The scariest words in English are: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”. I am sorry that in these unhappy hours of horror, indignation and impotence, with bastards with teeth professionally dedicated to politics in Spain, I evoke Ronald Reagan’s famous phrase. Substitute English for Spanish, and put the phrase in the mouth of any of the useless and petty people who throw dead men at each other’s heads.
Not far behind is the millennial troop of social network pacifiers, gregarious and fanatical on the left and the right, who are incapable of accepting immorality. and mediocrity of their own leaders, sad as it is. “I don’t want to be an American idiot/A nation controlled by the media/The age of information hysteria/It’s calling America an idiot.” This time it is the lyrics of a Green Day song that puts in situation so many idiots on both sides of the ocean who, truly indifferent to the tragedy, shovel not the mud of the streets, but the mud of their miseries.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Trump and Harris are playing the game. The United States represents the essence of emotional polarization, of structural misinformationof information hysteria. Rational and representative democracy has given way to a morbid and compulsive democracy, in which the grotesque and extravagant reign supreme. But, beneath the surface of polar sentiments, Harris and Trump exhibit two different ways of understanding their patriotism.
While Trump aspires for the United States to return to being the great nation of the original American dream, in which he has no qualms about loosening ties with its old European partners through the imposition of additional tariffs on foreign trade, Harris, with a certain controlled ambivalence, defends a multicultural nation, prone to income redistribution and increased public spending in areas where Biden has failed miserably, such as dependency. Indeed, there is no doubt in my mind that both are willing to dope the economy with aggressive fiscal supports and maintain unsustainable budget imbalances. Even if they don’t acknowledge it, they are the same.
Everything will happen in the next few hours. It is true that the United States, with the pandemic, ceased to be the plenipotentiary country that led all international crises. And it is also true that, since then, they have been looking for their place in the world. Trump and Harris have the answer. And Europe is waitingalthough we Europeans have been waiting for a long time, as if the answer had to come from the outside.