A reflexion on the growing ideological disarmament of the right and how to avoid it

Today we are on the eve of European elections, a golden opportunity to talk about big issues that affect us all.

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However, this electoral campaign has missed the opportunity to address these great debates, with the sole exception of Vox, which has dared to remember that the Socialists and the Popular Party pretend to be rivals in their respective countries but they vote together the vast majority of the time in Brussels, where they maintain a "grand coalition" that has held the European Commission in their hands for years.

What happened in these European elections is not at all strange. We live in a society that is settling into permanent intellectual immaturity, in an ideological adolescence in which in any debate rational arguments give way to emotional arguments. We have a society that reads less and less and feels increasingly lazy when it comes to addressing complex arguments. I lose count of the number of times someone has responded to the publication of an article saying that It was too much text.

This is not a problem that we can limit to a certain ideological current. The entire society is being affected by this drift, including the right. And by "right" I do not mean a specific political option, but rather that part of society that does not feel represented by the center and left options. There have been many complaints, rightly so, about the lack of maturity exhibited by many Podemos voters, whose simplicity of thinking is the clearest explanation for the success of that far-left party. However, in the rest of the political map we can begin to observe a very similar drift. This is something that causes alarm.

There are several issues in which this intellectual laziness is expressed more clearly. One of them is the economy, a facet of our society that is complex and requires having a certain experience to master it. The gap in knowledge in economic matters is compensated by prejudices, simplicity or magic wands, that is, easy (and often false) solutions to difficult and real problems.

We can see something similar in an important part of our culture. Ignorance of history today reaches astonishing extremes. Successive socialist laws have contributed to this, but they are not the only ones responsible. Learning history involves knowing why and how certain events occurred, a task that requires leaving prejudices aside. A very common tendency is to approach history with the same simplicity with which other subjects are approached.

Finally, international politics is an issue in which the abundance of opinions is not accompanied by the abundance of knowledge. As with history, many people give their opinions on international issues without seeking information, sometimes even without knowing how to geographically locate where certain events take place.

The tendency to sacrifice what is correct in favor of what is easy, the laziness when reading or obtaining information before giving an opinion, and assuming approaches such as that the end justifies the means, are causing >that a growing part of the right is suffering a process of ideological disarmament very similar to that of the left, a process that makes it easy prey for any hair growth seller. That is what explains why a certain right is increasingly agreeing with a certain left on issues that previously seemed unthinkable.

What to do to avoid that? Well, read, inform yourself, be critical of what you read, not simply believe any headline you read and, above all, try to be coherent. We are risking our country and our freedom, two things for which that it is worth assuming a certain intellectual effort. And above all, we must reject the idea that you have to give up your principles and rigor to be successful.

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Photo: Kaitlyn Baker.