[Politics] Ernesto Semán: "More than polarization, what there is in Argentina is a clear radicalization of the right"

[Deii]

For the Argentine writer and historian, there is no counterpart to the level of confrontation and the violently critical ideas promoted by the right regarding social, racial and political sectors.


 

Every Argentine who lives abroad long enough for the country to be in the news at some point has to answer a couple of commonplaces about Argentina: why so much conflict, how come there isn't widespread prosperity? if they have it all cows rivers mountains fields climates? To the Argentine writer and historian Ernesto Semán, who has lived abroad for 22 years (18 in the United States and four in Norway), these questions seem, frankly, “nonsense”. But when they appear, before giving in to rejection, he resorts to the teaching habit of pulling the string of questions. To see what they say about the perceptions that people have about themselves and about the place where they live.

 

"Everyone talks as if they had solved the distribution problem, right?" That kind of moral panic about what is happening in the country, says Semán, "has to do with naturalizing that there is no distributive conflict that justifies the unleashing of political, social or economic crises." Or, in another way: it is not understanding why a group, a political movement, can paralyze a country or a sector to fight for salaries, for subsidies, to defend acquired benefits. That is not understanding the unique relationship that an Argentine can have with what he considers his basic rights, an idea that in political traditions such as Peronism —but not exclusively— includes the “need to attend or pay attention to material achievements”. Populist identities in Argentina and Latin America, says Semán, suppose particular ways of thinking about equality and struggles for income distribution, but that escapes a view that only sees populism as a sort of crisis of the rule of law.

Ernesto Semán is a professor of Latin American History at the University of Bergen, in Norway, and before that he was a professor at the University of Richmond, in the United States, and before that he was a journalist for the Argentine newspapers Página/12 and Clarín. As a political reporter, he got to know the Kirchners closely, with whom he forged a relationship that, starting in 2003, would also become a collaboration link with the Argentine government through the consulate in New York, where Semán had gone to live in 2000 to write fiction. Between novels and works on politics and history, he has published seven books. The last one, Brief history of anti-populism, is a journey through the origins and drifts of the idea that Argentina is founded on a threatening plebeian world, a mass of barbarians who must be contained and guided in order to gain access to “ a modern and prosperous future.

https://elpais.com/internacional/2022-08-21/ernesto-seman-mas-que-polarizacion-lo-que-hay-en-argentina-es-una-clara-radicalizacion-de-la-derecha.html