Donald Trump’s victory was also confirmation of the triumph of a trend that has been with us for many years, but which is now in the majority and sometimes unbearable: the absolute absence of verbal inhibition in public discourse, particularly in far right and populists. movements. Many years ago, in 2010, the writer Javier Marías complained that Spain was the rudest country in the West. However, he found an advantage in the surrounding crudeness: it gave us very valuable information about people. Marías believed that we would never take as an example or vote for someone who uttered wild words and used brutal vocabulary. He gave some examples from that year, such as calling teenage girls “pink pussies” or saying that the deaths from the 2010 Haiti earthquake, in which 316,000 people died, were how “the world cleans itself.” His immense talent did not prevent him from being wrong in this prediction, even if the world would be more habitable if he had been right. We are already seeing that Trump’s atrocities during the campaign and throughout his life not only prevented people from voting for him, but actually worked in his favor, and that right-wing populists and their supporters find great pleasure in saying it all without any formal or moral restriction.
Marías understands well that people who lack scruples and limits when it comes to expressing themselves provide us with very valuable information about themselves. The iconoclastic, crude and lazy far right against women, immigrants, NGOs, foreigners, against social justice, solidarity, the State or political adversaries has discovered the force of expressing resentment, of hatred and revenge. He discovered a notion of liberty and free speech, perverse but effective, that connects many citizens of every class, condition, race or gender. In 2018, in one of his unbearable interviews where he made the journalist who dared to question him sweat ink, the writer Bret Easton Ellis affirmed that progressives around the world were exaggerating with Trump, giving excessive importance to his outbursts. , which the average American considered anecdotal and funny: “The women I know, many of whom voted for Trump, didn’t find the ‘grab them by the pussy’ comment bothering them, because they grew up with it the reality that they had three brothers, or that they had two brothers, and that conversation with each other or with friends in the locker room was a reality. Whether Trump actually did it or not would not decide your vote for him.” Easton Ellis argued that the left suffered a hysterical and puritanical reaction to Trump and his verbal excesses after his first victory and that reflection could explain the reasons for the success of the populist verbal outpouring that we are witnessing, now in all its full force. splendor and vulgarity.
