The longing for equality has come to stay. Those who deny this new discourse that the left is finally assuming, those who yearn for that monolithic working class, ignorant that individual singularities powerfully influence the socioeconomic place that each one occupies, are condemned to anachronism. They will end up modifying their sulking discourse, I am convinced, because, given the emotional distance of the citizen from the political parties, activism is today being the dynamizer of social protest. When on March 8 we participated in the great feminist mobilizations, this year much more frequented by men, we could observe that this date is gradually bringing together, under the slogan of equality, social demands of different kinds. Why shouldn’t women, if they now have this convening power, flag the urgent need that part of the citizenry has to improve the world?
That is, from my point of view, what the phenomenon of the New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez represents. It was her activist condition that drove her to politics, but her commitment is not exempt from the fact of being a woman, having a Puerto Rican origin (the most faithfully pointed out collective in New York) and coming from the working class. The girl from the Bronx. The extraordinary thing is that the contempt and mockery it provokes in the trumperos and the fascination it awakens in the young people has infected our country. As always, it is inconceivable that a beautiful young woman would be daring enough to make an articulated speech, a brilliant interrogation of campaign finances in the House of Representatives. The criticisms range from the usual offense, which can be summed up as uncerebrada, to the puerile, highlighting the fact that the girl who served drinks in a bar is awakening a dangerous tendency for elegant clothing. And it is already known that elegance is incompatible with being left-wing. Or dance gracefully, as neighborhood girls do, by the way. Those idiotic pages are also shared here, as if it were feared that the Ocasio phenomenon could have its replica.
But we are also influenced by it. Faced with the right wing’s denial of climate change, supported by unscrupulous capital, the centre-left or left-wing parties had so far not reacted with the urgency and firmness that this pressing threat requires, and they even maintained the old discourse that jobs were above the cleanliness of the environment. The present ahead of a catastrophic future. But the future is already here. And it is there where the discussed, beaten up and admired congresswoman has pulled out of her sleeve what she has called the Green New Deal, a new agreement that decarbonizing energy does not make the consequences of the change fall on the working class, but that this is the main beneficiary of the new social agreement. In Spain we don’t have such an evocative name as Green New Deal, because it refers to the economic measures with which Roosevelt saved his country from the Depression, but at least it is hopeful that we let ourselves be infected by this impulse. Ocasio-Cortez is not crazy, as is Greta Thunberg. To the motto given by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: “We should all be feminists”, it is urgent to add “and ecologists”. Only on these two movements can we reduce hell.
