From the blackout to the ‘bureaucratopia’ | Opinion

Compared to other conflicts in which our politicians are entangled, the advantage of the famous blackout is that its causes will end up being known in detail. It may take more or less, but in the end the bottom of the matter will be revealed. Even if only because our European partners will demand precise technical explanations, and the evaluation of these will allow attributing the corresponding responsibilities. The matter will cease to be « opinionable », as happened in the posterior parliamentary debate, so similar to those that affect any other political event.

Now, no one thinks that this will end the conflict between the parties. The energy issue is one of the most politicized and a technical decision on the collapse of the electrical system will not dissolve it as if it were a sugar. The difference is that at least it will serve to bring to light the frivolity of doing cheap politics with the things of eating. If there is something for what the blackout is for, it is for us to become aware of the essentials of certain public services and how its assurance is a matter would be sufficiently to deserve more than the inertia in the inertia of the partisan confrontation to use. To put it in silver, what interests us is that things They worknot the specific benefit that this or that party takes out of the anger.

I bring this up, because « things work », it has become the new mantra of the dispute – ideological? – contemporary. The « ideological » thing I put between interrogations, because what it is about is precisely to relegate the ideology to a second place and priority to the question of effectiveness. Not only ideology – subordinating everything to prevent climate change, for example – but the same processes or procedures, seen as dilatory and inefficient, which ensure the guarantee of certain rights.

We find it grossly In the desire of the Tecnobros Trumpists to crush the federal administration United States. But now it has also appeared on the left; Of course, within a much more sophisticated argument, as Ezra Klein and Derek Thomson do in their book Abundancewhich is having a wide impact. His thesis is very simple: however great the objectives are, when tangible results are not achieved, distrust of politics is accentuated and the populists end up voting. « The mistakes of the progressives contributed to the rise of illiberalism. » It is better, therefore, that we look less at issues of legitimacy, in the « obsession with the process », and let’s go to what really works.

It is a minimum synthesis of a book full of examples, but what matters is the basic idea. Democracy can be perfectly efficient, but when it is entangled in its mutual vetoes systems, in ideological dogmatism and the logic of bureaucratic processes it ends up being dysfunctional. The key is, therefore, in knowing how to properly combine the tension between legitimacy and efficiency. But I think they fall into the « bureaucratopia », for borrowing the title of a book by Julia Borggräffe, in which this German author also aspires to something like a salvation of democracy through a radical reorganization of public management. It may be essential; The danger is, of course, that we end up throwing the child – democratic guarantees – with dirty water. Who was going to tell us, we always thought that the Chinese would end up converging on democratic systems; Now it seems that we want to undertake the opposite path, approach your model.