When a transforming process has overcome the installation phase, it needs to deepen and institutionalize the changes to ensure their continuation. In this critical phase new circumstances and challenges emerge which, if not carefully considered, might compromise the accomplished transformations.
It happens that people based governments usually win elections when countries suffer harsh crises and serious unbalances. Once in office, they need to transform the followed course and way of functioning that generated the situation that propelled them to government. However, even if they get access to resources and public sector management, they frequently need to focus on certain fronts without opening others that they might not successfully address. Even more, as in many cases they have been prevented from accumulating managerial experience, they are forced to learn as they go along.
When the transforming process has overcome the installation phase, it is necessary to deepen and institutionalize the changes to ensure their continuation. In this critical phase, new circumstances and challenges emerge which, if not carefully considered, can compromise the achieved transformations. There is always the risk of an eventual restoration of the economic and judiciary order that prevailed before the transformation process took place.
In the following lines some critical changes in circumstances will be considered.
Changes generated by the same transforming process
The first thing to take into consideration is that the transforming action of popular governments generates by itself changes of circumstances. Being them successful or not in attaining their goals, it cannot be ignored that the circumstances they face after one or more government periods are inevitably different from the ones they found at the beginning of their administration. Remaining anchored in scenarios and popular “moods” that have already changed can lead to costly appreciation mistakes and eventual crashes or setbacks in the desired transformations.
Popular aspirations adjust themselves with time and reached achievements: That is, they are settling over superior thresholds in wellbeing. Although loyalties get developed towards those who led the transformations, not everybody has the same level of clarification, determination, and perseverance. Moreover, cultures based on instant and incremental pleasures can disrupt the values that came along the early stages of transformations. What started as an epic story can be diluted into the search for individual interests, generating spaces for siren songs from actors that want to preserve their privileges and perceive the opportunity to stop the process and impose a change of course.
Evolution of the correlation of forces
An aspect that can be inferred from the preceding paragraph but that needs to be explicitly addressed is that the transforming dynamic affects the correlation of social, economic, and political forces that existed previously. The new correlation of forces goes hand in hand with the reconfiguration of interests and needs (real or perceived) that are presented very differently by those who fight for the control of the State, its resources, and public policies.
This is a political fight but also a cultural one that takes place in the context of imperfect democracies where the power of concentrated groups weighs heavily. The concentration of the media, which is not only national but also regional and global, plays a main role in shaping public opinion, highlighting and concealing reality aspects as they fit the interests of their owners and clients. They act in complicity with sectors of politics and the judiciary that obstruct as much as they can the implementation of transforming measures to slow down their impacts or neutralize them.
Hence, the efforts to sustain in time and deepen a transforming process are conditioned by an unavoidable task that includes a permanent popular clarification, strengthening of social organizations, full democratization of mass media, a judicial reform that accompanies and thus not obstruct the democratic development and a skillful alignment of interests of increasingly more not less economic, social, and political sectors. The communicational messages of those who promote transformations cannot come to a standstill or plateau as they lose strength just with the simple iteration; instead the ability of those who resist changes to preserve in concealment interests that cannot be presented openly, can permeate into sectors that are submitted to permanent operations of informative manipulation.
“If repeating a lie a thousand times makes it believable, repeating a truth endlessly evaporates it” (Agustin Basave)
The changing international context
It is impossible to ignore the volatile international context that conditions the future of humanity and the transforming efforts. For decades, a certain type of globalization has been imposed; one that led to the reckless concentration of wealth that prevails in the world today. Such concentration materializes itself in diverse mechanisms of extracting value that undermine the potential for development of almost every country and harm medium sectors as well as popular majorities.
At the same time, the recurrent systemic instability that characterizes the prevailing economic order presents some phases in which the prices of goods exported by emerging economies remain solid and other phases where they slowly or resoundingly decline. These fluctuations have as substratum variations in the global demand associated with the cycles of economic instability, but they are magnified with the speculative action that financial capitals exerts over every market and, in particularly, those related with food, minerals, and other essential natural resources.
In this context dominated by the action of concentrated groups, if countries or regions embark on transformations that threaten their interests, those groups would form alliances with local actors that directly or indirectly pay them tribute to block the transforming efforts. This happens in various regions where popular governments face destabilizing attempts from central countries and their concentrated economic groups.
The conditioning of people’s will
In democratic regimes, political rights and rules of functioning are recognized in constitutions and laws even when the democratic practice must address traps and constraints. Some traps come from the fact that guiding principles, rules of the game, and main institutions have been conceived by the prevailing social forces at the time of their foundation. Hence, in general, they tend to preserve outdated situations in terms of the evolution of societies. Thus, the forces that promote transformations have to operate in an unfavorable context of norms and institutions. Democratic regimes foresee mechanisms for self-transformation but do not contemplate severe constraints that usually enervate a process of profound changes. The own State is sometimes controlled, but always conditioned, by the economic power which with its resources and contacts can align in its favor important mass media and critical segments of politics and the judiciary.
Moreover, in the field of people’s will it is not easy to harmonize actions among a great number of groups and individuals with different clarification levels and a diversity of needs, interests, and emotions.
Additionally, electoral processes that are the initial substance for democratic credibility and representativeness are coming more to resemble marketing operations on names and “brands.” The voter is manipulated in a similar way as the consumer is when facing a diversified offer of products: it weighs more and more the packaging, subliminal messages, slogans and evocations that are associated with the candidates-products. The trajectory of each candidate, the consistency of what he proposes with what he has done, the working methodologies that have been used, the referential utopias to which he subscribes, a clear description of the course and strategies he proposes are all left behind. Instead of contrasting these dimensions, preferences are based on pretended empathies, theatricalities, reiteration of slogans and catchphrases. The substantive debate is replaced with fantasy invocations, jingles, studied gestures, and sentimentalisms. There is little clarification or frankness, all replaced by image advisors that know how to camouflage interests that could not be openly defended.
Who monitors the fulfillment of commitments and the electoral lies? It is irrelevant as in the next election a new film crew will once again shield those who can hire them from the consequences of their actions or omissions.