On a recurring basis, the President of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, boasts of his deep and unwavering “love for the people.” It is evident that within the framework of his populist and demagogic narrative, the “people” is not a concept equivalent to “Mexican citizens.” In López Obrador’s discourse, the “people” is a concept that identifies exclusively with the Mexicans whom he defines as “poor” or, to express it more precisely, as historical victims of neoliberalism, that is, as historical victims of the political-economic regime that Salinas de Gortari inaugurated and that lasted until the six-year term of Peña Nieto. Understanding neoliberalism or neo-Porfirism as a political-economic regime that included not only right-wing technocrats from the PRI, but also conservative politicians from the National Action Party.
A critical analysis of the concept of the people used by López Obrador reveals a series of fundamental questions. In the first place, its concept of “people” is incompatible with the general theory of the rule of law which, in its character of a liberal and democratic perspective on the origin, legitimacy and exercise of political power, considers the State as an organic whole that emerged from the historical and territorial integration between a people and a government.
For this theory to be consistent with the universal and abstract nature of modern law, the concept of people must encompass all citizens regardless of their socio-economic status or their cultural and educational level. It is precisely this condition of fundamental equality among all people that made it possible to conceptualize the people as the source of a form of liberal and democratic state sovereignty that, unlike the sovereignty proper to the absolutist monarchical state designed to preserve the estate and corporate character of the “Ancien Régime”, focused precisely on the urgent need to abolish all forms of privilege based on despotic forms of exercising political power.
Something similar to what happened with the absolutist State took place in the historical framework of the 20th century with the emergence of totalitarian political systems based on ideological discourses of a dogmatic nature. Both in the framework of German national-socialism and in the framework of Soviet communism, the universal character inherent in the concepts of “people” and “popular sovereignty” emanating from the discursive projection of the “liberal-democratic” ideological framework, was radically denied. within the framework of narratives that identified the people with German citizens of “Aryan origin” or with the “proletariat”. The concepts of “arische rasse”, “deutsche volk” and “dictatorship of the proletariat” clearly reflect the openly sectarian and exclusionary nature of the narrative put forward both by the Nazi party within the Third Reich and by the communist party within of the Soviet state. It was precisely as a result of this frontal rejection of the ideological foundations of liberalism and its essential notion of “universal equality” that all totalitarian regimes have based their domination on radical indoctrination processes aimed at transforming consciences through the assimilation of dogmatic ideological frameworks. , that is, incompatible with any kind of critical analysis. Unlike National Socialism and Soviet Communism, liberalism is an open ideology that has historically been capable of evolving from the dialectical integration of critical discourses. It is precisely this plasticity that has allowed it to become and preserve itself as the most important and influential ideological narrative in the modern world.
Within this logic, identifying the “people” with the “poor” constitutes a clear expression not only of demagogic populism, but also, and in a highly worrying way, of a political ideology with tendencies that are not only authoritarian, but also potentially totalitarian. This is particularly clear when the concept of “poor” is identified in the framework of the presidential discourse with those sectors of the population that unconditionally support the current government. If we carefully analyze López Obrador’s speech, it becomes clear that among the “poor” whom he claims to love unconditionally, there are not those sectors of the population of the middle class and even of the popular or working class that do not share his government strategy. or who openly express their disenchantment with a government that has not been able to satisfactorily confront the terrible situation that the country is facing in terms of public security and economic stagnation.
In fact, the President himself in one of his morning conferences dared to say that support for his government and the movement that brought him to power is inversely related to the cultural and educational level of the population. In other words, the “people” to whom López Obrador is indebted, the “people” for whom he works incessantly, is not only poor but also ignorant. It is therefore deeply striking that the President himself recurrently affirms that the people of Mexico, the people that support the project of the fourth transformation that his movement leads, is not only intrinsically good but also “politically wise.” . In other words, for López Obrador an ignorant people prone to fanaticism is “politically wise”, while an educated and critical people is potentially reactionary. Between such a perception of reality and the idea, wielded in a particularly crude and brutal way by the Khmer Rouge of Pol-Pot in Cambodia or by Mao-Zedong and the communist leaders who promoted the ominous “cultural revolution” in China, according to which the fact of having read many “bourgeois” books turns human beings into reactionaries, there is no great difference.
In essence, for López Obrador, the concept of “people” only includes those sectors of the population that support the fourth transformation by virtue of the fact that they have not been intellectually corrupted by the media powers and by the ideological apparatuses of the neoliberal oligarchy. For López Obrador, being good implies being poor and being wise implies fully accepting the project of the fourth transformation. Within this primitive and Manichaean logic, “aspirational” entrepreneurs whose personal ambition has led them to generate wealth and sources of employment remain outside the concept of “good and wise” people; environmentalists and communities that question the construction of the Mayan train; the social movements and groups that criticize the government’s security policy and that include, among others, feminists and journalists; the academics and intellectuals of both the center right and the center left who criticize the public policies and legislative reforms promoted by the federal executive power, as well as all those opinion leaders who have dared to question the veracity of the statements and figures with which the López Obrador government intends to demonstrate its achievements, including the grotesque and daily assertion that murders attributable to organized crime are on the decline when every day we Mexicans wake up hearing news that reveals the terrible and apparently unstoppable spiral of violence in which we find ourselves immersed.
Demagoguery is synonymous with lies and deceit. The truth of things is that López Obrador is not due to the people of Mexico, López Obrador is due to himself and to the political group that he leads and that, together with his caudillo, intends to perpetuate himself in power. The concept “love of the good and wise people” is part of a deceptive, fraudulent and terribly dangerous ideological narrative. It is a concept that seeks to numb consciences by appealing to basic emotions. A concept that could perfectly be framed within a broad genre of discursive constructions that, as Karl Marx rightly denounced, operate as a kind of opium that neutralizes the ability of human beings to criticize the way in which the state of the world is organized and works. which they are part of.
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