It is difficult to understand that constant in history according to which when the human being has more means for freedom and happiness, he chooses fall down the totalitarian slope and return to barbarism. In our time this threatening trend manifests itself closely in populisms and nationalisms, since its essences imply a return to credulity and the simplest sectarianism. We see it in certain universities, in education in general, in numerous media related to power and in many other sectors.
Writing after World War II, that is, in post-Nazi democratic Germany, Karl Jaspers It said that all citizens are jointly responsible for the actions and crimes that are committed politically. He himself left Germany in 1948 and applied for a foreign nationality because the democratic regime of his homeland did not meet his expectations. In your opinion, there must be a universal solidarity Above all, a condition that we clearly do not find in the extremely sectarian populisms of our day. Each one should be involved in what happens to others, the nationalist right of course, but above all those who consider themselves on the left, instead of remaining indifferent or nurturing an institutional sectarianism that ignores the political and moral co-responsibility that we have with all citizens, as Jaspers maintains.
It is difficult to understand that the 1980 regime could have deteriorated in this way for more than four decades and that, at each moment, it has found a broad electoral support with almost religious fervor without counting on real resistance. It is something that invites us to reflect on the unfathomable depths of the populist phenomenon, which is not a chance accident but a radical and permanent interpretation of the world that has had and has dire consequences for all people. To be reborn it is necessary to draw consequences from the mistakes made, both in the past and in the present, which are the same, something for which the moment never seems to have come.
Parallel to what Hannah Arendt analyzed regarding the antisemitism, nationalism is also explained as the result of a decadence leading to totalitarianism: it becomes institutional and has taken root in other areas, given the passivity of a large part of the population. The obvious nation-state crisis, increasingly visible in the West, may have influenced this nationalist drift if it is due to an understandable, if unjustified, reaction to the precarious insecurity of our time. Political decadence produces an intimate malaise, where populism and nationalism feed off each other, and is translated into reactions that go beyond politics and penetrate all spheres of society from multiple directions.
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Following Arendt, with populisms we find ourselves before a ‘Total state’ in which the ideology dominates the State, in which the populist ideology of the party, to put it bluntly, is above the State, and where force, which in this case has the endorsement of the ballot box, prevails over the right, not only on universal law but even on the law of the State itself. The philosopher also highlighted, as a fundamental fact, two characteristics: institutional propaganda, as well as the spontaneous support of the majority of the population for totalitarianism.
Although it may be disturbing, what happens here and now has great sociological and political interest, since it places us inside a kind of laboratorio experimental where it is played against the interests of the population, of the entire population, but at the same time has the explicit or tacit support of a wide sector of the citizenry, partly active and partly invited by stone. The alarm raised by these events is great, insofar as they have long passed the stage of concern to plunge us into a state of stupor that does not bode well.
Reference-www.elperiodico.com