Donald Trump’s victory has also been the confirmation of the triumph of a trend that has been with us for many years, but that is now the majority and sometimes unbearable: the absolute lack of verbal inhibition in public conversation, especially in the extreme right and populist 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 prevailing coarseness: it gave us very valuable information about people. Marías believed that we would never take as an example or vote for someone who spouted savage words and used brutal vocabulary. He gave some examples from that year, such as calling teenage girls “pink pussies” or saying that the dead from the 2010 Haiti earthquake, in which 316,000 people died, were the way “the world cleans up.” His immense talent did not prevent him from being wrong in this prediction, although the world would be more habitable if he had been right. We already see that the atrocities that Trump has said during the campaign and throughout his life have not only not prevented people from voting for him, but have actually worked in his favor, and that right-wing populists and their sympathizers find great pleasure in saying them. all without any formal or moral restrictions.
Marías did get it right that people who lack scruples and limits when it comes to expressing themselves provide us with very valuable information about them. The iconoclastic, foul-mouthed and lazy far-right against women, immigrants, NGOs, foreigners, against social justice, solidarity, the state or political adversaries has discovered the strength of the expression of resentment, hatred and revenge. He has discovered a notion of freedom and freedom of expression, perverse but effective, that connects with many citizens of any class, condition, race or sex. In 2018, in one of his insufferable interviews in which he makes the journalist who dares to question him sweat ink, the writer Bret Easton Ellis said that progressives around the world were exaggerating with Trump, giving excessive importance to his outbursts, that the average American considered anecdotal and funny: “The women I know, many of whom voted for Trump, did not find the comment about ‘grab them by the pussy’ It bothered them, because they grew up with the reality that they had three brothers, or they had two brothers, and this conversation between them or with friends in the locker room was a reality. Whether Trump actually did it or not was not going to decide your vote for him.” Easton Ellis claimed that the left suffered a hysterical and puritanical reaction to Trump and his verbal excesses after his first victory and that reflection can explain the reasons for the success of the populist verbal outpouring that we are witnessing, now in all its splendor and vulgarity.
#left #understands
