Divergence

October 26, 2025

Luis Rubio

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the American scholar and diplomat, once wrote that “the central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society.” Politics can, of course, shape culture—that is the task of any government that aspires to improve the quality of life and prosperity of its people. Unfortunately, Mexican politics over the past several decades has been far more concerned with exclusion than with building and adding, and the culture has responded in kind. The result is polarization, which has become the everyday tone of public life. As Max Weber once observed, we are haunted by “that clerical vice of always needing to be right.”

In practical terms, polarization has translated into a politics of imposition. The methods may have changed between the era of the PRI and that of Morena, but not the substance: government decisions are imposed as if no alternatives or dissenting views exist. Yet the way politics is conducted has shifted profoundly. The great virtue of the early phase of economic reform—whether one liked the reforms or not—was clarity. There was no doubt about the goals being pursued or the means chosen to achieve them. Yes, there was legislative imposition, but there was also explanation and debate. Divergences existed, but no one questioned what was at stake.

In the Morena era, debate and explanation are no longer deemed necessary. The government’s media presence is far greater—indeed, omnipresent—than in the past, beginning with the daily mañaneras. But its audience is its own base; there is no intention, much less desire, to inform or engage the rest of society. Only those that identify with the cause matter. Congress, once envisioned as the “chapel of democracy”—a space for debate, discussion, and compromise—has become a mere registry office, a place for brute imposition rather than deliberation.

For political observers, the trajectory is clear: step by step, Morena has built the scaffolding of a new political regime. The semi-liberal order painstakingly constructed in the 1990s through electoral reforms and the strengthening of the Supreme Court has been gradually dismantled—a process that accelerated and became formalized with the current legislature. What is missing, however, is a clear, non-defamatory vision of the destination Morena governments hope to reach. The void invites endless speculation.

Is the aim a dictatorship? Does the drive to build a hegemonic party necessarily entail the exclusion of all others? When the president insists that hers is “the most democratic regime in the world,” what place does that leave for those who vote for other parties? Is democracy merely a matter of numbers tallied on election day—or is it a façade? Will the system open the door to new, fresh political organizations that could attract citizens, or will it close it tighter? Democracy, after all, must be more than a slogan.

Exclusion and opacity feed speculation—the worst possible foundation for legitimacy or peace. As David Hume warned in 1751, “speculation may seem advantageous to society, but in practice it is entirely pernicious and destructive.”

A few weeks ago, I came across a tweet that, in its bluntness, said more about Mexican politics today than all these years of presidential mañaneras. It came from “Obradorista youth” (@agriochairo): “And who is asking for a rich, first-world country? None of the 30 million of us wanted or asked for that. If we did, we would have voted for the neoliberal parties. On the contrary, we want equality—that the rich NO LONGER BE RICH, and that everyone be humble and equal.”

This statement encapsulates the Morena worldview on economic growth, income distribution, inequality, resentments, the future, life itself, and the purpose of government. At the same time, it highlights fissures within Morena and with President Sheinbaum, since it implicitly rejects the very efforts she has launched under her Plan México. The president surely recognizes the contradiction: her project depends on social transfers, but these cannot be sustained without economic growth. Hence Plan México. The crucial question is how—or if—these two imperatives can be reconciled.

The only real way out of this impasse is a politics of reconciliation, something the country desperately lacks. Thomas Mann put it best, in terms strikingly relevant to today’s Mexico: “Contradictions can converge. Only mediocrity and half-truths cannot be harmonized.” Or, as Rolando Cordera recently wrote, “We are in urgent need of a politics of truth that will allow us, all of us, to look each other in the eye again.”