The electoral victory of Gabriel Boric and I Approve Dignity in the last Chilean presidential elections has been a true political earthquake that has resonated in Latin America and beyond, reaching our country. In the first place, because a force of democratic radicalism, of social justice and with the clearest and most ambitious green agenda in America, has won the elections precisely in Chile, which was something like “the jewel in the crown of neoliberalism” in the region. The country in which the reforms of the Chicago Boys carried out by the Pinochet dictatorship configured a social order that survived the transition to democracy as a passive revolution, narrowing popular sovereignty and limiting to the maximum the egalitarian components of the democratic promise. In a region often portrayed as unstable and tumultuous, Chile was the perfect case for more conservative scholars. The rampant inequality and institutional stagnation did not produce political changes beyond the alternation between the two great poles that shared the fundamentals of the model. However, in that Chile, a protest that began as a student over the price of transportation began to concatenate demands until it led to a state of growing social opposition to the existing order, denounced as exclusive and characteristic of inbred elites closed in on themselves.
Secondly, because the political change is led and led by a generation of Chilean men and women forged in protests and extra-parliamentary militancy, who created their own electoral instruments, -beyond the parties of the established order but also beyond the left traditional – to open the political system to the popular will that was being developed “outside”. In this, the similarities, even biographical and intellectual, are extreme with various European cases, also the Spanish of the first Podemos in the years 2014 and 2015. But the change is not only generational, but has to do with the contents, with the proposed horizon and with the way of looking at the country itself. In this sense, I Approve Dignity, the coalition that has brought Gabriel Boric to La Moneda, is a clearly contemporary force: one that takes charge of the problems and tensions of its time, that does not intend to win the battles of its elders but rather the present and future. With the same values but in the current terms and conditions.
The entire campaign of fear unleashed against Boric and I Approve Dignity by the powerful conservative sectors and Chilean ultras could not stop their political ascent for a simple and important reason: those who today are preparing to lead the destinies of Chile never made the mistake of imagining or presenting political and social change as a tabula rasa. This idea, which seems essentially theoretical, has profound practical political consequences.
Boric and his people know that every successful order, and clearly neoliberalism was in Chile in the sense that it completely reordered the country, produces its own subjectivity: it produces daily life, affections, expectations and a way of looking at life. This is not a “lie” that is combated simply by “telling the truth”, as if pulling subordinates out of ignorance. A domination is a way of life that incorporates the dominated, and those who aspire to change it, to transform it to make it fairer, have to start from the really existing social, cultural and affective composition of their fellow citizens, not from the one they would like or the What do the manuals say? This partly explains his triumph: there is no going back to a pre-neoliberal time. No order can be challenged from full exteriority. There is, yes, the possibility of a post-neoliberal future, but it will necessarily be built with the limits and contradictions of the subjects constituted by the previous order, based on its unfulfilled promises, but also on its regime of desires and fears. Not all possible declensions of the famous Broad Front understood this, and therefore not all of them could have won. Those from the traditional left, in fact, criticized Gabriel Boric and his colleagues for being too transversal.
The Approve Dignity position implies a recognition of the relationship between freedom, past and change. If transformations are never tabula rasa and if pluralism is an inalienable horizon, then revolutionaries have to accept that even the most daring revolutions inherit much more from the previous order than they are often willing to assume. In fact, the most radical transformations are those that are capable of incorporating the past, the inherited, and integrating it into a new horizon. Because they build a new ground of rights in which even the adversaries participate. Only thanks to this way of thinking, the Approve Dignity policy was able to seduce not only the most mobilized sectors but also all those who, more fearful or prudent, did not want a leap into the void. And only in this way was he capable of articulating a new moral majority that did not offend those who had previously voted for other options, but rather integrated them on a different plane, in an overcoming proposal.
Boric thus took charge of the diversity of his country, its contradictions and its historical configuration, he took charge of his past and his really existing society, to which he proposed a credible and attractive idea of future order. He did not propose to turn everything upside down, because that is exactly what the despotic power of the markets and those who have the most do every day with the daily life of the majority. He proposed putting limits on the power of a few to make the lives of Chileans safer, freer and better. He proposed democratic regeneration and balancing the social balance in order to make lives calm and happier. He proposed feminism to bring equality to all corners of life. He proposed an enterprising State that leads an ecological transition that takes care of the planet, generating prosperity and equity. He proposed a future in a world in which ecological depredation, social breakdown and the absence of prospects seem to impose the idea of a permanent, painful and impossible flight forward, against ourselves and against the planet, in a war that we can only to lose. It was firmly anchored in everyday life and in the common sense of its time in order to be radical and at the same time understandable by the vast majority of its people. Thus, Boric was not a reactive candidate, he did not campaign “to stop the right”. Rather, the right campaigned to stop him. The difference is not minor, it is the one that goes from the defensive to the offensive, from the alternation to the overcoming.
At a given moment in the campaign, Boric stopped being the candidate of the left to be the candidate of the Chileans, of a new Chile. It began to be, with Antonio Gramsci, a leader before being a ruler. Even of those who were not going to vote for him but to whom he was already addressing himself as his future president. That is why he is going to govern now. His challenge will be to convert his electoral majority into a new moral majority, into a general will that reorders Chile to make it a greener, fairer country with freer people. For life to be better. You will have many difficulties in front of you, as many as your goals are beautiful. For now, it has arrived in La Moneda with the will and commitment that “the great malls” reopen. And it has done so with the best tribute to our benchmarks from the past: talking about the future.
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