Ricardo Morín Triangulación 9: The Rhetoric of Threat 56 x 76 cm Watercolor and wax crayon on paper 2007
Ricardo Morín
November 2025
Oakland Park, Florida
Authoritarian language does not arise as excess or accident; it emerges as a deliberate strategy designed to reorganize public perception until difference appears suspect and complexity becomes intolerable. Within this framework, the phrase attributed to the Argentine president Javier Milei—“if an immigrant does not adapt to your culture, then it is not immigration but an invasion” (or https://youtube.com/shorts/EJ9RRC3pyTQ?si=xehJCUD8fIIpaqsw )—functions as a mechanism of extreme reduction. It replaces the historical reality of migration with a binary schema meant to provoke alarm. The leader is not describing a fact; he is manufacturing an enemy.
This formulation shifts the migratory experience into a warlike imaginary in which any form of difference is construed as aggression. Culture—treated as a static and homogeneous block—is framed as a besieged territory requiring defense, and plurality as a threat that can only be resolved through submission. Under this logic, the migrant ceases to be a person and becomes an abstraction crafted to justify coercive impulse.
The paradox is unmistakable: what is proclaimed as the defense of identity is, in truth, an effort to standardize it; what is presented as caution operates as an instrument of fear. Rather than analyze, the language disciplines. And in doing so, it exposes its deeper function: it shapes an emotional climate ready to accept measures that, under any other light, would be incompatible with democratic life.
This is the dimension that most clearly reveals the nature of the statement: it is not a commentary on immigration but a mechanism of affective control. By turning coexistence into compulsory assimilation, it introduces a dehumanized conception of the social world, one in which diversity ceases to be constitutive and becomes an obstacle to be neutralized. Ultimately, this discourse seeks not to understand reality but to govern it.
In the post-truth landscape of Latin American media, where outrage has become currency, few figures illustrate the fusion of ideology and marketing as clearly as Inna Afinogenova. She has become the most recognizable voice of authoritarian suspicion in the Spanish-speaking sphere. From platforms such as Canal Red Latinoamérica, her discourse forms part of a vast network of disinformation spreading across the region, cloaked in the rhetoric of critical thinking and popular emancipation. These networks—spanning Moscow, Tehran, Beijing, and several Latin American governments—follow a single script: to dismantle trust in liberal democracy, to weaken institutions, and to turn permanent doubt into a substitute for conscience. In the name of informational sovereignty, they replace debate with discredit, analysis with suspicion, and truth with narrative. Their power lies not in blatant falsehoods but in the emotional manipulation that transforms confusion into conviction. Within this context, Afinogenova stands not as an isolated commentator but as the emblem of a sophisticated propaganda apparatus—one that disguises obedience to twenty-first-century autocracies beneath the costume of dissent.
Inna Afinogenova, born in Dagestan in 1989, is a Russian journalist who worked as deputy director of RT en Español until May 2022. She resigned citing her disagreement with the war in Ukraine and the imposition of a state-sanctioned narrative of aggression. Since then, she has collaborated with geopolitical and Latin American media such as LaBase, produced by the Spanish newspaper Público, and participates in Canal Red, an audiovisual project led by Pablo Iglesias (former vice-president of Spain and founder of the left-wing party Podemos, now active in political media). There she directs and hosts programs like CaféInna and contributes to political analysis, particularly on Latin America. Her audience is broad and her reach on digital platforms considerable, which makes her an influential figure in the political and informational debates of the Spanish-speaking world.
Her trajectory, however, has not escaped controversy. During her tenure at RT en Español, she was one of the network’s most visible faces in Latin America, amplifying narratives that portrayed Western powers as inherently deceitful and predatory. An opinion column in The Washington Post described her as “the Spanish voice of Russian propaganda,” citing her recurring defense of positions favorable to the Kremlin. In December 2021, two months before the invasion of Ukraine, she used her program Ahí les vato mock Western intelligence warnings of an imminent attack and predicted that “January will come, then February, and still no invasion,” implying that the media hysteria served the interests of NATO. Such episodes, though later overtaken by events, exemplify her rhetorical method: to transform skepticism into disbelief and disbelief into persuasion.
Following her departure from RT, Afinogenova has continued to operate in media circles ideologically aligned with the Latin American left, reinforcing a discourse that equates the Western press with manipulation and imperialism. Outlets such as Expediente Público have noted her role in shaping narratives within partisan campaigns, often echoing state-sponsored or geopolitically motivated lines from Russia, China, or Iran. Through Canal Red and Diario Red, both associated with Pablo Iglesias, she participates in content ecosystems that frequently recycle material from international broadcasters like CGTN. In countries such as Honduras, she has been accused of contributing to media strategies that favor left-wing candidates under the guise of “sovereign communication.” While the evidence does not show a direct chain of command linking her to a specific regime, the pattern of thematic consistency reveals a coherent ideological alignment rather than independent journalism.
This alignment has provoked renewed debate since the release of her recent video, “¿Premio Nobel de la Paz… o de la Guerra?”, where she presents the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to María Corina Machado as a maneuver of geopolitical design rather than a moral recognition. The video does not examine facts so much as it interprets intentions, suggesting that the award serves Western influence instead of honoring civic courage. The argument, though rhetorically effective, confuses correlation with causality. It is possible to acknowledge the imperfections of international institutions without denying the ethical weight of public bravery. The Nobel Prize, like every human institution, reflects judgments; but in this case, it distinguishes a life of civic risk undertaken without weapons, privileges, or access to the coercive power of the State.
Questioning motives is legitimate; insinuating conspiracies without evidence is not. Every critical voice bears responsibility, for truth demands proportion, not projection. The struggle of María Corina Machado cannot be reduced to the rhetoric of “Western intervention” or dismissed as “fabricated dissent.” It belongs to the conscience of a people seeking self-determination through legitimate means after decades of dispossession. Respecting pluralism requires granting others the same intellectual good faith one demands for oneself. Debate ennobles democracy only when grounded in verifiable facts and moral clarity, not when suspicion itself becomes the argument. Between necessary skepticism and systematic suspicion lies a moral frontier: crossing it is to pass from thinking freely to serving without knowing it.
There are lives that seem to recapitulate the destiny of a nation, as if history, in search of renewal, gathers its scattered promises into one mortal form. María Corina Machado stands within that rare order of beings in whom blood, memory, and conviction converge—not as privilege, but as burden. She was not merely born into Venezuela’s republican lineage; she was summoned by it. The call that first thundered through the assembly halls of Caracas in 1811—when its independence was declared and its first republican constitution conceived—still vibrates beneath her name.
Her ancestry reaches into the first pulse of the Republic. From the Rodríguez del Toros, who set their signatures beneath the Act of Independence, to the Zuloaga engineers who electrified a nation, hers is a genealogy woven into the civic arteries of Venezuela. It is a lineage that chose service over title, innovation over indulgence, and fidelity to the law over the ease of silence. In that tradition, the notion of freedom is not an abstraction—it is inheritance, obligation, and vocation. It is the thread that binds a people to their conscience.
When the institutions that once defined Venezuela began to crumble, when legality became theater and words lost their weight, Machado stepped into the void with the gravity of someone aware that retreat was impossible. Her defiance was not theatrical—it was ancestral. Every gesture, every refusal to submit, bore the quiet authority of history fulfilled. She spoke as one who understood that to preserve dignity in times of humiliation is the purest form of resistance. There is, in her manner of being, that rare synthesis of intellect and steadfastness that defines the moral personality of a nation at its best—lucid, unbending, and human.
Yet today, her adversary is not one but many. Before her stands not only a narco-state that has hollowed out Venezuela’s sovereignty, but a fractured opposition—an archipelago of parties and personalities bound less by principle than by convenience. Factionalized, transient, and transactional, these groups have transformed plurality into pretext and compromise into commerce. Many have learned to live off the dictatorship they denounce. They negotiate freedoms for themselves even as the country sinks deeper into captivity. Against that duplicity, Machado’s presence has become a moral indictment: her clarity exposes their corruption; her endurance, their opportunism.
Around this internal disarray, the world circles in watchful appetite. Venezuela’s vast natural wealth—its oil, gas, gold, and rare minerals—has become the prize of criminal networks and multinational investors alike. Russia, China, Iran, and the United States, each cloaked in rhetoric of salvation, compete not to free the country but to secure a share of its exhaustion. Behind the diplomatic masks of assistance lies the same calculation: that chaos can be profitable, that a nation weakened by hunger and fear can be managed more easily than one restored to its sovereignty. This, for twenty-five years, has been Venezuela’s condition—a field of material, moral, and human extraction; its people scattered, its institutions despoiled, its memory pawned to the highest bidder.
In such a landscape, María Corina Machado stands as both witness and counterpoint. Her struggle has never been for power but for coherence—for the recovery of a civic language capable of naming what has been lost. To speak of law, truth, and justice amid pervasive corruption is to resurrect meaning itself. Her voice has become the thread that gathers the nation’s scattered conscience, reminding Venezuelans that dignity cannot be negotiated, and that no foreign savior will restore what only citizens can redeem.
To see her walk through the streets, welcomed not by luxury but by faith, is to glimpse a country remembering itself. She has become, willingly or not, the mirror through which Venezuelans rediscover their own moral architecture: decency, courage, compassion, and an unextinguished appetite for truth. In her endurance, the long-interrupted dialogue between people and Republic resumes.
The Nobel Peace Prize, bestowed upon her, is therefore not a coronation but a recognition—an acknowledgment that her struggle transcends the moment and becomes emblematic of the human spirit’s refusal to yield to despair. In awarding her, the world affirms that Venezuela’s republican dream—born in fire, preserved in conscience—still breathes through one of its daughters. It is the dream of a nation that believes peace must be built not upon submission, but upon moral clarity; not upon silence, but upon the unwavering voice of the citizen.
What María Corina Machado represents is more than opposition to tyranny. She is the embodiment of continuity—of the idea that a Republic, like a soul, survives so long as there remains one person willing to bear its weight with dignity. Her ascent is not accidental—it is the return of an ancient promise. In her composure, Venezuela recognizes itself once more: wounded yet unbroken, luminous in defiance, faithful to the destiny inscribed in its first act of freedom.
Although the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize (2025) to María Corina Machado brings joy and honor to those who still believe in the possibility of a democratic Venezuela, it also reveals a far more complex reality; one that demands reflection.
The international press has yet to grasp the dream surrounding the supposed liberation of Venezuela from a narco-state. Venezuelans continue to wait indefinitely for liberation. Beneath this hope lies a deeper bondage: the nation’s territory continues to be bound to multinational interests (Chinese, Russian, American, and others) driven not by ideology but by competition between investors and criminal networks. For all of them, a prolonged conflict in Venezuela is convenient; it serves as a bridge to a regional metamorphosis and justifies the expropriation of the natural resources of the country; it aims at consolidating hemispheric dominance by the multinational interests. The situation in Venezuela is therefore not only political but also structural; it is an experiment in which sovereignty is traded for access and resistance itself becomes a form of captivity.
The crisis in Venezuela reveals a moral conflict in modern politics: how suffering can both be exploited and perpetuated when comprehension yields to fantasy. The dream of liberation has become one of the nation’s most persistent fantasies. Behind the language of emancipation lies a silent convergence of global interests; each one sustains the very conflict it claims to oppose. In Venezuela, disorder legitimizes intervention and chaos provides the pretext for extraction. In this sense, Venezuela is not merely a nation in distress but also a stage upon which the grammar of domination continues to be enacted through the vocabulary of deliverance
The challenge is no longer to imagine freedom as an external rescue but to comprehend how dependence disguises itself as salvation. Only comprehension (the act of seeing beyond grievance and beyond consolation) can pierce the veil of liberation and restore meaning to the very idea of freedom.
Nothing human begins from nothing. Institutions, languages, belief systems, and works of art all arise from what preceded them. Creation is not the rejection of inheritance but the transformation of it. Every act of making draws upon accumulated perception, memory, and experience. This insight is crucial to understanding contemporary culture, where claims of unprecedented change often conceal deep continuities beneath the surface of novelty. Human beings, bound by temporality, cannot detach themselves from what has been; they can only reorder and reinterpret the materials already available to them.
The notion of invention is often described as a break with the past, a leap into the unknown. Yet even the most radical departures are shaped by what came before. The ideals of modern democracy, for example, did not emerge spontaneously. They were built upon classical Greek ideas of citizenship as a shared civic responsibility, rooted in isonomia—equality before the law—and in the belief that legitimate authority derives from the deliberation and participation of free citizens. They also drew deeply on Roman conceptions of law as a universal and rational order capable of binding diverse peoples into a common political framework, and on the Roman principle of res publica, which conceived the State as a public entity oriented toward the common good rather than the will of a single ruler. These foundational ideas, adapted and reinterpreted over centuries, provided the intellectual architecture on which modern democratic institutions were constructed. Perception frames invention. It provides the vocabulary, assumptions, and conceptual tools that make new ideas possible. What seems entirely new still carries the imprint of what it sought to move beyond. On closer examination, the products of creativity are not isolated acts of originality but reconfigurations of existing structures. Evolution, rather than spontaneous emergence, governs how ideas, institutions, and cultures take shape.
Memory underlies this process. It is not a passive record of events but an active medium through which possibilities are conceived and action becomes intelligible. Imagination draws its material from memory; it combines and redirects memory toward conditions not yet realized. This is nowhere more evident than in the idea of freedom, a concept that resists simple definition yet has long carried two complementary meanings. The first, articulated most clearly in the classical Greek tradition, understands freedom as eleutheria—the condition of living without domination or external constraint, a state in which individuals are not subject to arbitrary power. The second, rooted in the Roman legal and civic tradition, conceives freedom as libertas—the capacity to participate actively in the governance of a political community and to shape its laws and institutions. Both meanings reveal how deeply freedom depends on historical precedent: it requires language to articulate its claims, institutions to guarantee its exercise, and collective memory to frame its significance. Far from existing apart from what has been, freedom is shaped and enabled by what has already been conceived, argued, and enacted. Prior experience supplies the references and alternatives against which choices acquire meaning. Without that reservoir of knowledge, novelty would lack coherence and direction, and the exercise of freedom would collapse into arbitrary impulse. Human beings do not invent in a void; they work within the continuity of time and adapt what has been lived and learned into forms suited to what is yet to come.
This same dynamic defines the formation of identity. Selfhood is not an isolated act of invention but a continuous negotiation with what has been received. The very idea of the self has itself evolved through history: in classical philosophy, it was often conceived as a psyche—an inner essence shaped by reason and virtue and embedded within a larger cosmic order. Christian thought reinterpreted this understanding through the notion of the soul as a unique bearer of moral responsibility, oriented toward salvation and defined by its relationship to God. Early modern thinkers such as John Locke then transformed this inheritance by grounding personal identity in memory and consciousness — a conception that would later inform modern ideas of individual autonomy. Even the impulse to define oneself against the past relies on categories inherited from it. Identity is therefore neither static nor wholly self-created; it is a process of reinterpretation through which the individual positions what is given in relation to what is chosen. Human beings exist in the tension between inheritance and aspiration, between the weight of memory and the desire for renewal. That tension is not an obstacle to authenticity but its condition, for without the framework provided by the past there would be nothing from which to depart.Continuity and change are not opposing forces. Without continuity, there is no ground on which to become. Without change, continuity hardens into mere repetition. The act of becoming depends on the dynamic between the two.
Viewed from this perspective, the human condition is defined less by pure invention than by the capacity to transform. What is called “new” is the familiar reorganized with new intentions, the established redirected toward new purposes. Recognizing this does not diminish creativity. It clarifies its nature. Humanity’s most significant achievements—in politics, art, science, and thought—are not escapes from what has been. They are deliberate reinterpretations of what has been, shaped to answer new questions and confront new circumstances. In the sciences, paradigmatic shifts often described as revolutions still follow this pattern. Einstein’s theory of relativity did not erase Newtonian mechanics; it incorporated and extended its principles, a revision that revealed their limits while preserving their usefulness within a broader understanding of space, time, and motion. This same principle governs artistic innovation. The Renaissance revival of classical forms did not merely reproduce antiquity; it reinterpreted ancient visual languages to express the spiritual and humanistic concerns of a new era. The evolution of digital communication and artificial intelligence reflects a comparable continuity. The internet did not replace human interaction; it expanded its reach and scale, a transformation that altered how language circulates, how memory is archived, and how collective knowledge is formed. Similarly, artificial intelligence—often portrayed as autonomous or unprecedented—rests on centuries of linguistic, mathematical, and conceptual developments. These systems extend rather than supersede the cognitive inheritance from which they originate. The future is built in this way: not in its rejection of the past but in its continuous interaction with it.
Resistance to this understanding persists wherever the idea of evolution is denied. Such resistance is rarely a matter of evidence alone. It reflects a desire for permanence—for a beginning that is untouched by change and a truth that stands apart from time. It offers certainty where process allows none and promises stability in place of adaptation. Yet even this resistance is shaped by the forces it seeks to escape. Languages evolve, beliefs adjust, and traditions adapt, even as they proclaim their immutability. Those who defend what is fixed do so with concepts and arguments that themselves have been shaped by historical change. The very doctrines that claim timeless authority — such as the medieval conception of divine sovereignty, once invoked to legitimize monarchies and later transformed into the principle of popular sovereignty in modern constitutional systems—reveal this dependence: they persist not by remaining unchanged but by being continually reinterpreted to meet new contexts. The contrast, therefore, is not between evolution and its absence, but between recognition and refusal. The reality remains: existence unfolds through transformation, and humanity, whether consciously or not, participates in that unfolding—a truth with profound implications for how societies remember their past, shape their present, and imagine their future.
Further Reading:
Arendt, Hannah: Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. New York: Viking Press, 1961.
Kuhn, Thomas S.: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.
MacIntyre, Alasdair: After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981.
Floridi, Luciano: The Philosophy of Information. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Koselleck, Reinhart: Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Translated by Keith Tribe. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
Politics (from the Greek politikós, “of, by, or relating to citizens”) is the practice and theory of influencing people at the civic or individual level.
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By Ricardo Morin
August 10, 2025.
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From their earliest formulations, constitutional frameworks have been more than foundational legal agreements; they have stood as declarations of political philosophy, and defined how power should be organized, how it should be restrained, and to whom it must be answerable. Contemporary governance, to a large extent, continues those experiments, shaped over centuries of trial and adaptation. Yet these forms can endure in appearance while being emptied of substance. In more than a few States today, constitutions proclaim liberty while they narrow its scope, define rights in ways that exclude, and preserve the interests of a governing elite. Partisanship exploits the perceived limitations and vulnerabilities of others as grounds for exclusion; self-righteousness becomes a tool for domination, silences opposition, and suppresses dissent. The worth of a constitutional framework, therefore, is measured not only by its letter but by the ethical integrity of those who sustain it. Without ethics, politics loses its meaning; without civic virtue, the law ceases to serve peace and becomes an instrument of dominion.
The separation of powers, vigorously defended by Montesquieu, rests on the conviction that liberty survives when power is compelled to check power. This principle is distorted when institutions are subordinated to partisan or personal interests. In recent years, several States have formally preserved an independent judiciary while, in practice, subjected it to appointment processes controlled by the Executive or the ruling party. Such hollowing-out is not merely a technical failure; it reflects a political culture in which ambition, fear, or indifference among citizens permits the disfigurement of the very mechanisms designed to protect them. It also reveals how institutional strength and civic responsibility are bound together in ways that cannot be separated.
Historical constitutions continue to shape how political communities imagine authority. They bequeath principles that, at their best, offer adaptable frameworks for meeting new challenges without renouncing their essential core: that the legitimacy of a Government rests not on the strength of its rulers but on the solidity of the structures that limit them.
Yet these structures endure only when citizens reject duplicity and sectarianism. Divisions of ideology must not harden into exclusive loyalty to one’s own group at the expense of a shared civic framework. They endure only when citizens resist the idolatry of power, because authority loses its legitimacy once it is treated as sacred or unquestionable. And they endure only when citizens repudiate the cult of personality, in which a leader is raised above criticism through image-making, propaganda, and personal loyalty.
The durability of constitutional order, then, does not lie solely in written texts or institutional arrangements. It rests equally on the civic ethic of those who inhabit them. When ambition, fear, or indifference allow citizens to tolerate duplicity or surrender to sectarian loyalty, the limits on power become fragile. Conversely, when vigilance and responsibility prevail, constitutions retain their strength as both shield and compass—guarding against arbitrary rule while orienting political life toward justice and restraint.
True reform is not solely institutional but also internal: a revolution in the individual and collective sphere, in which each person accepts the responsibility to act with integrity, openness, and commitment to the common good, in harmony with oneself and with others. Only through the alignment of institutional structures with civic responsibility can any Constitution preserve its meaning and endure as a safeguard against arbitrary power.
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Annotated Bibliography
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Ginsburg, Tom, and Aziz Z. Huq.; How to Save a Constitutional Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. (Ginsburg and Aziz examine the legal and institutional pathways through which democracies weaken, from court-packing to the erosion of independent oversight. They draw on comparative examples from the United States, Hungary, and elsewhere to show how constitutional mechanisms can be used to consolidate power while preserving a façade of legality.)
Landau, David: “Abusive Constitutionalism.” UC Davis Law Review 47 (1), 2013: 189–260. (Landaudevelops the concept of “abusive constitutionalism” to describe how incumbents exploit constitutional change to entrench their rule. Uses Latin American and other global cases to illustrate how amendments and reinterpretations weaken checks and balances, alter electoral systems, and undermine judicial independence.)
Levitsky, Steven, and Way, Lucan A.: Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. (Levitsky and Way analyze regimes that preserve the formal institutions of democracy but manipulate them to ensure ruling-party dominance. They introduce the concept of “competitive authoritarianism” as a framework for understanding how constitutional norms are hollowed out while democratic forms are maintained.)
Levitsky, Steven, and Ziblatt, Daniel: How Democracies Die. New York: Crown, 2018. (Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that modern democracies often decline through the gradual decline of norms rather than coups. The book shows how leaders exploit constitutional ambiguities, stack courts, and weaponize law to suppress opposition, eroding both civic trust and institutional integrity.)
One cannot assess the Spanish political climate without acknowledging the rise of VOX, a far-right party founded in 2013 by former members of the conservative Partido Popular. Since 2018, VOX has gained traction by opposing regional autonomy, feminist legislation, and immigration, while defending a nationalist agenda that includes the revision—or outright rejection—of Spain’s historical reckoning with Francoism.
It is the symptom of a deeper democratic disillusionment. What resurfaces is not spontaneous historical memory, but a political and cultural framework that reasserts itself when the social agreements binding the present begin to fray. VOX’s references to the Franco regime are rarely doctrinaire or explicit, but they are unmistakable in the party’s rejection of the Democratic Memory Law, its exaltation of national unity as a sacred and untouchable principle, its condemnation of the autonomous state model, and its appeal to a so-called “natural order” that treats hierarchy, the traditional family, and social inequality as if they were objective facts of history.
What is most concerning is not that voices like these exist—they always have—but that they have regained institutional power and cultural legitimacy. Dissatisfaction with the political system, fatigue with ineffective parliamentary politics, and a growing sense of identity displacement feed into a shared national unease. This unease can be felt across a wide spectrum: small business owners who perceive the state as hostile, or young people who find no meaning in a hollow, bureaucratized political language. The grievances vary, but the far right offers a single channel: the emotional simplification of conflict—transforming fear into obedience, and uncertainty into wounded pride.
Within this framework, VOX presents itself as the only political actor with a unified narrative. Its strength does not lie in public policy, but in assertion. It offers no coherent platform of governance, but instead proposes a reactive, exclusionary identity. And here the progressive response often falters. While the institutional left—represented by the PSOE and remnants of Unidas Podemos—relies on rhetorical frames worn down by official discourse, segments of the academic and cultural intelligentsia (particularly university-affiliated think tanks and subsidized editorial circuits) have retreated into a ritualized defense of democracy, without reassessing its principles or renewing the language through which it is explained. Repeating just causes through exhausted formulas turns even the noblest ideas into noise.
Worse still, in the name of pluralism—or out of fear of being labeled sectarian—certain cultural institutions (El País, publishing houses like Taurus, or high-profile forums such as the Círculo de Bellas Artes) have offered platforms to reactionary voices under the pretext of open debate. In doing so, they have helped normalize a discourse that steadily unravels the ethical agreements underpinning democratic life. What is framed as tolerance may, in fact, be a form of structural surrender.
Spain’s history is burdened with wounds that were never fully closed. The political pacts of the Transition, born of necessity, opted for shared silence as the price of institutional stability. That silence allowed for peace, but left the past unresolved. Today, as new efforts—like the Democratic Memory Law—begin to reshape that narrative, fear returns: fear that to acknowledge historical violence might destabilize the present. VOX exploits this fear not with policy, but with symbolic refuge—offering a home to a version of Spain that feels lost.
The responsibility of the intellectual class is not to reassert inherited certainties or rehearse moral slogans. It is to sustain complexity: to resist the lure of simplification, to acknowledge the fatigue of progressive frameworks without falling into cynicism, and to offer new ways of thinking that preserve both rigor and empathy. Because while reactionary discourse gains ground through simplification, critical thought must hold its ground in nuance—even if nuance isn’t viral, even if it doesn’t win applause.
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Annotated Bibliography
Preston, Paul: The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain. New York: W.W. Norton, 2012. (A comprehensive history of political and ideological violence during and after the Spanish Civil War, this work provides essential background for understanding the roots and continued appeal of Francoist narratives in Spain.)
Snyder, Timothy: On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2017. (This compact, cautionary text distills key lessons from the collapse of democracies in 20th-century Europe and offers reflections that resonate strongly with contemporary authoritarian rhetoric.)
Stanley, Jason: How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. New York: Random House, 2018. (An incisive study of fascist techniques and psychological mechanisms, this book helps explain how divisive identity politics and historical denial function in modern ultranationalist movements.)
The recent public defense of media censorship by the current Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission—an appointee from the Trump era—marks a chilling development in the ongoing campaign to recast American institutions in the image of authoritarian grievance. Justified under the pretext of combating “invidious ideology” associated with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), the move signals a deeper ideological purge aimed not at restoring neutrality but at eliminating pluralism itself.
This defense of censorship, framed as a protection against ideological bias, in fact constitutes a stark betrayal of the First Amendment’s foundational commitments. Far from curbing excess, it institutionalizes a selective silencing of voices that challenge the dominant ethno-nationalist narrative increasingly embraced by Trump-aligned cultural warriors. It is not DEI that poses a threat to democratic cohesion, but rather the repressive apparatus now being assembled to discredit and dismantle it.
What is emerging is not policy, but performance—a spectacle of control designed to communicate power rather than to govern justly. In this, the parallels to the reign of Caligula are not accidental. The Roman emperor’s descent into theatrical cruelty and capricious edicts was not merely a symptom of madness but a deliberate assertion of dominance over law, decorum, and truth itself. Under Caligula, the empire was transformed into a stage upon which reality bent to the will of a singular, vindictive ego. Trumpism, in its media strategy and institutional manipulation, follows a similar logic: one that privileges loyalty over legitimacy, and spectacle over substance.
The FCC’s shift from regulatory independence to ideological enforcement exemplifies this logic. Rather than acting as a steward of public trust, the Commission is being repurposed as a gatekeeper of permissible narratives—an arbiter of who may speak and who must be silenced. The language of “protecting viewers” from divisive content serves as a smokescreen for restricting narratives that confront historical injustice, racial inequality, or structural exclusion.
If allowed to continue, such measures risk hollowing out the very idea of a democratic media ecosystem. In its place would emerge a curated domain of sanctioned speech, curated not for truth or civic health, but for the comfort of those in power. The result would not be national unity, but enforced conformity masquerading as patriotism.
This is not a return to law and order; it is a return to imperial whim. The question now is whether American institutions will continue to serve as instruments of democratic accountability, or whether they will become, like the Senate under Caligula, ornamental backdrops to a regime that no longer pretends to tolerate dissent.
This essay examines the ethical decline at the heart of contemporary civic life and its consequences for culture. It argues that culture is not merely the preservation of artistic or intellectual forms, but the public expression of moral purpose. Drawing from Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958)—in particular, her critique of the “worldlessness” of mass society—the essay traces how symbolic and institutional forms have become detached from ethical responsibility. In place of a culture grounded in shared moral commitments, it identifies the rise of anticulture: a spectacle-driven imitation of cultural life, stripped of civic responsibility and moral depth. Rejecting nostalgia, the essay calls for a cultural renewal based on solidarity, public compassion, and ethical engagement.
The Withering of Culture: Goodness and Civility
Culture’s crisis is a moral one before it is a political one.
A society’s cultural life is not sustained by museums, literature, or festivals alone. These may serve as symbols of identity or refinement, but culture, in its fullest sense, demands a deeper moral orientation. If goodness—understood as a commitment to the dignity of others—does not animate civic life, culture loses its grounding and becomes a decorative shell. It may preserve the language, symbols, and rituals of a healthy society, but without ethical vitality, these forms risk becoming performative—or even deceptive. What withers first in such decline is not expression but conscience—the inner faculty that gives culture its ethical weight.
The current state of American public life illustrates this decline. Public discourse has grown coarse. It is now common for political actors to brand their opponents not merely as mistaken, but as dangerous or depraved. During his first presidency—and again since returning to office—Donald Trump has labeled critics as “traitors,” “scum,” and “evil.” At rallies and across social media, he has referred to political adversaries as “vermin,” language historically used by authoritarian regimes to delegitimize opposition. The press has been repeatedly cast as “the enemy of the people,” a phrase long employed to undermine public accountability.
This style of politics has become normalized. In school board meetings, legislative chambers, and campaign platforms, elected officials accuse their counterparts of being “groomers,” “communists,” or “un-American”—language that transforms disagreement into moral condemnation. In 2023, when Republican Utah Governor Spencer Cox publicly supported protections for LGBTQ youth and called for civil dialogue, far-right commentators denounced him as a ‘Republican in name only’—a supposed traitor to conservative values. His appeal to empathy was interpreted not as strength of character but as political surrender. In such an environment, even measured gestures of respect are read as weakness—or worse, betrayal.
Conspiracy theories once relegated to fringe pamphlets now echo in congressional hearings. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has accused political opponents of orchestrating “Satanic rituals”, while Senator J.D. Vance suggested that cultural and academic elites pose an existential threat to the nation. In such an environment, political opposition is recast as moral deviance. The result is not merely polarization, but a systematic dismantling of the civic imagination.
What is promoted in this environment is not only a political ideology, but a form of power centered on the humiliation of others—a self-glorifying posture sustained by the denigration it requires. This type of leadership rests not on principle or public vision but on the glorification of one’s own image. It is a form of narcissistic power—not in clinical terms, but as the conversion of symbolic authority into a vehicle for grievance, personality cult, and systematic contempt for difference.
The consequences of this climate are not confined to rhetoric. In 2022, Paul Pelosi, the husband of then–Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, was attacked in their home by an intruder radicalized by online conspiracies. In 2025, Minnesota state senator Melissa Hortman and her husband were murdered by a man reportedly enraged by progressive legislative agendas. Around the same time, a lone assailant attacked attendees at a local Pride event, citing ideological grievances as justification. More recently, on September 10, 2025, the high profile influencer Charlie Kirk was assassinated by a young radical inflamed by the very rhetoric he opposed. These acts are not isolated tragedies. They reveal a civic landscape in which anger is not only normalized but weaponized. Dehumanizing discourse is not idle speech; it becomes license for violence.
Online platforms amplify these dynamics. What began as tools for connection have become engines of outrage. Algorithms on platforms like X (formerly Twitter) promote content that inflames rather than informs. Verbal take-downs, personal attacks, and tribal affirmations generate more engagement than thoughtfulness or restraint. The loudest voices—not the wisest—are the most amplified. As a result, cruelty is often rewarded as candor, and ridicule is mistaken for insight.
The effects are tangible. A mayor receives death threats for enforcing public health policies. A schoolteacher is harassed online for adopting inclusive language. A librarian resigns after refusing to censor materials that affirm pluralism. Columbia University pays over $200 million in penalties to the federal government under political pressure from the Trump administration—forced to signal partisan compliance in order to continue its cancer research. These are not anecdotal exceptions. They reveal a broader decline of democratic sensibility: a failure to recognize fellow citizens as worthy of care, dialogue, or even basic dignity.
Nowhere is this inversion of moral language more visible than in two of the most enduring national failures: the absence of universal healthcare and the unchecked circulation of firearms. In both, the language of freedom conceals the logic of profit. Insurance and weapons industries, fortified by investors and political patrons, convert dependency and fear into revenue while legislators invoke “choice” and “rights” as moral cover for their complicity. The result is a civic inversion: health and safety—once understood as the moral responsibilities of a just society—are administered as markets. When interest acquires the vocabulary of conscience, democracy begins to speak its own undoing.
Yet this crisis is frequently mischaracterized. To name it is not to indulge in nostalgia. The diagnosis does not propose a return to an idealized past, but instead demands a reckoning with the ethical foundations of culture itself. A society may build monuments, publish literature, and preserve archives—but if it no longer cultivates compassion, humility, and the habit of care, its culture has already begun to wither.
When Aaron Copland composed Fanfare for the Common Man in 1942, the phrase “the common man” carried a sense of moral optimism—the embodiment of democratic dignity, sacrifice, and inclusion. Today, detached from that wartime faith in shared purpose, the same title sounds almost ironic, as if questioning whether the “common man” still exists amid inequality, manipulated populism, and performative patriotism. What was once an anthem of unity now lingers as an echo of the ideal—equality, justice, and shared responsibility—and that echo reveals, beneath its noble resonance, a critique of how those virtues have been hollowed out and repurposed by demagogic politics and consumer spectacle. The fanfare no longer celebrates; it laments. It stands as an elegy for the loss of democratic sincerity masquerading as triumph, capturing with quiet precision the tension between moral aspiration and civic disillusionment.
This moral decay gives rise to what may be called anticulture: not the absence of cultural forms, but their inversion—their use as instruments of division, branding, or control. Anticulture offers performance without substance, heritage without responsibility, and visibility without ethical vision. It mimics meaning but does not generate it. Its language flatters rather than guides. Its stories entertain but do not bind.
When conviction forgets to breathe, it mistakes endurance for moral strength. In time, it becomes a ritual of loyalty to its own image. Aspiration, however, is the current that keeps conviction alive—the movement that returns it to conscience. Without conviction, aspiration drifts without form; without aspiration, conviction calcifies into creed. The moral imagination depends on their continual exchange: hope that remembers, and memory that still dares to imagine.
To rebuild culture is to recover its moral essence. It is not enough to preserve institutions, sponsor festivals, or fund the arts if the ethical spirit is neglected. Culture without goodness becomes hollow—easily co-opted by spectacle, tribalism, or power. Acts of public courage, the rehumanization of discourse, and the refusal to normalize contempt are not ornamental gestures; they are essential conditions for renewal. Like democracy, culture must be tended—not merely inherited or displayed. When culture mistakes approval for virtue, morality becomes a mirror for power.At its core, culture and goodness are not separate. Nurturing one gives life to the other. Where goodness falters, culture loses its vitality; where it is cultivated, culture may yet be renewed. The work of rehumanization is therefore never complete; it must remain a continual labor of conscience.
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Annotated Bibliography
Arendt, Hannah: The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. (Arendt explores the distinction between labor, work, and action, offering a foundational critique of how modern life has eroded meaningful public engagement).
Bellah, Robert N., et al: Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. (This sociological study examines the tensions between individualism and civic responsibility in American culture).
Berman, Marshall: All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982. (Berman traces the psychological and cultural disorientation caused by modernity, especially in urban life).
Girard, René: Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977. (Girard’s theory of mimetic desire and sacrificial violence clarifies how cultural forms can devolve into mechanisms of exclusion or aggression).
Lasch, Christopher: The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. New York: W. W. Norton, 1979. (Lasch critiques the rise of therapeutic individualism and the erosion of civic virtue).
MacIntyre, Alasdair: After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981. (MacIntyre’s argument that modern moral discourse is fragmented and incoherent lays the philosophical groundwork for the essay).
Nussbaum, Martha C.: Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013. (Nussbaum argues that cultivating emotional capacities—such as compassion and solidarity—is essential for a just society).
Putnam, Robert D.: Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. (Putnam presents a comprehensive study of declining civic engagement in the United States).
Sandel, Michael J.: What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. (Sandel critiques the intrusion of market logic into spheres of life traditionally governed by ethical norms).
Taylor, Charles: A Secular Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. (Taylor examines the moral and cultural consequences of secular modernity, particularly the fragmentation of shared meaning).
… Rethinking Identity and Belonging in Civic Life”
By Ricardo Morin
July 2025
Ricardo Morin Silence III 22’ x 30” Watercolor, graphite, gesso, acrylic on paper 2010
Abstract
This essay explores the moral and civic tensions between identity and democratic belonging. While the affirmation of cultural, ethnic, or political identity can offer dignity and solidarity, it can also harden into exclusionary boundaries. The essay argues that liberal democracies must find ways to acknowledge difference without allowing it to erode shared commitments to equal rights, mutual recognition, and the rule of law. Drawing on historical reflection and philosophical insight, it calls for a civic imagination that resists reductionism and makes space for the full complexity of human life.
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“Lines That Divide: Rethinking Identity and Belonging in Civic Life”
The idea of a people signifies more than shared humanity—it evokes a sense of belonging, shaped by culture, memory, and mutual recognition. At its best, it names the bonds that tie individuals to communities, traditions, and aspirations larger than themselves. Yet when the phrase my people becomes a marker of separation or proprietary ownership over culture, suffering, or truth, it risks reinforcing the very divisions that our civic and legal frameworks aim to overcome. What begins as a declaration of identity can easily become a posture of exclusion. We hear it in moments of pain, pride, or fear: “You wouldn’t understand—you’re not one of us.” Sometimes that is true. But when the language of belonging hardens into a refusal to listen or an excuse not to care, it stops being a refuge and becomes a wall.
Throughout history, group identities—whether national, racial, religious, or political—have served both as sources of solidarity and as instruments of division. While identity offers a means to reclaim dignity and assert visibility in the face of marginalization, it also contains the seeds of separation. The line between affirmation and alienation is perilously thin. The same identity that uplifts a community can harden into a boundary that isolates others. It is a double-edged sword: capable of healing or harming, depending on how it is wielded.
The modern democratic project rests on a delicate balance: it must recognize difference while upholding equality. Liberal democracies are premised on the idea that all individuals, regardless of group affiliation, possess equal rights under the law. It’s a principle taught in early childhood, often before it’s fully understood: the sense that rules should be fair, that being left out or judged before being known feels wrong. That early moral intuition is echoed in constitutional promises, which exist not just to reflect majorities but to protect the dignity of each person, especially when they are in the minority—of belief, background, or circumstance.
The goal is not to erase identity, but to prevent it from becoming the sole axis along which rights, value, or participation are measured. When identity becomes the primary currency of belonging, we risk turning citizenship into a competition of grievances, where recognition is awarded only at the expense of others.
This problem is not abstract. We see it daily in public discourse, where appeals to identity often overshadow appeals to principle. The phrase my people can be used to claim historical injury, moral superiority, or cultural authority—but it can also suggest exclusion, as if others are not part of that moral circle. The danger lies in what is left unsaid: who is not included in my people? Who becomes them?
Such binaries—us versus them—flatten the complexity of human relationships and obscure our mutual dependence. In truth, no community exists in isolation. Our economies, institutions, and ecosystems are inextricably linked. The law is designed to reflect that interdependence by granting rights universally, not tribally. Yet when identity becomes the filter through which justice is demanded or denied, the rule of law suffers. Justice ceases to be blind and becomes instead a servant of factional interests.
This does not mean we should abandon the language of identity. Cultural and historical specificity matter. Erasing them in the name of unity risks another form of injustice: the silencing of lived experiences. The solution is not to reject identity, but to contextualize it—to understand it as one part of a broader human condition, rather than the totality of a person’s worth or moral standing.
To move forward, we must ask a hard question: Can we acknowledge identity without allowing it to calcify into division? Can we affirm cultural or historical differences while building institutions and relationships that are capacious enough to include those unlike ourselves?
Doing so requires more than tolerance. It demands a civic imagination—one that envisions solidarity not as uniformity, but as the commitment to coexist with dignity across lines of difference. It means seeing others not primarily as representatives of a group, but as individuals with rights, needs, and aspirations equal to our own. It means remembering that no one can be fully known by a single trait, history, or belonging—not even ourselves. We each carry contradictions: tenderness alongside prejudice, loyalty tangled with resentment, the need to be seen and the fear of being exposed. To honor our shared humanity is to make space for that complexity—not to excuse harm, but to understand that moral life begins not with certainty, but with humility.
Ultimately, the challenge of our time is not merely to recognize difference, but to live with it constructively. The real test of a pluralistic society is not how loudly it proclaims diversity, but how equitably it distributes belonging. To succeed, we must shift from my people to our people—not as an erasure of identity, but as a deeper, shared commitment to the fragile experiment of coexistence.
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Annotated Bibliography
Appiah, Kwame Anthony: The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity. New York: Liveright, 2018. (Explores how identities such as race, creed, and nation are constructed, sustained, and misused—calling for a more flexible, cosmopolitan ethics.)
Arendt, Hannah: The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. (Analyzes the nature of political life and plurality, grounding civic belonging in the shared space of action and speech rather than fixed identities.)
Benhabib, Seyla: The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. (Defends universal human rights while acknowledging the legitimacy of cultural claims—proposing a model of democratic iterations.)
Fukuyama, Francis: Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018. (Traces the rise of identity politics globally and its impact on democratic institutions, arguing for a re-centering of shared civic values.)
Glazer, Nathan, and Daniel P. Moynihan: Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians and Irish of New York City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1963. (Classic sociological study showing how ethnic identities persist across generations and shape urban belonging in complex, often contradictory ways.)
Hooks, Bell: Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End Press, 1990. (Critiques exclusionary forms of identity politics and calls for forms of solidarity that cross boundaries of race, gender, and class.)
Ignatieff, Michael: Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994. (Personal and political reflections on nationalism in the post–Cold War era, warning of the moral danger in defining belonging through ancestry.)
Rawls, John: Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. (Presents a theory of justice grounded in overlapping consensus rather than shared identity, advocating for stability in a pluralist society.)
Taylor, Charles: Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. Edited by Amy Gutmann. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. (Argues that recognition of cultural identity is vital to individual dignity, but must be balanced within a just liberal framework.)
Wiesel, Elie: Nobel Peace Prize Lecture. Oslo: Nobel Foundation, 1986. (A deeply moral reflection on human solidarity, memory, and the responsibility to resist indifference—invoking identity without exclusion.)
Observations On Perception 