1145 words - 5 minute read
On March 18th this year Isabel Díaz Ayuso gave a speech at the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) in London (founded by Alfred Sherman, Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher). For those of you who haven’t heard of Díaz Ayuso and are looking for a UK analogue think Nigel Farage, not so much for their politics (though there are similarities) but for their capacity to attract media attention way beyond what their electoral position warrants.
To be fair Díaz Ayuso has greater formal clout than Farage because while his party has just 5 MPs in the House of Commons, she is President of the largest of Spain’s 17 Autonomous Communities, the Madrid Community. What they share, though, is their unrivalled capacity to capture media attention in their respective countries.
So what Díaz Ayuso says, matters. She could even one day be elected to lead the country, having already defenestrated one leader of her party (the Partido Popular) and with the current leader (Alberto Núñez Feijóo) insecure and ineffective.
And so you don’t have to, I have listened to her 20-minute speech three times in an attempt to tease out what we might grandly call her political philosophy.
First off, full marks for originality and chutzpah. She describes her political beliefs as ‘liberal’ - but it’s a liberalism the like of which I’ve never seen before. And to cap that she refers to ‘liberalism, the Spanish version’ (liberalismo a la española) as the original, pure, authentic liberalism, while others have lost their way.
There are of course some shared and well-known principles across these liberalisms - respect for the rule of law, separation of powers, the assertion that the end never justify the means - but what stands out is the anti-rational and moralising content of Ayuso’s liberalism. She’s at least as interested in the gut and the heart as in the head.
So the key principles of pure and authentic liberalism are apparently these: happiness, bravery, generosity and truth (la alegría, la valentía, la generosidad, la verdad). What’s striking about these principles is that they are both superficially attractive and radically imprecise - and therein lies their rhetorical and political potency. Ayuso has recognised (or stumbled upon) the recipe for rhetorical success in what we might call these anti-Enlightenment political times: make a list of warm-sounding homilies, repeat them often (she does so throughout this speech) and make a virtue of their imprecision so as to draw as many people into their orbit as possible.
Modern liberalism as we’ve come to understand it has very little moral content: its whole point is that within the constraints of the law and respect for other people we are free to choose the life we want to lead. Freedom is a word that Ayuso uses regularly, mostly in a reductive way - we’re unfree if there’s nowhere to have a beer at 3 in the morning. In this speech she adds a dash of intellectual substance by namechecking the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset and his assertion (along with existentialists) that human beings are constitutively free and therefore obliged to choose.
This seems impeccably liberal, but Ayuso parts ways with modern liberalism when she says that we must ‘choose well’. It’s clear that she doesn’t just mean ‘well’ in terms of adhering to the rule of the law because she makes it clear in her speech that there are some choices she abhors even if they’re legal. Two she refers to are abortion and euthanasia. A third is the consumption of drugs (mentioned no less than four times in the speech) which of course some liberals wish to see decriminalised precisely on the grounds of freedom to choose.
This is a moralising liberalism that rejects the idea of the unrooted ‘individual’ (individuo) in favour of the ‘person’ (persona) born into a particular circumstance which informs their (moral) choices and conditions their possibilities. If this is a liberalism at all it is the communitarian liberalism that arose in reaction what its supporters regarded as an excessive individualism leading to egocentrism (a point Ayuso makes in exactly those terms in her speech).
The problem with communitarian liberalism is that it has the potential to severely constrain the options open to the individual. The nature of the community one is born into is critical in that it conditions and constrains the choices the individual can legitimately make. Ayuso’s community is (I draw these characteristics from her speech): Christian, anti-’woke’, anti-left, nationalist, anti-feminist, pro-maternity. ‘Choosing well’ on Planet Ayuso means choosing in line with these principles and the behaviours that flow from them.
Running a high moral content politics is risky. Left-wing politics are almost constitutively moralising and left-wing politicians are very often called out for not living up to the moral standards they promote. This gives the right a very convenient stick with which to beat the left - and they do so at every opportunity.
On the face of it Ayuso runs a similar risk, and on a series of counts she is as susceptible to the charge of hypocrisy as any left-wing politician might be. For example, she makes much of the principle of ‘respect for human life’. This is the woman who defended her refusal to move older Covid patients from care homes to hospital on the grounds that they’d have soon died anyway. Again, she lionises the importance of ‘decorum’ in politics. This is the woman who called President Pedro Sánchez a son of a whore in Parliament and then claimed that she only said she liked fruit (hijo de puta/me gusta la fruta). Again, she makes much of the importance of the rule of law. This is the woman who shouts ‘calumny!’ when her partner is accused of defrauding the tax office, an accusation to which he has himself confessed. Finally, Ayuso goes into battle brandishing the sword of truth. This is the woman who unselfconsciously refers to ‘wokeism’ as the Trojan horse that the left is using to install communism throughout the western world. (Some of us might wish she was right about that).
In the end, and despite Ayuso’s protestations, hers is not a liberalism. It is a profound conservatism, rooted in Catholicism, Spanish nationalism, idealisation of the family and tradition. And she is not as susceptible to the charge of hypocrisy as those on the left are because no-one has ever really expects morally consistent behaviour from right-wing politicians. And even less so now that Trump has made a virtue out of anti-virtue. Ayuso’s supporters are as delirious as his are when they see her flouting the rules - even (especially?) the ones she extols herself.
How fitting that Ayuso should choose to give her lecture at a centre founded by Margaret Thatcher. The Madrid President is unfortunate proof that the latter’s conservatism is alive and kicking in all but - literally - name.
On March 18th this year Isabel Díaz Ayuso gave a speech at the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) in London (founded by Alfred Sherman, Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher). For those of you who haven’t heard of Díaz Ayuso and are looking for a UK analogue think Nigel Farage, not so much for their politics (though there are similarities) but for their capacity to attract media attention way beyond what their electoral position warrants.
To be fair Díaz Ayuso has greater formal clout than Farage because while his party has just 5 MPs in the House of Commons, she is President of the largest of Spain’s 17 Autonomous Communities, the Madrid Community. What they share, though, is their unrivalled capacity to capture media attention in their respective countries.
So what Díaz Ayuso says, matters. She could even one day be elected to lead the country, having already defenestrated one leader of her party (the Partido Popular) and with the current leader (Alberto Núñez Feijóo) insecure and ineffective.
And so you don’t have to, I have listened to her 20-minute speech three times in an attempt to tease out what we might grandly call her political philosophy.
First off, full marks for originality and chutzpah. She describes her political beliefs as ‘liberal’ - but it’s a liberalism the like of which I’ve never seen before. And to cap that she refers to ‘liberalism, the Spanish version’ (liberalismo a la española) as the original, pure, authentic liberalism, while others have lost their way.
There are of course some shared and well-known principles across these liberalisms - respect for the rule of law, separation of powers, the assertion that the end never justify the means - but what stands out is the anti-rational and moralising content of Ayuso’s liberalism. She’s at least as interested in the gut and the heart as in the head.
So the key principles of pure and authentic liberalism are apparently these: happiness, bravery, generosity and truth (la alegría, la valentía, la generosidad, la verdad). What’s striking about these principles is that they are both superficially attractive and radically imprecise - and therein lies their rhetorical and political potency. Ayuso has recognised (or stumbled upon) the recipe for rhetorical success in what we might call these anti-Enlightenment political times: make a list of warm-sounding homilies, repeat them often (she does so throughout this speech) and make a virtue of their imprecision so as to draw as many people into their orbit as possible.
Modern liberalism as we’ve come to understand it has very little moral content: its whole point is that within the constraints of the law and respect for other people we are free to choose the life we want to lead. Freedom is a word that Ayuso uses regularly, mostly in a reductive way - we’re unfree if there’s nowhere to have a beer at 3 in the morning. In this speech she adds a dash of intellectual substance by namechecking the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset and his assertion (along with existentialists) that human beings are constitutively free and therefore obliged to choose.
This seems impeccably liberal, but Ayuso parts ways with modern liberalism when she says that we must ‘choose well’. It’s clear that she doesn’t just mean ‘well’ in terms of adhering to the rule of the law because she makes it clear in her speech that there are some choices she abhors even if they’re legal. Two she refers to are abortion and euthanasia. A third is the consumption of drugs (mentioned no less than four times in the speech) which of course some liberals wish to see decriminalised precisely on the grounds of freedom to choose.
This is a moralising liberalism that rejects the idea of the unrooted ‘individual’ (individuo) in favour of the ‘person’ (persona) born into a particular circumstance which informs their (moral) choices and conditions their possibilities. If this is a liberalism at all it is the communitarian liberalism that arose in reaction what its supporters regarded as an excessive individualism leading to egocentrism (a point Ayuso makes in exactly those terms in her speech).
The problem with communitarian liberalism is that it has the potential to severely constrain the options open to the individual. The nature of the community one is born into is critical in that it conditions and constrains the choices the individual can legitimately make. Ayuso’s community is (I draw these characteristics from her speech): Christian, anti-’woke’, anti-left, nationalist, anti-feminist, pro-maternity. ‘Choosing well’ on Planet Ayuso means choosing in line with these principles and the behaviours that flow from them.
Running a high moral content politics is risky. Left-wing politics are almost constitutively moralising and left-wing politicians are very often called out for not living up to the moral standards they promote. This gives the right a very convenient stick with which to beat the left - and they do so at every opportunity.
On the face of it Ayuso runs a similar risk, and on a series of counts she is as susceptible to the charge of hypocrisy as any left-wing politician might be. For example, she makes much of the principle of ‘respect for human life’. This is the woman who defended her refusal to move older Covid patients from care homes to hospital on the grounds that they’d have soon died anyway. Again, she lionises the importance of ‘decorum’ in politics. This is the woman who called President Pedro Sánchez a son of a whore in Parliament and then claimed that she only said she liked fruit (hijo de puta/me gusta la fruta). Again, she makes much of the importance of the rule of law. This is the woman who shouts ‘calumny!’ when her partner is accused of defrauding the tax office, an accusation to which he has himself confessed. Finally, Ayuso goes into battle brandishing the sword of truth. This is the woman who unselfconsciously refers to ‘wokeism’ as the Trojan horse that the left is using to install communism throughout the western world. (Some of us might wish she was right about that).
In the end, and despite Ayuso’s protestations, hers is not a liberalism. It is a profound conservatism, rooted in Catholicism, Spanish nationalism, idealisation of the family and tradition. And she is not as susceptible to the charge of hypocrisy as those on the left are because no-one has ever really expects morally consistent behaviour from right-wing politicians. And even less so now that Trump has made a virtue out of anti-virtue. Ayuso’s supporters are as delirious as his are when they see her flouting the rules - even (especially?) the ones she extols herself.
How fitting that Ayuso should choose to give her lecture at a centre founded by Margaret Thatcher. The Madrid President is unfortunate proof that the latter’s conservatism is alive and kicking in all but - literally - name.
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