Columnistas invitados/Guest columnists

Esta noche es noche buena

 y mañana es Navidad

 tengo a mi hijo en la cárcel

yo no puedo celebrar.

Mi vecina de 80 años

no tiene nitrazepán

ni pagándolo a sobre precio

ya lo puede encontrar.

Tiene náuseas, tiene mareos,

depresión, no quiere hablar

y repite, hasta de madrugada,

consíganme el nitrazepán.

Vi morir a otra vecina

con un cáncer de garganta

no llegó la medicina

nunca tuvo tratamiento

me duele su sufrimiento

yo no puedo celebrar.

Mi pequeño, él que está preso

está enfermo de diabetes

si aquí, con mis cuidados,

le subía tanto el azúcar

y mira que le rogué

que no saliera a marchar

_ Si se llevan, será a los hombres 

si son unos culi cagaos,

me decía otro vecino,

que el pobre ya no recuerda

como las madres alzaron

en brazos a sus bebés

 creyendo que al ver los niños

se iban a condoler,

hundieron al 13 de marzo,

ahogaron a sus bebés.

I’ve been to Syria twice over the years for about a week at a time. I drove around the country, even including what passes for beach resorts on the small Syrian coast—not that that gave me any special insight into the current situation. Though the country was viewed as a dangerous bastion of evil, I had a great time. Except for active war zones, you can almost use the State Department’s "no go" list as a travel advisor. FWIW, even when I applied for my visa at the Syrian consulate in Beirut, I remember being impressed with their friendly and competent staff.

People forget that Syria is an artificial country. The region called "Syria" has been around for thousands of years, since pre-Roman times. But today’s Syria only came into existence with the breakup of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. It’s not an organic country. Like most Third World countries, it was put together in the drawing rooms of Europe, with zero consideration of local ethnic or religious sensitivities. That’s a guaranteed formula for perpetual chaos in a highly tribal region, where governments are mainly vehicles for theft.

For the last 50 years, it’s been run by the Assad family. Even if you’re a nice guy, or used to be a nice guy, like Bashar al-Assad, when you’re surrounded by lots of nasty people who are holding together a pressure cooker that’s looking to explode, it can’t end well.

¡NO! La democracia auténtica depende de un consenso nacional en el que prime un ambiente de fraternidad humana donde mayorías y minorías, amigos y adversarios muestren el debido respeto mutuo a la hora de tomar decisiones. Por lo tanto, la democracia no puede prevalecer si descuida el propósito de promover una sociedad a la medida del hombre, edificada sobre principios más humanos y sobre firmes cimientos éticos integrados por:

1) el principio del bien común, que no tiene otro fin que el de asegurar, sin interrupción, las condiciones externas que permitan a cada ciudadano desarrollar plenamente su vida individual, en un sistema en el que la justicia exige que se consideren las necesidades de los trabajadores y de sus respectivas familias, pero también la situación real de la empresa en que trabajan y las exigencias que promuevan y faciliten el bien común económico. Esto sólo puede desarrollarse y sostenerse cuando nos comprometemos a seguir un proceso de conversión personal que desarrolle un espíritu de solidaridad destinado a prevalecer como motor de una sociedad justa; 

Although I will focus on the U.S., the rise of populism is widespread. From Argentina to Italy to France to the United Kingdom to Hungary, there are similarities. The new populism tends to be economically and politically nationalistic. It tends to be culturally patriotic and socially conservative. It tends to sympathize with workers over corporations. It is also self-consciously, defiantly—often mockingly—anti-establishment.

It is not a coincidence that so many of the West’s populist leaders —Javier Milei, Jair Bolsonaro, Viktor Orbán, Giorgia Meloni, and Donald Trump— have, shall we say, colorful personalities. Their political swagger may threaten elite politicians almost as much as their policy agendas do, because it punctures the bubble of credentialed, institutional authority insulating elite power from public scrutiny.

With few exceptions, the Left as we know it today has rejected populism out of hand, embracing instead Big Government, Big Business, Big Banks, Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Labor, Big Ag, Big Media, and Big Entertainment. For the most part, today’s Left is hard at work fortifying the power these institutions wield against the rigors of democratic accountability.

Thus the only hope for a sustainable, democratically legitimate populist reform movement today is on the Right. The question is whether the leaders of the movement can harness the highly negative energy from which the populism emerges and channel it toward a coherent, positive politics of national renewal and reform.

***

To see what today’s populists are reacting against, think back to 1991. The end of the Cold War appeared to be a great victory for the Washington establishment—never mind that most leaders of that establishment opposed Reaganism, which was instrumental in bringing down the Soviet Union. Regardless, this victory earned Western institutions a high level of public trust unimaginable today. In November 1989, for instance, when the Berlin Wall fell, President George H.W. Bush’s public approval rating hit 70 percent and would climb to 80 and even 90 percent in subsequent years.