Democracy is precarious by giving it for granted, explained Thomas Mann in his famous 1938 conference. The prediction he made in that speech was fulfilled. “The victorious arrival of democracy” occurred. But he also pointed to a farther future and predicted something dark: “When fascism returns, it will do so in the name of freedom.”
That is precisely the word that atibor the propaganda, speeches and proclamations in the ultra -conservative wave that is touring the world. Exponents of authoritarian culture that suppurates the precariousness of democracy are messianic and practice verbal violence full of vulgarity, which at some time inexorable passes from words to acts.
The current precarization of democracy occurs because the Democrats “take it for granted”, as the German writer who won the Nobel Prize for literature with his novel Los Buddenbrook, but also because another part of society naturalizes authoritarianism and arbitrariness if the leader manages to calm his greatest anxieties.
Today a leader can be authoritarian, vulgar and even unpresentable if he succeeds in economics and security, or makes people believe in their policies for those areas. As if he economic success or victory over crime justified arbitrariness and the actions and preaching that intoxicate society.
The greatest exponent of ultraconservative leadership that suppurates the purulent cracks of sick democracies, is Donald Trump. In his shadow, other leaderships grew that despise critical thinking, journalism, awareness about climate change and respect for sexual diversity, as well as everything that contradicts his dogmas and challenges his grudges.
Among those despised by the New York tycoon and the rulers and leaders who identify with him, was the Argentine Pope. Shortly before serving a hundred days in the Oval Office, Francisco’s death put Trump and other ultraconservative leaders.
Vice President JD Vance came with the right to photograph himself with the Pope who denounced Trump for the cruel criminalization and mass deportation of immigrants. In the White House they warned the fragility with which he left the Gemelli Hospital and sent Vice President Vance. Trump went further in the control of damage and traveled to Rome to attend funerals. Just deceased, the pontiff is dangerous for the leader of the one in the antipodes.
In this time of brutal leadership, the image of the Jesuit Pope increased by contrast the image of insensitivity, arrogance and violent vulgarity to attack the critics and the moderates that Trump, Milei and other ultra -conservative leaders exhibit.
Some of them, although they detest him, went to the funeral to cushion the damage. The Greeks created the word that Max Weber incorporated sociology in the nineteenth century: “Charisma.” This is how they called in the ancient polis the charm of the gods of Olympus, and the apostle Paul Cristianized the term as “Divine Don” that some have in front of the communities that observe them.
With the calm of his gestures and the kind tone of his voice, the charism of the Pope irrada goodness, humility, compression and compassion, that is, the opposite of what Trump and other ultra -conservative leaders convey. That is why he decided to play his chips in the conclave with the New York Archbishops Timothy Dolan, and Wisconsin, Raymond Burke, two orthodox that praised him.
The first hundred days of his second government were bleak. Unlike the first, which began with several respectable and trained figures, it now began with an obsolete mediocre cabinet. There is no one who contains it and corrects their mistakes. The vice president is not the moderate Mike Pence but Vance, a Trumpist who, unlike his republican predecessor, would fulfill the order to prevent the legislative certification of an election that its president loses.
Trump restarted his attempt to dismantle democracy following the model of Russian autocracy and destroyed the free trade system with axis in the United States that had been almost a century.
The future will say whether this dyslobalization is beneficial to the United States and the world, as was the globalization that had been driven by Washington. It will also show the loss of American gravitation that will produce the cruel closing of humanitarian assistance in the world.
Trump tries to see the future looking for the rearview mirror, as if it were possible to return to the country of the industries full of workers and skyscrapers full of office workers. The geopolitical redesign also leads backwards, promoting a territorial expansion as if it were the world that governed until the first half of the 20th century. With the aggravating man of ramming historical allies such as Canada, trying to turn it into state 51 of La Unión, and Denmark, trying to snatch Greenland with the fallacious argument of US security, being a territory in which, for belonging to NATO, Washington can establish the amount of military bases you want. In fact, he had 17.
No one would have imagined that the United States would break the successful economic, political and military alliance that from the First World War maintained with Europe. It is also inconceivable alignment with Putin, who helped weaken the European Union convulsing NATO and supporting Brexit.
For that alignment he betrayed Ukraine by cutting the flow of armaments and ammunition while blaming it for the war that exploded with the Russian invasion.
That could change, but it would be for the criminal negligence that Putin commits and for the ability with which Zelenski handled the negotiation with the White House on the joint exploitation of rare earths.
Like the other ultraconservative rulers, Trump cut health programs, scientific research and auspices to universities, teaching with Harvard.
In something they resemble Adrián Leverkühn, the character of the novel Doctor Faustus who agrees with the demon to obtain genius paying the price of dehumanizing, in the book with which Thomas Mann allegorized the moral and cultural decline that Weimar’s democracy murdered, opening the way to Nazism.
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