A new right has reached the cultural battlefield. His mission, his emissaries say, is reconquer the world of values that due to lack of appearance was in the hands of the left. Dispute the elements that shape the worldviews, and that so far have inclined … The electoral board to the left.
This interesting analysis being, hides a hoax. And it is that the battle of the values was not won by the left, liberalism won it. Young people who took the streets in May 68 They faced the working class (The Police), as the communist Pasolini lamented, and claimed the moral and erotic slogans of surrealism, as the avant -garde Octavio Paz celebrated. That was what was happening: vital attitudes incubated in artistic fields since the late nineteenth century were massified.
May 68 buried the promises of orthodoxy and uniformity of communism under ironic, anti -authoritarian and jovial debauchery of dadaism and surrealism. The great revolution in the West had been that, that of values and lifestyles. The generation that was born after the world wars already He did not want to reproduce his parents’ lifestyle.
He even despise state paternalism and predictable channel that a generous welfare system gave its existence. I wanted risk, adventure, fun. I wanted self -expression and exploration of consciousness and body.
Communism was undone between Gulags nightmares run by gray and totalitarian moral bureaucrats, while young people consumed LSD and danced to the rhythm of the ‘Bebop’ or ‘Rock and Roll’.
Despite its sedious origin, the values of the avant -garde did not attempt against capitalism or liberalism; They ranked with them. Nothing stimulated consumption so much such as hedonism and expression of protein individualities.
We have patriots again throughout the West. The postwar world order begins to wobble
The hippies ended up being successful entrepreneurs and investors in the stock market, and the logic of the avant -garde, ‘Make it new’, turned out to be compatible with the creative destruction that promoted industrial innovation and The constant search for the new gadget that will realize the most ambitious dream of the avant -garde, change life.
Without knowing it, we became Dadaist and surreal. The hatred from the western to the Westhis fascination with the exotic and the deconstruction of our categories of thought, humorism and infantilization of life, irony and the postponement of adulthood, the erotic of life and that cult of the creative self, drank of those same sources.
But then came the economic crisis of 2008 and the West found that hedonism and casual self -expression were only possible in economic security times. When 15-M protesters They went to the Plaza del Sol, in 2011, they were no longer rebels. “We are not anti -system,” they said, “the system is antin.” They had adjusted to a bohemian and ‘bourgeois’ system, as David Brooks would say, in which he worked hard and enjoyed a lot, and the system had betrayed them. And that betrayal stirred the Morales waters throughout the world.
Contrary moral agenda
It is to this post -sessant andchistachista ‘establishment’ that the new postmodern right has presented weapons. It came from rigorous training in the quadrilaterals on the left, curiously. He had fought with Gramsci, Debord, Lyotard, Laclau, and had discovered, to his surprise, that they were right. Reality is blurred between the multiplicity of visions and opinions, The logic of the show triumphs And the battle for political power is not won with public policies but with stories.
We had to fight for hegemony, and occupy educational, informative and cultural institutions where life attitudes and styles are forged. Had to Replicate the deed of the artistic avant -gardebut not spontaneously but planned, to impose a contrary moral agenda.
No more hedonism and infantilism, it was time for homelands, families, tradition, strong leaders weakened by the crisis security of a homogeneous community and a helmsman with gonads like papayas.
But there was a problem: how was a new cultural battle to give the new right without artists? To this inconvenience they found a bold solution: erase the difference between culture and politics. If in postmodern society only the image and simulation count, the politician can become a ‘performer’ that, through political incorrectnessagitation and conflict, dispute the values and meaning of reality.
That’s what this right is playing, with Trump and Milei at the head: To forge a new reality where tradition is patriotic and healthy because it protects from solvent diversity.
If the Dadaists lit their crazy party to bend the patriotism that had led to World War I, today we have patriots again throughout the West. The postwar world order begins to wobble, the new rights They advance closing bordersbut his attacks are not against the left. They go against the open and cosmopolitan order, prosperous and peaceful – if you want, banal and mild – that sustains liberal democracy.
#cultural #battle
