Political Science as Cosa Nostra
Political Science as Cosa Nostra
Diego Martín Velázquez Caballero
Political science in Mexican public universities is not only at an existential crossroads; it inhabits a morgue of empty concepts. The spirit of Emilio Uranga, that philosopher of the Hyperion who dissected the ontology of the Mexican only to then surrender himself to the arms of absolute power, seems to have returned in a degraded and cynical version. Today, the university "intellectual" no longer seeks to explain the world, but rather, in an act of pure nihilism, decides to kill everything: the transition, democracy, and science, in order to make a final pact with the regime in power. The intellectual's suicide is not Socratic but Machiavellian.
This attitude, which some mistake for pragmatism, is in reality criminal cronyism. It is the literal application of Mario Puzo's maxim: when the law is an obstacle and institutions are empty shells, "it's better to have a godfather than a father." The political system, seen as a mafia of clans, has infiltrated academia, transforming the political scientist into a consigliere whose sole function is to grease the wheels of external power into university autonomy. It is not revenge against neoliberalism; it is the natural reaction of someone who, seeing that their library no longer serves to wield influence, decides to burn it down to heat the coffee of the new despot.
The rescue plan must be based on data literacy and a humanist technocracy. The political scientist of the future cannot be a mere spectator at book fairs or an identity manager who negotiates their entry into government as an infiltrator; they must be an architect of evidence-based public policies. The country doesn't need more rhetoric about "the people" while water stress collapses cities or organized crime audits the economy.
We need professionals capable of handling econometric models, understanding critical infrastructure, and auditing the algorithms that currently govern popular will.
The university must banish the academic kitsch that celebrates mediocrity under the guise of
"social conscience." A return to the rigor of the applied sciences in the social sphere is fundamental, where the study of democracy is complemented by cybersecurity, supply chain logistics, and environmental impact assessment. Institutional recovery demands that internal administration cease to be a public relations agency or a prize for the "godfather" of the moment, and instead become a highly complex laboratory.
Each seminar on Uranga's theory of power must be balanced with a workshop on big data analysis. Only in this way will the graduate cease to be the "intellectual gardener" of the elites—or the government informant—and become the technician who diagnoses and repairs the fractures of the State. True university autonomy is not defended with slogans sold to the highest bidder under the sophistry of political science for the grassroots, but with the technical excellence that makes the professional indispensable for the functioning of the country.
The attitude of the intellectual who colludes with power to infiltrate his own house—the university—is a symptom of a larger pathology: the belief that politics is merely a succession of betrayals and patronage. This view, inherited from a misunderstood realism, is what has killed faith in the democratic transition in Mexico. If the political scientist surrenders to Puzo's logic, he admits that science is dead and only the court remains.
If the political scientist educated in public schools does not learn to master the tools of technological modernity, the system will devour him without remorse, or worse, turn him into another cog in the machine of corruption. The salvation of the Mexican public university lies in its capacity to produce minds that not only understand the world but also possess the surgical skill to transform it in the face of the blindness of populism and the voraciousness of disorder. Political science must cease to be the study of "who owes whom." to become the design of "how we make this work."
Mexico no longer has room for "Urangas" who justify authoritarianism out of resentment, nor for "Godfathers" who trade scholarships for loyalties. We need a political science that is, above all, a technical defense of freedom.
Political science is currently experiencing its darkest hour, the victim of an intellectual suicide perpetrated by those who, in the name of a supposed popular exceptionalism, have decided to dismantle the ladder of abstraction in order to sink into the mire of sentimentalism. The Mexican case is the most alarming symptom of this regression: what some casually call the political science of the downtrodden is nothing more than the capitulation of rigor to the sultanate. Sartori warned that when language is corrupted, politics is degraded; today we see how systemic analysis is replaced by an outdated liberation theology that, under a Marxist-Maoist veneer and a sloganistic anti-Zionism, ends up legitimizing the most archaic structure of power: the patrimonial system of local bosses.
This shift toward illiberal populism is not progress, but a return to the Americanized Sicily, that mafia republic where the law is not a general and abstract norm, but a fickle pact between factions and powerful interests. By embracing the idea that deprivation exempts one from modernity, the regime's intellectuals have created a perfect alibi for authoritarianism. The argument of poverty becomes the foundation of voluntary servitude, where the citizen is reduced to a corporate client and the ruler to a sultan who despises political science because technical truth hinders his arbitrary will. The political science of the downtrodden is, in reality, a political science for the elite, since it grants the populist elite the divine right to govern without checks and balances, under the pretext of a historical debt that is never settled, only managed.
The disdain for technocracy and institutional liberalism has left the State defenseless against Hobbesian disorder. While the university classroom is lost, the narco-state and institutional failures deepen, precisely because the engineering of solutions has been abandoned. However, the most compelling evidence against this exceptionalism of poverty lies not in treaties, but at the border. The millions of Mexicans who cross into the United States or Canada do not change their human essence; they change their incentive system. It is not culture that condemns Mexico, but the extractive institutions that populists today defend as sovereignty. The Mexican who prospers in the north demonstrates that the problem is not our inability to be modern, but an elite that prefers to govern a poor sultanate rather than a republic of free citizens. Political science must recover its surgical vocation and abandon the exegesis of complaints. If we are unable to transmute resentment into technical excellence, we will remain trapped in this academic simulation, watching the country crumble while street prophets celebrate the ruins in the name of the people. True autonomy and the only shield against the mafia republic lie in the rigor that populism so fears.
