Luis Rubio

“The curse of man, and the cause of his worst woes, wrote HL Mencken, is his stupendous capability for believing the incredible. He is forever embracing delusions, and each new one is more preposterous than all that have gone before.” That’s what Mexican politics seems like these days.

The great question with an eye toward 2024 is to what degree will the social base of the president and his popularity be relevant. Though it is not the sole pertinent variable, its transcendence is more than evident.

Three factors appear to be true. First, to date there has not been a single individual who agglutinates the opposition. This variable is key because the president dominates the stage, as if he were the only actor, scarcely complemented (or distracted) by the pre-candidates in his own stable. Although there are some individuals and potential candidates who occasionally show their face, none has been able to capture the imagination of the electorate nor who has come to represent a salient point of competition (or confrontation) for the presidential rhetoric. Time will shape potential options, but only one recognizable and accepted by the wide-reaching electorate would be prone to altering the current vectors of national politics.

Second certainty: popularity is not transferred. The surveys demonstrate that the president’s popularity is not linked to traditional gauges, such as economic growth, which benefits him. But this has the effect of isolating him from day-to-day life, including the fate of his candidates, which could exert an effect on what happens in 2024. One election after another has shown that the party of the president and its candidates wins or loses due more to the mobilization capacity of the Morena party (and of the threatened governors) than to the popularity of the president; where the (diminished) opposition has achieved mobilizing the electorate, Morena has confronted greater rivalry. But where it has lost has been to a greater extent the product of the electorate itself than that of any mobilization.

And, third certainty, the president is a communications genius and has procured that his narrative dominates public discourse and discussion in all orders of Mexican politics. However, as Emilio Lezama fittingly argues, everything has its consequences: “from the pinnacle of political power, AMLO has wrested a convincing narrative that he is not the power, but instead the spokesperson for the general struggle against the ‘true power’… the president has maintained his popularity but has lost a historic opportunity to transform the country. His confrontation with institutions and public personages empowers him but weaken the State. In the final analysis, that is one of the great differences between Lázaro Cárdenas and AMLO, the former employed his coming into power to transform the country and the latter to nurture his popularity.”

The narrative of AMLO has triumphed, but he has done this at the price of his project of national transformation; the president’s success in monopolizing the narrative has come at the cost of forfeiting the advance of his agenda. The president has also distanced himself from his government and Morena, to the degree that on more than one occasion he threatened to withdraw from his party. That distance also enriches his popularity and creates a peculiar phenomenon that will moreover be accompanied by its own consequences: in Fidel’s Cuba, the suffering of the population was legendary because his revolution did not translate into more production, better services or products or a better quality of life. But the Cubans did not blame Fidel Castro: “they don’t tell Fidel how things are, they fool him,” “if Fidel only knew.” That is, the fault was of the government, not the president’s, his strategy, or his poor decisions. Perhaps this explains the enormous and bourgeoning gap between the popularity of the president and that of his government.

Each of these factors obeys its own dynamic, but the totality furnishes a panorama that is increasingly more complex and simultaneously clarifying. The country lives under the spell of a narrative that exalts accumulated resentment and deposits it in the limelight as the political factor that is concurrently the mobilizer of the social base, but also the paralyzer of the economy. One feeds the other, limiting the potential for the country´s development and, paradoxically, impeding the articulation of policies likely to resolve the causes of the inequality and resentment. The strategy of political confrontation is in the end very useful for boosting a person’s profile, but not for improving life levels or the possibility of achieving it.

Nothing better illustrates the imbroglio that national politics is presently undergoing than a December 2021 Alarcón comic strip on the so-called “revocation of the mandate” of the president: “We don’t want him to go, but we want to be asked whether we want him to go to say that we don’t want him to go.” The objectives of the president in promoting the referendum are transparent, but not for that reason does it not end up as a mere deception. Yet another.

The panorama is clear; the country demands a contest to determine its future, a debate which establishes the options going forward, forces clear decisions because the current lack of definition does nothing other than deteriorate the present and cancel out the future. The way out will not come from the spell, but rather from the debate -and the evidence- that unmasks it. While that does not happen, everything will continue in limbo.

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Luis Rubio

1982 was a watershed in Mexican political life. For one part of society, that year’s financial crisis constituted an unequivocal sign of the unviability and, in fact, of the collapse of the economic model that the country had followed at least since 1970. For others, during that period the highest economic-growth rates had been reached in history and, had it not been for the excesses on the financial front, the country could have continued along that pathway in permanent fashion. That discussion is still in force because therein lies the heart of the strategy that urges President López Obrador on.

For the president, the problems that the country experiences are the product of the reforms embarked upon from 1982:  from his perspective, those reforms derived from an erroneous diagnosis, thus creating the reality of inequality and corruption, which he turned into his standard bearer to win the presidency. What were for some attempts at a solution, for others were the cause of the dilemmas of today.

That diagnostic dispute has been the essence of national politics for nearly four decades and diverse presidential candidates along the route represented contrasting opinions on the trajectory in each electoral vote-casting. A crucial issue in that confrontation of views is whether the 2018 election was the product of a change of perception by most of the electorate with respect to the road the country should pursue. Another no less relevant is whether the current government brings Mexico closer to a solution of the domestic problematic, beginning with the evils that the president himself calls central, specifically corruption, poverty and inequality.

Of course, no one truly knows what motivates each voter when expressing their electoral preference. However, the evidence suggests that there were at least three factors that were definitive in the most recent presidential result: the perception of the corruption of the outgoing administration; being fed up with the lack of results (above all compared with expectations) in terms of growth, social mobility and general well-being; and finally, manipulation of the conditions of competition during the campaign period on judicially giving chase to a candidate and impeding the other from an equitable performance.

A factor that adds another dimension to the time of that election is that of the nature of the reforms that Peña Nieto undertook. Until the arrival of that president no government had dared to recast the three sacrosanct articles of the constitution so intensely and even radically: Peña not only disrupted the three (Article 3 on education; Article 27 on energy; and Article 123 on labor), but also did so without building a coalition with the relevant political supports behind each of these reforms to attenuate the opposition that existed (open or underground), nor did he erect a political and cultural scaffold that would sustain them. That is, he ignored the need to build support for those reforms and obviated all political action despite their enormously ambitious and politically risky nature. Therefore, the innumerable interests affected were not considered or mollified. Many of these then did nothing other than, as the Japanese proverb says, “sit by the river long enough to see their enemy’s body float by.”

If to all this one adds the enormous -and evident- corruption generally accompanying that administration, everything that was lacking was a fuse that would turn that moment into a politico-electoral opportunity.  And that fuse was supplied by then-candidate López Obrador, who found himself at the optimal point in time and circumstance to take advantage of it. One needs to go no further than to observe the extraordinary coalition that he rallied under the auspices of the Morena Party to see many of those vested interests affected by Peña watching the enemy float by…

Whatever the comprehensive explanation of what happened in 2018, what is not up for discussion is that President López Obrador is convinced of the need to return to the past during which things, from his perspective, worked well. His entire focus is on the dismantling of everything reformed since 1983, for the sake of recreating the seventies, with the sole exception of minding the fiscal accounts.

In the presidential vision, there is no recognition of how much the world has changed since the seventies or, especially, of the exceptional degree of complexity that characterizes the Mexican economy of today. Nor has there been learning, further than that in the fiscal arena, of the nature of the problems confronting the country today, or of the features of the digital world of the XXI century.

Furthermore, there is not the least intention of enlisting the population in his project. Thus, his future will not be distinct from that of Peña, even if the causes are.

Lord Acton, an English politician and historian of the XIX century, wrote that the objective of a nation and its citizenry should be “to be governed not by the Past, but by the knowledge of the Past – different things.” For President López Obrador no such distinction exists: aside from his clear acknowledgment of the financial immoderation of the seventies, his objective is the recreation of that past just as it was. Much rhetoric but too little learning.

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Luis Rubio

The objectives that defined the agenda and electoral proposal of now President López Obrador are THE problems of Mexico: poverty, corruption, inequality and insufficient growth. The strategies to defeat these wrongs can be argued, but  no one can dispute their transcendence in today’s national reality. The true dilemma lies elsewhere: it concerns structural and systemic problems that must be understood in their dimension because, contrariwise, the president -and the country- will be in pursuit of nothing more than another mirage. Another of the many that accumulate at each morning presidential-press-conference.

“Many of the problems are systemic, says Charles Murray in his new book,* but they will not be solved by going after their appearance. They will be solved, or ameliorated, by going after systemic educational problems, systemic law enforcement problems, systemic employment problems.” That is, instead of claiming that a better teacher or a better textbook is going to transform the system of education (or the equivalent in matters of Rule of Law), the only way to achieve the sought-after transformation is recognizing its structural nature and conceiving public policies expressly designed for such a purpose.

In Mexico, the latter implies beginning with the objectives of the educational system, which were never about the education of the population, equalizing opportunities, or training for life. Education in the post-Revolutionary era was always an instrument of political action oriented toward control of the citizenry and manipulating their way of thinking to construct aideological hegemony. Rather than it being a transformative factor, education was always conceived for control, due to which it not only tolerated the growth of powerful teachers’ unions, but this also was an express objective of corporativist Mexico. Just as procuring control of industrial-sector workers, control of teachers and subordination of the populace was sought through an educational system tailored with that objective in mind. In this, the Mexico of the XX century was much more like the old Soviet Union than the rest of the Latin-American nations and nothing more contrasting with the emphasis adopted by the Asian nations to convert education into the transformative factor of their societies.

In Asia, especially in countries such as Korea, Japan, Singapore and Taiwan, education became the transformative instrument of their societies. Nations without great natural resources, all of them viewed education as the means through which they could raise the productivity of their economies, improve the incomes of their populations, and enter triumphantly into the developed world. It is not by chance that the second wave of governments dedicated to the same objective -like China and Vietnam- have regarded education as the key element in their economic project. The rapid rise in their per-capita rates of income speaks for itself.

Try as the diverse educational reforms from the nineties up to those of the Peña government might, the tangible fact, measured by results, is that the country remains stagnant in this matter. Now, with a president who thinks that the sole legitimate objective of a government is political, -that is, ignoring any technological or analytical consideration- Mexico has returned to the logic of the seventies in which the express purpose of education (not merely de facto) is control of the citizenry. Moved by the notion of throwing overboard anything that does not contribute to the concentration of power and the subordination of everything and everyone to the president, the current government threatens to remit thecountry to neolithic political post-Revolutionary times.

Why educate Mexicans if all that is needed to employ Colonial-era technologies is, at most, basic education? In other words, instead of bringing about the elevation of the population’s income levels and their opportunities to make it in life, starting with the most impoverished, the government of President López Obrador is in the quest of equalizing down: for everyone to be poor. That may not be its avowed objective, but it is the one toward which its policies are advancing, and its result will be decades of lagging behind, in addition to amassed resentments that will do nothing other than complicate the panorama. Additionally, this is the reason for an enormous growth in the number of Mexicans migrating to the United States.Instead of pursuing the development of Mexico, the aim appears to be having a hand in the development of our neighbors.

Inequality and poverty are a palpable reality, the product of an entire system devoted to preserving those circumstances. Even the most ambitious governments in developmental matters omitted the attacking of structural problems -social, political, petty fiefdoms- the daily bread in the lives of most Mexicans. It is paradoxical, but above all pathetic, that the most radical government in its rhetoric in these affairs is also the most reactionary, one that will contribute most over the last half century to increasing poverty, inequality and, why not say it, corruption. Life is full of surprises.

*Facing Reality

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Luis Rubio

Ideological coherence or political pragmatism: the eternal dilemma of alliances. These last as long as their members continue to find greater benefits in participating and remaining in them than in denouncing them and breaking away. From Marxist theoreticians to the most seasoned political operators, alliances are the heart of politics. In the Netherlands there has not been a single majority government in seventy years: coalitions are a permanent factor and key element in their politicians’ civility because no one knows with whom they will associate in the future. As this year makes its debut, the alliance forged for the 2021 mid-term election will be put to the test for the grand event of 2024.

Motivations to form alliances are many and very diverse, but the principal one is always need. A political party that has an extensive majority lacks the incentive to ally itself with another; when it needs partners to achieve power, it seeks potential allies with whom to affiliate. This is customary in parliamentary systems, has been an unabridged vicissitude in Mexico, but does not for this reason discard involving an impeccable logic.

Political parties are cast with an ideological content, but their central function is that of procuring political power, engendering their flexibility at the time of setting up legislative or electoral coalitions or alliances. A party can be pristine in its objectives and fastidious in its manner of proceeding, but if it is not in power, its circumstance impedes it from being anything more than a witness to the nation’s happenings. An alliance among forces as diverse as the PAN, PRI and PRD (and, potentially, Movimiento Ciudadano [MC]) leads many to break out in hives (beginning with this latter), but it is the rational response to the quest for power.

Without doubt, an alliance entails costs owing to that on allying itself a political party it surrenders freedoms, starting with that of nominating its own candidates. When it concerns, as it did last year, an alliance for legislative power, the sacrifices are relatively minor, in that there are many seats to fill; however, this year six governorships will come into play in which there can be only one candidate from the alliance per state, which in turn will produce at least three potential losers per entity. The following year there will be two more and in 2024, the mother of all battles.

Each party that incorporates itself into an alliance does so because it sees in it a better way to advance its own interests. However much each of these political institutes perceives itself as pure and chaste, all exhibit deficiencies, corruptions and an abysmal record in terms of democratic procedures at their core. Haley Barbour, a U.S. politician, said that “in politics, purity is the enemy of victory.” Whoever allies themself with other parties does so because they entertain the objective of transcending their own individual capacities.

With a powerful president who still retains a relatively high level of popularity, an alliance is the sole mechanism offering an opportunity to the political parties that are found today among the opposition. And each of those parties encounters distinct challenges on looking at itself in the mirror. For the PAN, the party that has always assumed itself to be an unsullied entity that contrasted with the corruption of the PRI, now must recognize that its time in power was not too distinct from that of its historical nemesis. For the PRI the problem is one of survival: be extinguished if it allows itself to be absorbed by Morena or renovate itself and find a new platform and political support base. Regarding the PRD, the smallest of the alliance’s political parties, its challenge is to not disappear despite the caliber of its adherents. MC did not wish to join the alliance for the mid-term election because it did not want to “contaminate” itself with the costs of the “Pact for Mexico,” which ravaged the other three.

Undeniably, the risk of contagion is high, but so is the pigheadedness. As the authors of Éloge de la trahisonwrite, this is a fragile equilibrium in that the objective is not merely to stay in power. If the objective of the political parties is power, the question is how to structure an alliance that possesses the greatest probability of this being attained. María Matilde Oilier, the Argentinean scholar, states this in candid fashion: those who wanted to respect the norms never attained the ability to govern and those who achieved governance never respected the norms.

The reality is that for a long time Mexico has needed a political transformation because the entire political apparatus and the system of government has stagnated, as evidenced by crisis-ridden pathways of economic growth, insecurity, corruption and poverty. The way that López Obrador governs forced the opposition to unite to have the opportunity to access power. The 2021 Alliance showed that it can indeed function, but the true test does not lie in the pragmatism of joining together for an election, but in agreeing on a strategy of political transformation. Without a rationale for allying themselves that transcends the fact of a short-term electoral triumph, alliance members would experience what their constituents suffered, respectively, in 2000, 2006 and 2012: failure and the ensuing twilight.

In politics, wrote Camus, it is the means that justify the end. The alliance is a means, but its relevance and capacity of convincing the electorate depends on the quality of the project brandished by the alliance andits members.

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Luis Rubio

The pandemic has ended, but its aftereffects are visible everywhere. An epidemic, Ambrose Bierce wrote in 1906, is “a disease having a sociable turn and few prejudices.” Indeed, science responded with medicines that helped allay the symptoms of those who fell ill, while vaccines began to show a path forward, even though the exit, due to the enormous complexity of the logistics involved, will take time to materialize for the whole of humankind.

Through this period, I gathered a large quantity of anecdotes and quotes about pandemics through history. Here go a few that I found particularly relevant.

In his novel Death in Venice (1912), Thomas Mann tells how the pesthouse of the Ospedale Civico had filled and commerce had become very active between the port and the cemetery island of San Michelle. But there was ear of a general drop in prosperity. The recently opened art exhibit in the public gardens was to be considered, along with the heavy losses that in case of panic or unfavorable rumors would threaten businesses, the hotels, the entire elaborate system for exploiting foreigners… The policy of silence and denial was upheld… The chief health officer had resigned from his post in indignation and been promptly replaced by a more tractable personality. Nothing new under the sun.

Humanity has but three great enemies: fever, famine, and war; of these, by far the greatest, by far the most terrible, is fever

William Osler, 1896

After the epidemic began, I basically didn’t go home. I lived separately from my husband and family. My sister helped take care of my children at home. My youngest child didn’t recognize me, didn’t react to me when he saw me on video. I felt lost. My husband told me that things happen in life, and you’re not only a participant, you’re choosing to lead a team to fight this epidemic. That’s also a very meaningful act, he said, and when everything returns to normal, you’ll know it was a valuable experience to have had.

Interview with Dr. Li Wenliang, who died in Wuhan

Plagues are as certain as death and taxes

Richard Krause, 1982

When one remembers under what conditions the working people live, when one thinks how crowded their dwellings are, how every nook and corner swarms in the same room, in the same bed, the only wonder is that a contagious disease like this fever does not spread yet farther. And when one reflects how little medical assistance the sick have at command, how many are without any medical advice whatsoever, and ignorant of the most ordinary precautionary measures, the mortality seems actually small.

Friedrich Engels, The Conditions of the Working Class in England, 1844

Death from the bubonic plague is rated, with crucifixion, among the nastiest human experiences of all

Guy R. Williams, 1975

A number of people were still unpersuaded that there really was a plague. And since some victims had actually recovered, “it was said” (the final arguments of an opinion defeated by the evidence are always strange to hear), by the common people, and also by many biased doctors, that it was not a true plague, because otherwise everyone would have been dead

Alejandro Manzoni, The Betrothed, 1827

The most important consideration in the causation of disease is the body constitution that becomes afflicted. Therefore, not all people will die during an epidemic

Moses Maimonides, c 1190

The illness was so dreadful that no one could walk or move. The sick were so utterly helpless that they could only lie on their beds, like corpses… A great many died from the plague, and many others died of hunger. They could not get up to search for food, and everyone else was too sick to care for them, so they starved to death in their beds. Some people came down with a milder form of the disease; they suffered less than others and made a good recovery. But they could not escape entirely. Their looks were ravaged, for wherever a sore broke out, it gouged an ugly pockmark in the skin. And a few of the survivors were left completely blind.

Bernardino de Sahagun, Florentine Codex, 1545-1590

He who dies of epidemic disease is a martyr

Muhammad, c 630

Amid the confusion the plague spread rapidly, encouraged both by the misery and lawlessness of the people… The mayor reported that in Monte Lupo “twenty five houses had been closed, and we continually found more people sick with the contagious disease.” On June 4, Mayor Francesco della Stufa “passed to a better life,” and the gravediggers who had caused hem so much trouble in his life buried him after his death “in the cemetery of Cacciacane, because he had died of the plague…

Carlo M. Cipolla, Faith, Reason, and the Plague in Seventeenth-Century Tuscany, 1977

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Luis Rubio

Every year brings its surprises and opportunities, but some can leave us speechless in the face of what happened. In March 2020, all the inhabitants of the planet found us before an unknown world: that of fear and seclusion due to the risk implied by a pandemic, a phenomenon that, with local exceptions, was only known by historical reference. However, it took no more than a few weeks for vaccines capable of fighting the virus to emerge, vaccines whose technology had been in development for years, but which suddenly found practical application. The rest is history: the testing stages of these vaccines began immediately, followed by their accelerated vaccination rolldown through the year that is now ending. One cannot help but marvel at what technology makes possible -and the risks involved.

As in other years, I take this moment to quote some of the great thinkers, this time regarding the issue of the moment: technology.

“All of our exalted technological progress, civilization for that matter, is comparable to an ax in the hands of a pathological criminal.” Albert Einstein, 1917

“Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of these two has the grander view?” Victor Hugo, 1862

“Intelligence will become more and more collective; innovation and order will become more and more bottom up.” Matt Ridley 2019

“Every civilization has been grounded on technology. What makes ours unique is that for the first time we believe that every man is entitled to all its benefits” Jacob Bronowski, 1972

“The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.” B.F. Skinner, 1969

“Think of this: When they present you with a watch, they are gifting you with a tiny flowering hell, a wreath of roses, a dungeon of air. They aren’t simply wishing the watch on you, and many more, and we hope it will last you, it’s a good brand, Swiss, seventeen rubies; they aren’t just giving you this minute stonecutter that will bind you by the wrist and walk along with you. They are giving you -they don’t know it- they are gifting you with a new, fragile and precarious piece of yourself, something that’s yours but not a part of your body, that you have to strap to your body like your belt, like a tiny, furious bit of something hanging on to your wrist. They gift you with the job of having to wind it every day, an obligation to wind it, so that it foes on being a watch; they gift you with the obsession of looking into jewelry-shop windows to check the exact time, check the radio announcer, check the telephone service. They give you the gift of fear, someone will steal it from you, it’ll fall on the street and get broken. They give you the gift of trademark and the assurance that it’s a trademark better than the others, they gift you the impulse to compare your watch with other watches. They aren’t giving you a watch, you are the gift, they are gibing you yourself for the watch’s birthday.” Julio Cortazar, Cronopios, 1962

“Inventor, n. A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers, and springs and believes it civilization.” Ambrose Bierce, 1911

“If the human race wants to go to hell in a basket, technology can help it get there by jet.” Charles M. Allen, 1967

“Without slavery there is no cotton; without cotton there is no modern industry. It is slavery that has given value to universal commerce, and it is world trade which is the condition of large-scales industry.” Karl Marx, 1846

“Sometimes I wonder. I’m making explorations. I don’t know where they’re going to take me. My work is designed for the purpose of trying to understand our technological environment and its psychic and social consequences. My purpose is to employ facts as tentative probes, as a means of insight, of pattern recognition, rather than to use them in the traditional and sterile sense of classified data, categories, containers. The better part of my work on media is actually somewhat like a safecracker’s. I don’t know what’s inside; maybe it’s nothing. I just sit down and start to work. I grope, I listen, I accept and discard; I try of different sequences -until the tumblers fall and the doors spring open.” Marshall McLuhan, 1969

“The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.” Edward O Wilson, 2009

“Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains.” Eric Hoffer, 1955

“The main ingredient in the secret sauce that leads to innovation is freedom. Freedom to exchange, experiment, imagine, invest and fail; freedom from expropriation or restrictions by chiefs, priests and thieves; freedom on the part of consumers to reward the innovations they like and reject the ones they do not” Matt Ridley, 2020

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Luis Rubio

The year 2021 has been quite strange. It began with nearly exponential growth in the number of contagions and ended with a downward trend. While other nations acted to quell the pandemic with perfectly structured vaccination programs, such as those that Mexico accomplished systematically and successfully some years ago for terrible diseases like smallpox and polio, the obsession to politicize everything led to an uncertain outcome: instead of capitalizing on the prime opportunities it possesses, starting with the China–U.S. controversy whose natural beneficiary, were the government to know where it is going, would be Mexico.

China has not ceased being an issue of analysis and discussion because it breaks with the patterns expected by the social sciences, opening a favorable window for serious scholars as well as charlatans to try out and build hypotheses ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous. The problem is that only time will tell who was correct in their estimates regarding the solidity of the institutions and economy of that nation.   The literature on the topic is endless; a truly interesting one, entitled The China Nighmare by Dan Blumenthal, proposes the existence of a contradiction at the heart of the strategy of the General Secretary of the CCP, Xi Jinping. On the one hand, he has displayed extraordinary geopolitical ambition with all that implies in terms of military expenditure and subsidies for the construction of a project to interconnect China at the center of its logistic corridors through Asia to Africa and Europe. Nonetheless, on the other hand, the Secretary has dismantled the mechanisms engineered by his predecessors, above all Deng Xiaoping, for the accelerated development of his economy, creating an enormous internal weakness that cannot support the politico-military project. This is a must-read, due to the immense transcendence and importance, embracing all orders, of the Asian giant.

Perhaps the most simulating reading I encountered this year was Open: The Story of Human Progress, by Johan Norberg. The central premise of the work is that, throughout history, the world has advanced whenever there is an open mindset in the broadest sense of the word: an opening to ideas, to commerce and to exchange. Moments of ascent are the product of that opening, retrograde moments occur when societies retreat toward tribalism. In this manner, history is a constant struggle between cooperation and cloister. One of the best examples and one that the book describes in detail is that of China, the nation that led the world in technology, science, and wealth during the era that it stayed open to the world, only to sustain poverty at the time it retracted. The main paradox that the author recounts in multiple examples is that of the propensity to protect the status quo which, originally, was achieved due to the existence of an open regime. Fascinating reading.

A heretical and iconoclastic book on the predominant dogma is Capitalism, Democracy, and Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery. John Mueller argues that, despite its bad image, what allows for stability, development and life in society is the economic system that generates affluence:  capitalism. For its part, democracy, which enjoys prodigious recognition, is more an ideal than an effective mechanism for problem solving and improving the population’s quality of life. The reference to Ralph’s grocery is an allegory forged by a humorist who affirms that “if you can’t find it in that store, you probably don’t need it.” The idea is that, despite their image problems, democracy and capitalism have carried the day because people have accepted that those systems cannot provide everything but that, in conjunction, the populace acknowledges that if they can’t provide you with it, you probably don’t have need of it.

Few things are as heart-rending as the so-called “dirty wars” when governmental and paramilitary forces overturn the society to “cleanse it” of the evils of those who think differently. Daniel Loedel pens Hades, Argentina, a novel on the disappearance of his half-sister in the seventies, where hell is as much a metaphor as the context within which life transpires. Excellent reading.

Mariana Mazzucato, an Italian economist, has been writing a series of critical texts on the political economy of the last decades. In her most recent book, Mission Economy, she posits that the model to follow is the Apollo space program that rendered possible placing man on the moon, the program in which the government addressed itself, via an industrial policy, to erecting the conditions for this to happen. Her critique sounds reasonable in view of the better performance exhibited by nations that pursue this type of strategy, notably China. But, in the last analysis, her model sounds more like the failed Soviet Union than a map toward the future, especially because it does not demonstrate that its schema is the most effective one for the development of the technologies that, as Matt Ridley illustrates, only take place stochastically in an ambience of freedom and competition produced by the markets. As Ridley brilliantly maintains in his most recent book, How Innovation Works, no one can foretell from whom or from whence progress will materialize.

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Luis Rubio

The discourse, body language and tone are increasingly more intolerant and revealing of a growing despair. Verbal radicalization was on the rise throughout last year, culminating in indiscriminate attacks against educational institutions, journalists and individuals, many of whom, paradoxically, have been the bulwarks and even backers of the President himself and certainly of his causes. The change in his demeanor with respect to the beginning of the government is plain and, however, none of that has altered the devotion bestowed on him by his electoral base.

Specialists in surveys bend over backward to explain the phenomenon of the elevated popularity despite such pathetic results and, especially, the distance between the numbers that his government receives with respect to those of his own. In the words of Francisco Abundis, one of the most accurate forecasters, “the perception of the economy, the critical variable traditionally employed to consider presidential approval, does not appear to be a determinant indicator. It seems that the population pays attention to other indicators such as social programs… The phenomenon is very similar to that which was observed with ex-President Fox. When supporters of the present Mexican head of state are questioned on his administrative errors, the response frequently is to pin the responsibility on his team or on those around him, but never on the president.”*

In his three-year midterm “report,” the President exhibited what could be a new strategy for the remainder of his administration: if what matters to his base (and to his popularity) are not tangible results measured by traditional gauges (such as growth, employment, security, etc.), then what proceeds is personal promotion, exactly the content of the massive convocation to Mexico City’s Zocalo on December 1. That is to say, the presidential rationale gives the impression of metamorphosing toward a consecration not of the project but of the person as a myth.

The response and reaction of those present at that massive act in the Capital’s center, as well as the popularity tallies, suggest that this is not a bad gamble. Conventional yardsticks do not appear to apply to this president because he has achieved identification as the champion of certain causes and as the incarnation of accumulated resentments that transcend the demand for the usual material or tangible satisfiers. The electoral base does not exact those results because its devotion entails a more religious explanation, one fundamentally more faith-based than rational. In a word, it is a distinct phenomenon that should be categorized in its own terms.

In the history of the world more leaders aspire to become mythical figures than those who attain it. Some are converted into myths for erroneous reasons (such as the Kennedy assassination), others for having transformed their societies, for good or ill, such as Mandela, Mao or Stalin. The excessive power conferred by Mexico’s political system on their presidents often lead them to believe that they can be transformer leaders who come to resolve, with or without an adequate project, all of the country’s problems in less than a six-year term of office. Many attempted it and practically all ended up in history’s dustbin, if not worse.

A few decades ago, Thomas Frank* argued that people vote against their interests: people grant privilege to values above interests and associate with leaders who promote causes that are not material, immediate or necessarily “rational”. In the specific case, the electorate of regions such as Kansas prefer to vote for candidates who reject abortion and favor the availability of arms for personal use rather than those who promote economic development, education, better jobs and other time-honored benchmarks.

The point is that not all electoral preferences can be codified, or even understood, with established categories of analysis. Heads of state who are effective employ myths to advance their enterprise and oftentimes win over the loyalty of the population not due to their programs but to factors that would appear “irrational” under the prevailing measures. Fidel Castro became a mythical figure despite impoverishing his population and keeping it oppressed for more than a half century. Xi Jinping governs an extremely successful nation and, nonetheless, resorts to Mao, another mythical ruler who oppressed the citizenry, as a source of ideological support.

In contrast with those nations (and many more), the moment of AMLO is not propitious for the consecration of a mythical figure. Access to information and the grandiosity of the population’s expectations that this information permits create a point of comparison that renders it very difficult to preserve coherence between poor results and grandiloquent holding-forth. What is certain is that three years are in the offing of unredeemed self-promotion. That may end up consecrating the myth. But as suggested by the evaluation of Abundis cited at the beginning of this piece, what happened to Fox can happen again, this time to AMLO. Fox unleashed extraordinary expectations and hopes that, on not materializing, had the effect of drastically demythologizing the figure, turning him into the very opposite of a myth: a fiction, a sophism or, simply, a failure…

*Milenio, December 1, 2021, **What’s the Matter with Kansas?

www.mexicoevalua.org
@lrubiof

Luis Rubio

The problem with bets is that they are binary: all or nothing. When a government plays the betting game, as when one plays with fire, it can end up badly. For three years, the Mexican president has placed odds on a series of factors that to date and despite the pandemic, have come out essentially well. What no one knows is whether those same factors will continue to be favorable. Bets can come out well, but they do not cease being bets. And they can also come out badly…

The government of President López Obrador has made three fundamental bets: first, the infrastructure projects (the refinery, the train and the airport), as sources of economic growth, to which one must add the attempted revitalization of Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex). These initiatives have advanced against sea and deluge, the pandemic and recession, thanks to the conviction of the president that this is the way to the future to ensure the consolidation of his eagerly awaited transformation.

The second bet is on improving the standard of living of the population that has been his electoral base (not always the poorest or most needy), which he trusts will guarantee the politico-electoral continuity of his (historic) project of government. That population reiterated its support at the recent midterms, but proved insufficient for achieving the ultimate objective of underwriting the project’s continuity or its legitimacy.

The third bet is on the country’s economic and financial stability, measured principally by the steadiness of the exchange rate. What many consider this an obsession, particularly those who argue insistently (many of them with legitimate and persuasive approaches) for greater expenditure in the context of the pandemic, is the product of a cold political calculation summed up in the celebrated phrase “the president who devaluates is devaluated.” For the president it is obvious that this variable is transcendental for the entire Mexican society and that it, therefore, comprises a fundamental factor in his assessment.

Beyond the boos and ovations, the presidential project has been successful on its terms. While the issues that drove his candidacy have not been corrected (such as insecurity, corruption, growth or poverty), the mere fact that the country has been able to navigate the turbulent waters of the pandemic with the acute impoverishment that it implied, earned the president an infinitely less pernicious electoral result for his party than could have been.

The problem of the second half of the six-year presidential term is that it is the time of harvesting what was sown during the previous years and this government will not have many fruits to gather. The infrastructure projects are not particularly solid nor do they have multiplier-effect benefits for the economy as a whole, and it is even possible that they will end up as white elephants; for its part, instead of being a source of demand and growth as it was during in the seventies, Pemex is an interminable drain of fiscal resources and, in any case, it no longer entertains (nor will it ever entertain) the relative weight it had a half century ago and even less so in today’s, ever more digital economy. The complexity characterizing the Mexican economy of the XXI century is such that no government can pretend to control all its variables or conduct all of its processes. Worse still, the concentration of power that lies at the heart of the governmental strategy constitutes a damper on investment and growth. To top the overall picture, the government has done nothing to combat evils such as corruption or insecurity, factors that, had they diminished, would have held, in themselves, enormous political and social appeal for the country’s long-term development.

In addition to the latter, much of what facilitated the stability of the past three years has less to do with the internal management than with the international financial markets, which have been especially favorable. I have no doubt that much of the support that the president continues to enjoy depends on that economic stability, but this is combined with the deep-seated nature of the electorate. Mexicans understand how limited their options are; thus, they respond to the largesse dispensed by politicians with electoral motives (particularly transfers to the president’s base), corroborating the wisdom of Mexican voters, but not necessarily their convictions: it winds up being an exchange, pure and simple.

In a word, electoral support is more volatile than politicians suppose, and the president has acted under the assumption that he can eliminate much of the traditional expenditure (such as in health or childcare centers) to dedicate these monies to his clienteles while simultaneously expecting the international context to favor him. The question is: What happens if these premises turn out to be in error?

Today it is not inconceivable for the Federal Reserve, to begin to raise interest rates at some point, which would immediately have repercussions on the Mexican peso–U.S. dollar exchange rate. In the same fashion, remittances from Mexicans living in the U.S. may begin to diminish to the degree that the huge transfers that the U.S. government has made due to the pandemic begin to wind down. On the other hand, given the unfavorable environment for investment, there are no reasons to anticipate that the Mexican economy improve its performance. Furthermore, the issue security, which has not been a priority of the president’s, could further deteriorate.

At the end of the day, everything will continue to depend on bets, as always.

www.mexicoevalua.org
@lrubiof
a quick-translation of this article can be found at www.luisrubio.mx