Spanish Steps (2)

Earlier in the week I was looking to Spain’s 19th century experience for some readily-deployable modern parallels.

Aside from those then noted, I have since conceived of a few more, but these are not quite as straightforward, as they involve an element of flipping across the political spectrum, or outright reversal.

The key thing about Spain is that it became maladapted to its environment...an increasingly modern environment. This was in part because of an entrenched establishment ideology smothering the workings of the state.

Where other nations took piecemeal, yet significant steps towards reform, Spain found that it could not overcome its innate inertia.

And whenever some attempts to aggressively force through change were made, it later became apparent that no government lasted long enough to make anything stick.

This is a situation which has tended to take shape here in Guatemala as well, much more recently. Another familiar environment is that produced by the resistance of what we might call a liberal oligarchy to the full implications of mass democracy.

In the USA, we could now be witnessing an attempt to walk the underlying process back in the other direction.

In Spain from the 1870s onward, a well-defined set of libertarian ideas — though not the sort we now associate with Javier Milei, Elon Musk or Gloria Álvarez — would take a profound hold in both rural Andalucia and industrial Catalonia.

This was one of those classic alliances between the people who think too much and the people who don’t think that much at all.

Bakuninstic anarchism established itself in key regions with a cult-like religious intensity amongst both rural peasants and the urban proletariat because — rather like some of the ‘populist’ discourse we see being used to manipulate modern American equivalents — it triggered anxieties which had repeatedly emerged in response to the established, 'Catholic' system of governance — that it was dark, depraved and despotic — and appealed on an almost unconscious level to their existing communal cultures and historical self-image.