Politics, where improvisation and lack of method are rarely rewarded

At the beginning of the last century, Walter Lippmannthe two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, American philosopher and media critic, made it absolutely clear that in every complex society, we subjects understand the world from mental images. These constructions, closely related to what George LakoffAmerican linguist and expert in political communication, years later called “metaphors”, they are cognitive strongholds that allow us to understand, to a certain degree, the challenging reality that surrounds us.

Through mental images, metaphors and schemes, on a daily basis, we face a world full of uncertainty and we convince ourselves that we “understand” what is happening, especially in moments of extreme agonality such as electoral times.

“The oven is not for buns”, “we are going to fly through the air”, “Argentina is very bullish”, “don’t make curlers”, “we have to get through the winter”, “the rodrigazo is coming”, They are metaphors, mental images and common schemes in our national political imagination that quickly indicate what we are trying to refer.

The image of the lion, for example, has concentrated throughout much of the history of humanity, certain attributes of majesty and fierceness, causing tens of thousands of leaders to have wanted to be related to it from that remote and intriguing Babylon until today. .

Paradoxically, if we transcend the mental image and refer it to its real signifier, we find a feline that, beyond that striking mane, rarely hunts, it usually depends for its food on a pack of females that surround it, and sleeps up to 20 hours a day. The lion, for example, is not the fastest feline, nor agile, nor cunning. Simply, he is the one who best conveys an image of power that, many times, does not end up being such.

In that same African savanna lives another feline less used in political language.

Without all those image attributes that the lion has, the Acinonyx jubatus, also known as the cheetah or cheetah, is a skilled hunter, with a privileged view that allows it to predict the movement of its prey from a distance, and that, to its extraordinary agility to climb and pursue their victims both in the horizontal and vertical planes, adds the cruel cunning of twilight predators and extraordinary speed.

That is why some of us, in the last month and a half of the campaign, insisted on stating that “the lion is powerful, but in the last hundred meters, the cheetah is lethal.”

Hours after the elections, a colleague whom I respect and admire, who usually shows off in the cafes of Buenos Aires, sharply analyzing reality, wearing his historic beret and always having a good brand cigar on his lips, wrote to me: “I “The best thing about this first place in Massa is the validity of politics as a professional and autonomous activity.”

The phrase, which inevitably refers to political thinkers of the stature of Thucydides, Machiavelli, Weber or, more contemporary, Carl Schmittrefers to that esoteric nature and immune to all ethics with a claim to transcendence that is Politics, like this, with capital letters; also understood as that cruel scaffold to which they are going to die marching in single file, all the good intentions. An interlude between worlds where improvisation and lack of method are rarely rewarded and where persistence and the will to fight against all circumstances usually crown the winner.

Without accepting that this ghostly and dark world for the layman is a field different from all the others, it is impossible to understand how a political subject, historically hated by Kirchnerism, with a worn-out public image, who knew how to waste several historical opportunities, which today he holds the lead shirt of being the minister of economy of, perhaps, the worst government since the return of democracy and leading a country that is on the verge of hyperinflation, manages to finish a national election less than 4 points away from winning in the first round.

From this last perspective, and beyond any other consideration about his person, the feat of Sergio Tomas Massa It marks him as one of the politicians with the most will, ambition, persistence and gift of opportunity in recent decades, regardless of the result he achieves. next November 19.

But beyond that, today it represents a palpable example of the imperative need for all those who, from any ideology or origin, wish to make politics, Do so understanding that this is a professional activity with its own language, history, practices and codes and, above all, an activity that is very intolerant of improvisation, clumsiness, fanaticism and naivety.