create absurd characters, beyond all logic, secondary characters locked for life in their irrelevant role, to justify and mask everything that is absurd and contradictory in what is told. The English playwright (of Czech origin), Tom Stoppard, explained this very well in his work Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. These were Hamlet’s two friends, who suddenly appeared in the castle, it was not clear what they were doing with this theater troupe, but everything was connected with the plot despite themselves, and then they were killed, even not live, but on a delayed one, because in reality it didn’t matter. Ruiz Mateos has had no dramatic role in Spanish politics, other than his role as an extra. This is why Alvise has been compared to Rumasa’s eccentric owner. It must be recognized that the people before had more depth. Ruiz Mateos stole big and big to get where he got. All Alvise had to do was tweet. We became very attentive to everything.
Santiago Abascal is also a Guildenstern or a Rosencrantz (they can’t even be distinguished). This was demonstrated when he filed this motion of censure with the historic Ramón Tamames at its head. Abascal did not realize it, because he believed he was interpreting The Revenge of Don Mendo; but, deep down, Santiago Abascal was nothing other than the skull of Yorick, the jester, in the hand of Tamames, filled with political and biographical cemeteries. Miguel Ángel Rodríguez is a postmodernist, in the explicit sense of the term. In other words, it is obsolete. People have already forgotten Lyotard, postmodernism, all that. Now another idea comes to mind, less that of reading than that of going to chat on video screens. This is why Isabel Díaz Ayuso has this retro and old-fashioned look. This is a product of MAR’s late night. One of those grotesque monsters that appear in Delirium Tremens. All of Ayuso’s political content is contained in a single joke from Lina Morgan. The work that the popular people represent in the community of Madrid is pure “táztica and monocle”, as in the popular saints of Arniches. In Spain, what is popular is not the voice of the people, but that of the master speaking to the servant.
While the PP can afford to be more and more to the right, the PSOE has never dared to be more and more to the left. It’s quite the opposite. Survivors of the Transition consider that the PSOE ceased to be left-wing when Felipe (later called González, also simply), removed the Marxist label from the party during an extraordinary congress. In high school, we also changed Novecento by Village People (two different ways of representing the people). Other witnesses to the Transition are more patient, and maintain that the leftism of the PSOE continued until the NATO referendum. Generally speaking (pun intended), it is contradictory to be on the left and to be part of NATO. But the body can withstand anything thrown at it. Until he couldn’t take it anymore. This is how the term leftism was everywhere replaced by the word progressivism. Much more versatile, where does it end! To be progressive, you don’t have to be very left-wing. Furthermore, staff believed that social progress was not necessarily linked to the left, and vice versa.
Once again, the left has sunk to the left of the PSOE. It happens from time to time. The left’s main problem is that it is not right enough. Socialists have always understood this. But that only works for them. What the left of the left has not understood is that it is not as left-wing as we think, even if it calls itself progressive. Or maybe because of that.
