The evidence accumulates. He latest report on values from the Center for Opinion Studies (CEO), the Catalan equivalent of the CIS, revealed two weeks ago that Young people between 16 and 24 years old are the most willing to give up living in a democratically governed country if in exchange they are guaranteed a decent standard of living. A couple of days ago, The country published a survey that showed that that same section, young people from 18 to 24, was the strongest in Vox (22%), a democratic but authoritarian party (without a doubt the most demonized by the media, despite the fact that reality has been confirming some of its most unpopular theses). According to our own CIS, those under 35 years of age are the Spaniards who least believe that democracy is better than any other form of government. In fact, 12% defend that in some circumstances an authoritarian government is preferable to a democratic one.
It is not a Spanish phenomenon: just look at the electoral results in countries as different as Italy, El Salvador and the United States, where the options for order win or grow significantly, despite the hostility of the majority of the media. Many liberals attribute these data to the fact that young people have never experienced a dictatorship. It is true, and it surely influences, but what does What they have suffered is a liberal democracy like Spain's, with its high levels of unemployment, inability to access housing – even for rent – and records of sterile political brawls.. When they come of age, they have found a society based on weak ties, with decaying institutions and a labor market where contacts weigh much more than merit.
All this got me reading a splendid anthology Donoso Cortes: the illiberal reason (Ubi sunt), selection by the young political scientist Yesurún Moreno Gallardo with a prologue by the prestigious Dalmacio Negro. It is dazzling to now remember the lucidity of Juan Donoso Cortés, first Marquis of Valdegamas, a reactionary realist who defended the Catholic religion as a space of freedom against progressive politics. His capacity for analysis reached the point of predicting that a workers' revolution was more likely in Saint Petersburg than in London, when Marx thought that there were hardly any possibilities in Russia. All this almost a century before the Bolshevik uprising.
Donoso Cortés, prophetic
Donoso's words resonate strongly in these years of sanchismo. “There is no autocrat – clearly, despot or tyrant – who does not presume to be a democrat. And, as Robert Spaemann said shortly before he died, lCurrent states are totalitarian even though they proclaim themselves 'liberal'. “A kind of covert dictatorship”. Donoso believed in the principle of Roman law that reads Salus populi suprema lex est, something he defended in public, for example, in his vehement parliamentary speech for the bill on states of exception. “The people do not complain, they cannot complain, about a dictatorship that saves them,” he defends, a phrase that can be very useful when it comes to understanding the current authoritarian drift on the planet. Why do ordinary people perceive certain dictators, with or without quotes, as preferable to self-proclaimed democrats?
Donoso saw clearly two centuries ago that Catholicism and tradition were the best defense against progressive mirages
Donoso offered a clear explanation in our Congress of Deputies, during an applauded intervention in January 1849: “Gentlemen, if it were a question here of choosing, of choosing between freedom, on the one hand, and dictatorship, on the other, here it is not there would be no dissent; Because who, being able to embrace freedom, kneels before dictatorship? Well, this is not the question. Freedom does not in fact exist in Europe, the constitutional governments that represented it years ago are no longer almost everywhere, gentlemen, but a framework, a lifeless skeleton”, he proclaims. “It is about choosing between the dictatorship that comes from below and the dictatorship that comes from above; I choose the one that comes from above, because it comes from cleaner and more serene regions; It is about choosing between the dictatorship of the fist and the dictatorship of the saber; I choose the dictatorship of the saber, because it is more noble,” he concludes.
Many things have changed since the 19th century. The most notable: that the left has become a technocracy to ally itself with global elites. On the contrary, a certain right has become authoritarian and has found its political bases in ordinary people. It is no longer so clear who represents the dagger and who the sword, but it is not difficult to see where the “noblest” option is. Donoso saw clearly two centuries ago that Catholicism and the classics are the best defense against progressive mirages.
