The ruling party’s argument, which many commentators not aligned with the Government have also adopted, states that the resounding failure of the public administrations in managing the emergency confirms, precisely, the need to reinforce the irreplaceable protective vision of the State.
Nothing more dangerous, according to this reasoning, than the “anti-politics” that spread among the victims and so many other citizens, embodied in the Paiporta riot, and that was once again present in the bitter insults directed against the presidents of the Government and the Generalitat at the “funeral” this Thursday. His righteous anger would have been manipulated by an interested campaign to discredit the institutions.
But this talk gives way to the direct experience of the victims’ relatives and the majority of Spaniards.
What they felt with crystal clarity was not only the incompetence and venality of their representatives, but a fundamental disappointment with the tacit budget to which any State owes its legitimation: the protection of its citizens.
A brigade of volunteers upon arrival in Alfafar to help in the reconstruction work after the damage.
Alfafar, Valencia
Hence the guardians of the the state in which They have applied all this time to ward off the radical questions about it that arose as a result of the multi-organ collapse of the system before, during and after the storm, reducing them to anti-system alienations excited by demagogues.
But the truth is that the floods brought to light the definitive failure of the State.
In the first instance, the failure of the State of the autonomies.
The lack of coordination of the chaotic civil protection system, divided between different bodies and administrations.
The parsimonious system for requesting help from the central State and decreeing exceptional powers.
The delayed protocols for sending rescue forces.
And so many other inputs that provided definitive support for the inveterate warnings about this cantonal model of decentralization, of which it was repeated that It would only bring costly administrative duplications that would reduce operability and agility. of executive action, and that would be a source of regulatory confusion and jurisdictional conflicts.
And, for this reason, along with the discredit of the autonomous State, the failure of the State in general, of the smoothness of the administrative machinery when all political action must be developed strictly through the authorized and mandatory channels, also became evident.
Updated information on flows is only provided to Emergencies if they require it.
Alerts are only issued to the population if they have been previously approved.
Aid is only sent to the regions if it is requested.
Troops are only deployed if they have received prior authorization.
No matter how dramatic the situation is, everything must go in its corresponding window.
đź”´ BREAKING NEWS | Tertullians from Cadena SER lose their minds and begin to call “fascist” everything that is not congratulating Sánchez for his management: “The motto ‘the people save the people’ is pure fascism.”
“The Sánchez-Mazón resignation banners are also fascism.” pic.twitter.com/2X5kpaU9zN
— Unai Cano (@unaicano10) November 11, 2024
And in this way it was revealed in all its crudeness how the State’s innate tendency towards bureaucratization leads to an absurd result: the irrationality of hyperrationalization.
The overflow of public powers served as an epiphany of the incapable “government of no one” led to by an administrative system that, instead of fulfilling its function (assigning command powers to each political actor), encourages the dilution of responsibility.
Hence, the other most common aspect in the analysis of dana is equally misguided: the one that strives to resolve individual responsibilities.
Beyond whether the negligence must be attributed to the president of the Generalitat, the president of the Government, or both, it is necessary to understand thatWhat is essential to explain the catastrophe is not so much the personal factoras the institutional framework that guides political decisions.
The key is not that the rulers are immoral, but that the State is amoral.
Because the sclerotized State engenders the moral anemia of society. as he wrote Ortega y Gasset“the people become meat that feeds the mere machinery that is the State. The skeleton eats the meat around it.”
The President of the Government responded to this assessment by reaffirming that “we are all the State.” From “We are all the Treasury” to the State is all of us.
But experience shows the opposite: that the modern State, as pointed out Nicolás GĂłmez Dávila“it is the transformation of the apparatus that society developed for its defense into an autonomous organism that exploits it.”
On the other hand, the contingents of dedicated volunteers who went to the affected areas demonstrated much more reflexes and greater resolution than the Administration.
And this was at the same time a lesson of something that we had forgotten: in the face of obese States, very large but impotent, andIt is crucial to be equipped with muscular intermediate bodieswhich act as a counterweight to a State that monopolizes all political life.
That would be the correct conclusion to draw from the tragedy of the dana: the disastrous consequences of downloading all collective agency in a State that absorbs all the associative nerve of a community.
Lessons from the Dutch case for Spain:
-The coordination of emergencies depends on the municipality, and not on the distant scaffolding of the CCAA.
-The monitoring of flows is the responsibility of autonomous bodies (Water Boards), and the State only intervenes subsidiarily. https://t.co/Y8iCFbrQGM
— VĂctor Núñez DĂaz (@victornunezd) November 11, 2024
Therefore, the motto that so worries systemic exegetes, “Only the people save the people”, it is not “anti-politics”.
It is, on the contrary, an expansion of the horizons of politics, which had always had a much greater scope than the reduced individual-State duality. Because it included all forms of local self-organization: neighborhood associations, parishes, cooperatives, unions, brotherhoods, brotherhoods, etc.
It is not a question of using the collapse of the tutelary State in Valencia as a boost to the minarchist theses of the minimal State.
It is about advocating for a subsidiary State that it can satisfactorily fulfill its main functions, being relieved of all those powers that can be better carried out by the actors most attached to the territorial circumstances. That they have a more accurate knowledge of real needs than centralized control will ever have.
The realization that the State is not going to save us offers an invitation to reconsider statist thinking. And to recover a certain community conception of social life that had been eclipsed by bureaucratic individualism.
On October 29, the perverse effects of the totalitarian contamination of all civic life by partitocratic politics were expressed in a very crude way, which does not leave independent spaces capable of reaching where the State cannot reach.
Contrary to what government propaganda claimed, we did not come out of the pandemic better.
But on the anniversary of the dana we have the opportunity to emerge better, developing popular organizations that mobilize and channel collective action, the only ones capable of awakening a sentimental connection with the common destiny. And promoting greater political commitment of all social agents through, in the words of Domingo Gonzalez“organic formulas of popular participation and ways of exercising active citizenship.”