When water mixes with dirt it becomes mud, tons of mud, the kind of mud that, in the wake of flash floods on Oct. 29 and 30, has turned the Spanish region of València into a kind of war zone. More than 200 people are dead; nearly 90 are still missing; hundreds of houses, roads and railways are destroyed; and towns are cut off without electricity, water, or provisions. Hundreds of families have lost everything. Large swathes of the region have been transformed into a brown hell, reeking of decay, after rivers topped their banks, sending water coursing through towns and cities.
But there is more than one kind of mud.
When administrative incompetence mixes with political partisanship, as has happened here, then another kind of mud emerges: populism. In this catastrophe, those anti-government forces that have been swirling in the dark edges of Spanish politics for years are now feeding on the many levels of incompetence of the state, and the absence of an effective public response by regional or national authorities.
Right now both València and Spain, mired in this morass, are at risk of being engulfed by the zeitgeist undermining so many Western democracies — and summarized in the slogan that quickly emerged on Spanish social media after the floods: “Only the people save the people.” It is the old trick of populism: confronting established institutions with the philosophical falsehood of the peoples’s purity; the idea that the average citizen is more capable at solving the problems of society than the government is.
I was born here. I grew up here. I belong to a people — the Valencian people — with an almost pathological obsession with water due to our history of severe droughts and torrential autumn rains. Water turned us into one of the main agricultural regions of the Mediterranean and enriched us with the export of our oranges, one of the largest sources of foreign currency in Spain during the years of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship. We had little industry but we had water, and that allowed us to survive. However, in this century, with the acceleration of climate change, we are increasingly vulnerable to flooding and brutal weather events, such as the recent torrential rains that have caused the destruction of the area around València, a destruction that now threatens to also be political.
After the initial shock of the extent of the damage, a variety of feelings emerged. First, the bewilderment of the citizens confronted by deadly error: The local authorities failed to warn the population in time of the real danger that water would fill the streets, putting lives at risk. “Avoidable deaths,” read the cover of Libération. It comes with an almost unbearable burden of guilt — so many lives lost.
Next came solidarity, with thousands of young people — already labeled the Shovel and Broom Generation — helping the devastated places that the state and the regional governments did not reach in the initial days of the catastrophe. They came from towns across the region to remove mud, clean houses, tow away cars and distribute food. In these times of individualism, the image of the spontaneous wave of young volunteers sullied with mud provided a rush of pride for a wounded people making the tragedy more manageable.
But the worst was yet to come, and that is where we are now. The population has settled into its rage and indignation at both the regional and national governments. Only through that prism is it possible to understand an event of enormous gravity in Spain: images of the king and queen of Spain being rebuked and splattered with mud and objects thrown at them while visiting the town of Paiporta, ground zero of the tragedy. The queen, her face mud-stained, her bodyguard with a bloody gash on his forehead. The king, protected against flying objects by an umbrella. The prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, threatened with shovels and fleeing the scene. The screams of “murderers”; angry crowds conjuring the grotesque faces of Goya’s paintings that are ever-present in Spain.
Small groups from the extreme right have reportedly led this response, fomenting a lie: that nothing can be expected of institutions and that only the people can save people. The reality is far less poetic. Only a surgeon can save you on the operating table. Only a meteorologist can warn you ahead of a deadly flood. Only political institutions can deploy the means to rebuild and offer the social safety net that those affected by this tragedy deserve. The latest Nobel laureates in economics, James Robinson, Simon Johnson and Daron Acemoglu, have demonstrated that the work of institutions is the crucial and determining factor — even more so than geography, culture or history — in the prosperity of a society. Turning your back on institutions serves only to further stir up the mud.
This sort of anti-politics, a politics of rejection, if you will, has been in Europe before. It led to Rome 1922, to Berlin 1933, to Madrid 1939. These historical shifts are too familiar for us not to take these neo-populist tendencies seriously. In Spain they worsened just a year ago during the violent demonstrations in Madrid against the government of Prime Minister Sánchez.
Just this week, I saw a banner painted with the motto, “València is our Bastille.” Again, a deceitful story: country, people, heroes. On July 14, 1789, the Bastille prison was liberated by the people, but behind it there was a despotic monarchy and the ancien regime to overthrow. That was the meaning of the French Revolution, an ideal admired even now. However, today in Spain there is no tyranny. There is an imperfect constitutional democracy and a state with central power and autonomous regions that, in this case, have failed their citizens and turned them to desolation and unrest.
These days, while the political mud keeps growing and the streets are still mired in muck, I can’t stop thinking about “The Dead Command,” the book by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, perhaps the most widely read and translated Valencian writer of the 20th century. “Let us kill the dead: Let us trample the useless obstacles, those old things that obstruct and complicate our path,” one of Mr. Ibáñez’s characters says on the book’s last page. That seems to be precisely the populists’ purpose: to destroy the old democracy that obstructs their overly simplistic worldview. We know them: Rome 1922, Berlin 1933, Madrid 1939. That is why we must urgently clean up both kinds of mud that are soiling us. The dead command it.
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