The Conservative Pact
Diego Martín Velázquez Caballero
It is not the first time that a president of Mexico tries to imitate the government period of Gral. Lázaro Cárdenas del Río. The initial event occurred with Luis Echeverría Álvarez -LITEMPO, a CIA agent- who had the Yankee task of replacing the leftist leaderships in Latin America. Echeverrismo built one of the most important political networks in the Mexican political system, but it is nothing like Cardenismo. Now, López Obrador tries to carry out a scheme similar to that of Cardenista revolutionary nationalism and he is wrong, as much or more, than LEA. The ruler faithful to the Cardenista style of governing, paradoxically, has been Carlos Salinas de Gortari, only with adverse results to the Michoacan revolutionary: Cardenismo is one of the symbolic branches of the Revolutionary Family, Salinism was expelled from the technocratic domain and the PRI cliques.
However, salinismo and cardenismo were equivalent in deactivating the risk pivots for the Mexican political system and restructuring the lines of governance, at least during their six-year period. Both constitute formal attempts at modernization in contemporary history.
The president's criticism of the middle classes and the universities shows that, as a LEA, he is a pillar of salt looking to the past. The only thing that cannot be stopped is time, but the president - along with the usual dinosaurs - is determined to maintain the medieval colonized society that is afraid to look into the eyes of the future.
The millions of Mexicans who voted for his option, considered that the fight against corruption and rebuilding the Mexican State were MORENA's main tasks. Neither one nor the other. The purpose is to rebuild the modus vivendi and solve conservatism everywhere. The Mexican State has to respond to the challenges of a globalized, digital, robotic and spatial world, which is just around the corner. Will it also be necessary to bury as it was done with the pyramids? Mexicans will be able to face globalization when the cancer of corruption is over.
Why are the universities and the middle classes enemies in the president's rhetoric? Why is Carlos Salinas de Gortari the arch-enemy of Mexican populism? Claudio Lomnitz constructs an interesting hypothesis regarding the non-Jewish anti-Semitism that revolutionary nationalism contains. Populists and conservatives of the Porfirian era, rejected - perhaps with justified reason - the role played by the scientists and technocrats of the incipient positivist dictatorship. The scientist (university, intellectual, academic, Piarist) was described as a Jew - an archetype of the fascist insane myth - by the protagonists of the Mexican historical dialectic and, as no one wanted to modernize, a revolution was made. North America was also interested in the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution, according to research by Friederich Katz.
The university was constituted as the sounding board of reason and science. In less than 500 years, the West achieved hegemony thanks to the liberalization that developed in higher education centers. The tandem of the Enlightenment and modernity was structured in the universities that allowed the passage of the medieval order to modern societies.
Reason became autarkic, poetic, systemic and referential thanks to the instruction, mastery of technique, freedom and dialogue that European universities built as a route to modernization.
This is the reason why the Catholic Church, the monarchs and the State (sometimes understood as the Army), try to control it and do it in their own way.
University thought can upset the world, find that extreme relativism that leads to nihilistic agnosticism and also provoke cultural revolutions that change the hegemony of values.
The institutions of the old regime observe in the University Pandora's Box, the Socratic school that can pervert the generations and break the social order. This is what happened with the hegemonic loss of the Catholic Church in Europe.
The criticism pointed out to the UNAM by the President of the Republic obeys this tenor. Mexican society despises its youth and university students. Left and right will never be satisfied with the university, they are incapable of responding to the role and critical nature of the institution.
Carlos Salinas de Gortari was a neoliberal technocratic university student who took seriously the economic liberalism that the PAN only proclaimed, but also understood the necessary economic modernization that legal liberalism required, he called it social liberalism. Salinas is considered the Plutarco Elías Calles of the 21st century, although he was called to be the Mustafa Kemal Ataturk of Mexicanness, the silent revolution of the technocrats was the change of the young Turks to rebuild a civilization.
The objectives of the Mexican revolution were lost as political civilism, modus vivendi and corporatism advanced. The political degeneration of Mexico could be stopped during Salinas, but the cost implied integration into North America and the national group was not willing to take the next step. What followed was a neoliberal comedy that disguised the distorting and degenerative inertias of Mexican political culture to radiate a corruption and social decomposition that has led to the Failed State.
Cárdenas and Salinas managed to correct the degenerative trajectories of the Mexican political system by restructuring the political class and the military sector of their cliques for just one six-year term. Salinas and Cárdenas invited the conservatives of the time to the modernizing pact, both - like Colosio - were betrayed. The Caciques-Holy See-United States nomenklatura was imposed to continue colonizing Mexico. Lázaro Cárdenas and Carlos Salinas de Gortari had different preparation, but they had in common the youth in power and the strong will to modernize the country. Nothing to do with the 4T.
Manuel Gómez Morin was a modernizer who gave up the opportunity to be a Cardenista because of the false consciousness of belonging to different social groups. General Cárdenas wasted no time analyzing whether Catholics will one day be modern. The Cardenistas made their institution of higher education, the noble National Polytechnic Institute, which has done so much good for Mexico. Only time will see if the 4Q university school proposals have similar results. To the Normals and Teachers of Cardenismo, the country owes the incalculable.
Gómez Morín and Cosío Villegas kept the ideas as weapons to influence the medieval university cloisters and generate a current like the one represented by Carlos Salinas de Gortari fifty years after the Cardenismo. In the end, Gómez Morín and Cárdenas had more coincidences. Hopefully the Gomezmorinian cry "Mexico exists" will be heard by Hispanists who continue to see the country as a bastard (Carlos Sola Ayape) and who think of the university as an Opus Dei community of a different "social group".
Luis Paredes Moctezuma, an organized Catholic nationalist, pointed out that the best ally of uncompromising integralism was AMLO. Indeed, the criticisms of the middle class and the universities are an example of a Mexican revolutionary conservatism like the one that Claudio Lomnitz points out. Francoists, freemasons and caciques are happy with the governments of the 4T. Doesn't Mexico have the right to modernity? The Francoists, Freemasons and Caciques, do not love Mexico; they are foreign and matriarchal; But the development of the national state and its historical consolidation is a task that takes more time than the democratic transition. Are there democracies without territory, law and population? The relationship between the state and democracy is not the chicken-and-egg dilemma.