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.

To rescue the public university from its current drift toward insignificance, it is imperative to transmute the discipline: to move from the exegesis of complaint to the engineering of solutions. In a Mexico where democratic indicators are languishing and the State is fragmenting in the face of disorder, the ability to solve complex technical problems is the only real shield against servitude.
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.

The Conservative Pact

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.