Opening image: proportions of the Spanish-speaking population in the US, according to 2010 data (Wikimedia)
Helen Andrews is an American writer, journalist, and editor-in-chief of The American Conservative. From 2012 to 2017, he was a researcher at the Center for Independent Studies in Sydney, having previously edited the Washington Examiner. He is the author of Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster, published in January this year. *** In June 2020, a Democratic Political Action Committee called Priorities USA began campaigning among Spaniards with a video that “our families did not come to America to replace one caudillo (the common name for Latin American dictators - ed.)”. Writes Helen Andrews in her essay The American Conservative. He recalls that the cut below the text showed Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, and the Democrats immediately offered a solution: "We don't need a caudillo, but a caballero (gentleman - ed.) Like Joe Biden." At about the same time, Donald Trump recorded his campaign song for Spaniards: “La buena vida! The economy! Hazlo por tu familia! Yo voy a votar por Donald Trump! ” ("The good life! The economy! Do it for your family! I'm going to vote for Donald Trump!") The short bastard announced. According to Andrews Trump also had success with it: he also won Florida and Texas, he won in the border counties inhabited by Hispanics with the greatest advantage, and received an even higher proportion of Latino votes in 2020 than in 2016, even though he already surpassed Mitt Romney’s 2012 result. “The Spanish-speakers who voted for Hillary Clinton pulled the trigger on it,” Andrews said. The author puts it this way, the Republican Party has traditionally developed two ways of thinking about Hispanics: there are amnesty parties like the Bush family who say “softening the party’s immigration policy is the only way to avoid political insignificance”; and there are fatalist pessimists who say that “if America’s demographics ever begin to resemble California, the national party will inevitably follow the California Republican Party into irrelevance”. According to him With his success among Latinos, Trump refuted both concepts. “It’s not a question of whether a Conservative party can win among Spaniards. The question is what the Spaniards will do with conservatism if they become integral parts of their coalition. Immigrants exert a gravitational effect proportional to their numbers, bringing the policies of their host country closer to the policies of the places they have left. By 2050, the United States will be made up of a third of Hispanics. Now is the time to ask what it will mean for our policy to become more Latin American, ”Andrews argues. According to the author, it is not socializing or dictating to say that Trump’s style resembled Hugo Chávez in many ways: Twitter resembled Chávez from 1999 to 2012 on the Venezuelan public television show, Aló, President. “None of them could expect a flattering news service from the journalism department, so they were forced to build direct channels of communication to the audience. They both agreed on a similar personality that is cheeky, spontaneous, peculiar, and surprisingly funny, ”Andrews says. Remaining with Venezuela, the author mentions that the South American oil power was the best-running country in Latin America in the 1980s, everyone waited for it to move into the first world - and then, after Chávez’s death, “sank back into the usual cycle of coups and civil wars. ”. According to him the chronic instability of Latin American countries is due to the lack of the middle class, since in none of the Latin American countries does the middle class make up the majority of the population, ‘what is middle class does not exactly fit the Anglo-Saxon definition’ because, thanks to the informal economy, many middle-income people work in black, so Andrews sees the characteristics that make the middle class so desirable in terms of political institution-building do not necessarily stop them - such as predictability, respect for the law, intolerance of corruption ”. Another crab in Latin America, Andrews says, is a lack of social trust. “Neither the laws nor their enforcers are considered impartial. Family dynasties are common in the Third World precisely because, where the general level of trust is low, people have more trust in family relationships where trust can at least be assumed, ”the author writes, citing the Brazilian and Bolivian presidential elections as an example of bias. up: Former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was jailed for corruption in 2018, and one of the strongest supporters of his conviction is a neoliberal Bolivian lawyer,It was Jeanine Añez, who later became President of Bolivia. Three years later, however, Lula was released because the Supreme Court abruptly overturned her verdict and Añez was shut down by her successor on an unfounded charge of incitement. “This imprisonment carousel always raises the stakes for power transfers,” Andrews believes. The author warns that since 2015, the middle class has not made up the majority in the United States, and there are areas on the west coast where inequality is on a Latin American scale, and public order is comparable to that of the Third World. “California’s elite will find the same solution that the Latin American elite has long devised for themselves: isolating itself from the illegitimate elements by building - or emigrating, its own security infrastructure,” Andrews analyzes. Although Andrews said Trump also had Latin American pulls during his presidency (e.g., he organized a white house interior from family members and used macho, insulting language instead of neutral bureaucratic language), in reality “it wasn’t the orange caudillo but his opponents who did more to get started. through Latin American instability, ”as Democrats“ exposed Trump to two unfounded impeachments, one of which happened days before he left office, so the whole process became clearly symbolic and lost the residual weight of impeachment as well ”. However, the author is fortunate that the majority of migrants arriving in the United States come from Mexico, which is the least unstable country in Latin America. He recalls that in Mexico, the party state operated by the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, Institutional Revolutionary Party) lasted for almost 80 years and survived the Soviet Union for a long time. Andrews said the PRI system was the perfect dictatorship, which realized that its critics were worth paying off rather than ransacking; where there were extensive networks of corruption but no labor camps; and press censorship was informal because while anyone could criticize anything, the state oversaw the paper industry and gave the paper to whom it wanted. The main flaw in the system was electoral fraud, with the party’s “alchemists” bringing the right result to every election through vote-buying, chain voting and other methods - greatly contributing to what Andrews cites as the third major problem in Latin American systems: conspiracy theories . “Many Mexicans today believe in extensive conspiracy theories that include drug cartels, corrupt politicians, and police, many of which are entirely conceivable,” the author writes. Vicente Fox’s victory in the 2000 presidential election eventually ended Mexico’s one-party system, but that didn’t solve Mexico’s problems. “Competitive elections require more money than non-competitive ones, and the fact that they need campaign dollars has made politicians, especially through cartels, more affordable,” analyzes Andrews, who warns that the United States will pay attention to this. “In the United States, our notions of political tyranny have been shaped too much by the Cold War. We believe that an American dictatorship will take the form of stifling Slavic totalitarianism. In reality, however, we are much more likely to sink into a Latin American dysfunction that is more chaotic than claustrophobic, ”the author believes. Andrews notes that the U.S. has spent millions of dollars every year for decades to develop Latin America’s political culture. "But what if we've paid them in vain so far to be like us, while we've become more like them?" He asks the question. As he recently moved back from Australia, he also sees signs of this - he was surprised, for example, that the institution of public toilets in the United States had virtually ceased to exist and that the toilets in cafes had become code-locked; in addition, parts of California already look like favelas, and Chicago car hackers are rivaling the bogots, so there will soon be South American-style security guards and security guards in front of malls. Andrews stresses that while many fear that in 15-20 years an American right-wing tyrant will come to power will end American democracy, it is actually “already seeing the rise of conspiratorial thinking” and either those who believe Trump’s conspiracy to erupt are right, or no, in his view, “the result is the same: cynicism and declining demands on norms of political behavior”. In conclusion, he warns that there has been as much impeachment in the country in the last two years as in the first two centuries of US existence, and Trump may be the first president to be convicted after leaving office - so “if Latin American politics is our future, we are on the right track ”.
