Political Factionalism in Mexico Facing the Shock of the Future
Diego Martin Velázquez Caballero
https://www.semanarioelreto.com/single-post/el-faccionalismo-pol%C3%ADtico-en-m%C3%A9xico
The North American electoral process has confirmed a dispute that all societies maintain in the face of modernity and continuous progress. Deep down, it remains the same as always, despite the fact that it changes protagonists, flags, contexts and rhetoric: liberals and conservatives. Even though it seemed that the American civil war had settled the point, the characteristics that distinguish the Trump Nation - American Native - show that the North-South divide is still conflicted in some way.
When, how and why progress? The answer depends on the elites and their interests, while society remains on the sidelines, as it can have little influence against the system that is imposed on it. The economic, political and social challenges posed by runaway modernization have pulverized the party system and realigned elites in various countries in search of options to maintain their hegemony. There is no struggle between globalphobics and globalizers but between elites and oligarchies that have chained their interests and companies to one or another project. The masses, but above all the weak and naive middle class, can do little to avoid this dilemma.
John Gray, the skeptical conservative English philosopher, considered, like AMLO - keeping the proper proportions - that the pandemic was going to reorient public policies towards a strengthening of the State and internal economies. It didn't happen like that, it won't happen like that.
While MORENA, or the 4T, or what AMLO understands by Revolutionary Conservative, they try to generate a nationalist capitalism, PRIANRD or México Sí, or FRENAA, or whatever the clerofascists understand by conservative liberalism, they are achieving notable advances with respect to the elections from 2021.
The dilemma of survival in the face of globalization is so serious that the parties have put aside their ideological doctrines and in true leaps of faith have decided to gamble. Factionalism and transfuguism are carried out immorally for all sides. Andrés Oppenheimer, in two simple but illuminating books about the future, warns that the automation and digitization of the world are inevitable. Countries will have to prepare to face competition that is no longer against companies but against humanity itself. The pandemic has locked a large part of human beings on the internet and the other is facing COVID-19 amidst uncertainty. Technology and machines seem to have defeated human beings. Jorge Castañeda, in another old analysis of Japan - as Oppenheimer himself does - considered basic income or minimum social justice policies essential while society assimilates technological advance. The division between technocrats and politicians seems to have lost meaning and a new scheme of techno / optimists and techno / pessimists begins to take on identity.
Schools and teachers are being forced to close technological and social gaps. It is true that contexts are not always suitable for everyone, but; somehow, educational actors adapt to the trends of virtual neoliberalism. In Oppenheimer's text - Who can save himself - we find that digitization will only allow the survival of two jobs: the highly sophisticated and those that can hardly be done by a robot. This assumption is important for thinking about education and how context influences.
Economy and technology imply costs that not everyone can pay, they obey oligarchic interests that seek to maintain their hegemony, but individuals - and sometimes the State as a social contract - must seek options to correct the abuses and defects that this situation generates. Faced with automation and digitization, two types of jobs will survive: 1. Those that are very sophisticated and require permanent training to update themselves, and 2. Jobs that depend on physical skills and resistance that artificial intelligence robots cannot. do. The other jobs will be literally swept away. Hence, becoming aware of the way that technology influences economic development leads to running towards one of the two extremes. That is why education is essential in this process. On the one hand, the issue of soft skills constitutes the only source of survival in an almost apocalyptic context, the school has become an exclusive refuge where people -of any age- will go to recover in mentality, attitudes and aptitudes. Actually, the transmission of knowledge will be less and less in schools and, nevertheless, the fraternity and humanism that distinguish teaching will be the main incentive. For this reason, although schools and teachers may not have the latest technology, they are convergent spaces for training, recovery and formation of social expectations. It is talking about the industrial and financial transformation so serious for people who need to promote resistance, courage and cunning as the essence of the human condition in addition to technological training.
Many jobs have disappeared and will disappear in the face of a hybrid and virtual reality that is increasingly imposed on us in an almost totalitarian way. Education, for the most part, will be hybrid, although for the privileged and not so privileged, it will be informal. Humanity lives a technological, economic, health trauma -shock-; which is raising the need for accelerated changes. Some signals were given by those who drive the robotic and cyber world, but nothing is written. It is humanism that can and always has redeemed people.
Governments, parties and politics are rethinking themselves in the face of a reality that, as has happened in other historical moments, could be used to reduce suffering and the lack of opportunities for millions of people. The internet, automation, aeronautics, robotics and digitization no longer run the same risk as, in their time, nuclear energy; now economic interests freely and utilitarian manage their access.
Automation and digitization are huge opportunities for government practice. The new possibility of conquering space and colonizing planets are options for Mexican emigration. The future awaits a government capable of taking advantage of the conditions. Not afraid of the future, says Yehezkel Dror, but the MORENA government has been paralyzed.
The question in Mexico is that neither MORENA nor the PRIANRD Pragmatic Poliparty Coalition have options for the post-Covid world. Nowhere are serious and real models developed to execute effective actions. The apocalypse is not over yet, but it will end. And there is no glimpse of how Mexico will live when economies have to open up. There is not enough time for MORENA to try to create a bourgeoisie in the south, as the right did in the north at the time. The severe economic recession that the United States is experiencing is not a bridge for the market to solve things as the traditional Mexican bourgeoisie wishes.
Why was the infrastructure not built to bring water from the south to the north, or to the desert south itself? By when will the federal agencies leave the capital? Until when will AMLO take his own ideas seriously? The six-year term has been bogged down in a factional struggle that is dangerous for governance. In a post-pandemic but highly automated and digitized world, informality and crime are safe receptacles if universal education and the abatement of digital illiteracy are not guaranteed. Morena's nationalist capitalism requires the energies that Donald Trump lacked to build the wall, a centralization of power for which time is running out. Approval does not mean electoral preference and, compared to 2021, Q4 is being canceled. If AMLO bets on internal capitalism, the infrastructure can no longer wait; on the other hand, if neoliberal globalization will continue to be the unavoidable route, the issue of education and social equity cannot be postponed.
While the MORENA governments are only trying to attract, in a crude and ridiculous way, the defectors of the factual powers to rebuild the model of the PRI State, the world is advancing towards dystopian stages that were predicted in the next two hundred years. The future is closer and closer and it will not stop with societies like Mexico, and others, that do not resolve their digital and economic gaps. Automation and digitization cause millions of unemployment, the pandemic will also affect the economy and leave a deep hole in public social protection. It is paradoxical that Vicente Fox is still right: not only has he been right with the legalization of marijuana, he was also right with the idea that the English language is necessary for Mexican emigrants to work better in the United States; now gardeners will be needed on Mars. Then, Amlo asks Marta Sahagún for the pills or the extreme right proposes her as a future candidate for the presidency of the republic for Morena or Mexico Sí.