A political essayist obsessed with social transformations that transcend the material, Esteban Hernández (Madrid, 1965) has laid bare in titles such as El fin de la clase media the processes by which social structures are modified and has composed an atlas that he now expands with El corazón of the present (map of an unknown company), in which he proposes other gaps, beyond those that account for income.
He opens the book with two anecdotes, one about automatic response protocols, and another, the unexpected results of 23-J and the astonishment of the right. Is the second story the result of the first?
When you operate politically and need results, you read the society from which you send your messages. When the answers are automated and the product of your bubbles, you generate first an ankylosed view of society and, second, a way of interpreting it that offers very banal answers. And this has been the case: the left’s interpretation of the municipal and regional elections in May and the right’s interpretation of the general elections in July are wrong because they are the product of this kind of trivialized thinking.
Let’s look at the first pair: aspirational and embarrassed.
This takes place in large cities, such as Madrid or Barcelona. You have a city where there are the big communication companies, the law, the consultancy, the high administration of the State and the universities. You create a climate where there is bustle, excitement, possibility. A lot of people from the inner cities come there. They are middle-class people, that is to say, they are the people who can pay for their stay in Madrid, not just their studies. They’re all waiting for their moment to come, so it’s an aspirational activity. Sure, what’s up? That there are many people who come for this and fail. When you perceive that it will not touch you or that the money is no longer coming to you, you have to leave or live in the city. Or you change profession to another of social disrepute. People tend to hide, because they feel the shame of the middle class: “I don’t want to be seen on guard”.
Another of its pairs: connected against immobile.
It has to do with network settings. You have a central core in Madrid around which other territories develop. It’s becoming a border. The further you get away from the core or the less connected you are to the core, the less chance you have. Professionally, if you live in the provinces and you don’t have money, you won’t have connections. You need at least two of the three things: money and connections, or money and living in the right place. There are many places that have good life connections, so to speak, but lack opportunities, where you think you can have a future, but the city, no. And you live well, but you have the feeling that things are not working and you are afraid that everything will go to shit.
And, even with the capital, there are cities whose trade is dying and which only gather people where there are terraces.
For me, this element is decisive because, in general, in the West, politics has been defined by the fight between the core of the network, which absorbs resources, and the rest of the territory. It is France with Paris, the United Kingdom with London or the United States with the coasts. And it is Argentina with Buenos Aires. For us, the great territorial dividing line, on the other hand, is the line of the Ebro. It was clearly seen in the elections: from the Ebro line down, the presence of Vox and the PP did not scare. Instead, there is the Basque Country, Navarre and Catalonia. And this is a State that has two global cities, Madrid and Barcelona, ??and here there is a huge point of friction.
In “optimists contra farts” he describes optimism as a political malpractice.
It is a form of fantasy, of forgetting problems. Among the national enlightened classes, you would put a problem on the table and say: “Well, it’s true, but it’s conjunctural, we’ll have ideal solutions in less than nothing”. And the highest point is the technological fantasy: “I will take rockets to Mars and the cars will drive themselves”. With inflated expectations, there are people who have made a lot of money.
Has the right become the patron saint of the sick?
Yes, that’s right. He has lived to better identify the existence of these foci and channel them towards their positions. Spain is a special place in this regard, but in the West it has been like this.
“Innovators versus experienced”. Is it generational?
I wanted to go a little beyond the old-young axis. It has to do with the difficulty of enforcing what has already been done. And, in this sense, it doesn’t matter if you have a lot of experience or a little. There is no accumulation. But the processes in general are cumulative, that is to say, people grow because they make progress. You start with a potential and then develop it. But this accumulation is biased, because any moment can put you at zero, and today the learning that is done is not about improving the activity, it is about improving how to survive.
It’s flexibility. Of couse.
You don’t learn to do your job, you learn to be flexible, to be smart about the codes of the company or the sector. If you know how to do it, you will be fine, apart from your work. This completely changes the framework.
Close with a praise of balance. He must not be an optimist.
It’s historical, it’s in Aristotle and Machiavelli: in all societies, and it doesn’t matter if it’s capitalist or communist, there are people who have a lot of power and people who have little. The difference between some regimes and others, and it was also the case for Pericles, is the ability to make these differences shorter and manageable through agreements. When all agreements are broken and societies are divided, not only do they have strong internal tensions, but they suffer enormous temptations to dominate by force what they have not been able to dominate by consensus. And this is our moment, a historic moment. Because the consensus between those who have and those who don’t makes one society tend to endure over time much more than another. And I am convinced of this position.
