In the movie “Money Ball,” starring Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill, the sports news credited the team’s manager, and not the Oakland Athletics general manager, Billy Beane (Pitt), for the team’s winning streak during the season. 2002. They have won seven games in a row with the method devised by Beane, which is to make a baseball team competitive with little money but a lot of data revision. Hill, indignant, asks him, “Did you hear that?”, To which Pitt responds: “I hear seven (games won) in a row.”
And it is that after “half the way” in charge of President López Obrador, we could use the scene of “Money ball” to imagine what the president says to himself – “I read 62% approval” -, while the Public and published opinion struggles with the narrative that the 4T tries to impose.
It may be asked, how does the president achieve such degrees of approval and support? And the answer lies in polarization and bipartisanship. It is now the way in which a large part of humanity interprets public affairs: choosing between inconveniences and taking bold positions, without nuances and with the rigidity of fierce defense.
“Anti abortion or pro abortion”, “meritocracy or welfare state”, “United States or China”, “for or against migrants”, “inclusion or privilege”, “with AMLO or against AMLO”, “justice or right ”,“ patriot or global ”,“ fidelity in poverty or aspirational luxury ”. Choose a side, why waste time thinking so much about everything?
In other words, it is false that in today’s democracy we exercise political freedom, but rather that we choose from a menu arranged by an oligarchy of parties and institutions. It is no coincidence, they are the sales mechanisms that have penetrated any social exchange. In consuming is the new being and bipartisanship is an act of the market.
The electoral days of recent years create a heritage of hostility towards the new generations. Polarization and bipartisanship have fertile ground. Yes, in Mexico there are still more than two parties, but no more than two visions of the country. Both sectors communicate it every day.
Let us remember what the president told us a few weeks ago, when he related the recommendations that communication agencies make to politicians: “What do the publicists who have become fashionable to make recommendations to candidates say? ‘The first thing is: put on your gorilla snot, put on good gum, smile, don’t stop smiling and run to the center, to nothing, run to the center.’ ”
The center is nothingness and it is evident on every page, minute of air, space on social networks. Who does not understand it probably finds the coldness of irrelevance. For example, and despite efforts to sell an idea of progressivism, the Citizen Movement today has fewer federal deputies than the PT. Polarization pays dividends.
Let’s look out of the corner of our eye that Covid-19 calls into question a good amount of sophistry that sustains liberal democracy. For example, the polarization and bipartisanship that converge with the pandemic make more and more Mexicans raise their eyebrows when they hear things like: “The Law (with a capital letter) makes us equal” or “All human beings are born in the image and likeness of God”.
However, and under the sieve of political communication, it is also clear that the current one is a stage of involution. Everything discussed ad nauseam with increasing hilarity and spite has, at its rational core, more or less three centuries of existence.
Why? Because John Locke wrote the foundations of liberalism more than 300 years ago.
Why? Because the president is a politician who filled a void of more than 40 years with a thought of 160 years ago (he defines himself as “Juarista”).
Why? Because AMLO brought back the importance of doing politics, but it seems aimed at banishing it in the form of polarization and choosing between inconveniences.
Why? Because bipartisanship turns institutions into parties “catches everything.”
Why? Because in no social, political, economic and cultural space is it even intuited that the cognitive paradigm should be changed, much less delineate the idea of a scientific revolution.
Polarization and bipartisanship will be the tandem that determines public discussions for years to come. It is immediacy and a sense of belonging. It facilitates any circumstance, balances the sense of transcendence and makes subversion, in addition to being useless, unintelligible.
On the route traced by the market to determine the elections, we will go to contests with greater frenzy in language. List potential contenders as “bottle caps”, for example. Or, on the other pole, to ensure that the Executive has overtones of “Castro-Chavista dictatorship” (whatever that means). Without a doubt we will have exchanges of statements that are further and further away from the debate.
It is what it is. For that it is enough. It is what will come.
Analyst.
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