Two days after the expulsion of Nicolás Redondo Terreros from the PSOE, on Thursday 14, Elías Bendodo, general coordinator of the PP, declared: “Pedro Sánchez’s PSOE is the Soviet Union, with purges included”. And it stayed so wide. Despite the fact that any similarity between the PSOE and the USSR is difficult to prove. Stalinism was terrifying: when he removed one of his notables from the circle of power, moreover, he used to physically eliminate him and then erase him from the photos. It excluded him from the present and even from the past.
The same does not happen here. But in the current political struggle, the analogy is used and abused. Bendodo himself had been a victim in June, when the Andalusian socialist leader Amparo Rubiales called him a “Nazi Jew”. It was based, so to speak, on his Sephardic origin, but he baselessly compared him to a Hitlerite. Thus, he varnished his analogy with very colorful paradoxical brushstrokes. But it was still a false analogy. Since we’re at it, let’s say everything: after the outburst, Rubiales resigned as president of the PSOE in Seville; after his, Bendodo continues as number 3 of the PP.
Analogy is a figure of speech designed to facilitate the understanding of an idea, and it can manifest itself with different tones and intensities, from simile to metaphor. This is, at least, what the grammatical or literary treatises say. But in our political sphere, an unfortunate use of analogy is often made, no longer to clarify ideas, but to obscure them and turn them into weapons of attack. We could say, in the analogical way, that the political analogy undermines dialogue and coexistence today as cholesterol has undermined our health since time immemorial.
The list of examples grows almost every day. Former president Aznar recently had one of his cloudiest days and proposed a new ¡Basta Ya! movement, this time to deal with the new amnesty law that is being promoted by the current Spanish Government led by Pedro Sánchez. It was a sibylline and lying way of establishing an analogy between those who outline measures of grace for the Catalan separatists, with the aim of redoing coexistence, without breaking the Constitution, and the Etara terrorism responsible for 850 murders.
Neither did the socialist spokeswoman who responded by comparing him to a coup plotter. Aznar is a conservative with an ultra-centralist, patrimonialist and reductionist vision of Spain. But Tejero, the underlying figure in the socialist analogy, was something worse.
In the past there were parliamentarians in this country with careful rhetoric, whom the chronicles say was a joy to listen to, such as Castelar, Pi i Margall, Sagasta, Cánovas or Azaña. But this tradition has generally been dilapidated. Last year, they competed for the Castelar prize, given by parliamentary journalists, deputies Errejón and Rufián and deputy Arrimadas. I say nothing more.
The constant – and deviant – recourse to analogy in political speeches only serves, most of the time, to demonstrate the argumentative poverty of the speakers. Unable to articulate the advantages of their proposals, and to convince with their own reasons, they resort to more or less capricious analogies to consolidate their position with other cases. They aspire to convince, but only diverge.
We are talking about politicians as champions of this misguided practice. But it is also common for mortals to fall into it, when in any discussion, lacking argumentative force, we introduce phrases of the type “it’s as if…”. Without taking into account that when one says “it is as if…” he is expressing his inability to convince through the reasons claimed by the case, his distrust of them and, instead, his confidence in an analogical argument, which perhaps it has little relation to the subject of the debate, but from which a borrowed triumph is vainly expected.
Having said that, the analogy in a private conversation is one thing and the analogy of a politician on the podium of the Congress of Deputies, or in any public scene, is another. Castelar, to whom we have already alluded, pronounced a sentence that is often forgotten by those who have succeeded him in this tribune: “After distrust in one’s own judgment, comes immorality in life”.
