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2. A New Clerical Politics
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509 In two previous articles I have pointed out the political depth that exists in the official tendency to impose a communist dogma on the school, a tendency that, although originating in the heart of the state itself inasmuch as it is systematically supported by the secretary of education, who finds in it the superior standard of his acts, represents also an opposition to the state. In this political contradiction, which pits the state against the state, the rivalry of two politics that vie for the government is manifested only superficially, a rivalry in which the communist alleges a greater right to possess it completely given that, if it is the one with a most certain revolutionary sense, the direction of a state that is or claims to be revolutionary belongs to it. With the question presented in this way, it is logical that a doubt is produced within the state, of which communist doctrines take advantage in order to make themselves felt, at least in educational policy, and that seems to enjoy an official favor, which, nonetheless, is very far from representing a definitive inclination to convert those doctrines into the standard for all national politics.The state has a revolutionaryorigin and wishes to be revolutionary . It is natural that, in the face of the political trend that claims to govern it and that presents itself with the prestige of the most revolutionary trend, the state might have numerous reasons for hesitating and for not immediately rejecting it; inasmuch as considering itself a philosophical doctrine closer to the field of education than its own field of politics, it leaves in liberty, for the moment, those other objectives of politics, dissembling and softening in this way its dissenting and profoundly oppositional character. But at heart, the sense of that opposition is very different from a struggle between the revolutionary left and right; its true nature corresponds to the natural opposition between a romantic outlook and a real2 A New Clerical Politics Original title: “Una nueva política clerical.” Source: El Universal, October 9, 1933. 510 : jorGe CueSta istic outlook. The communist trend in the school, precisely because it is presented in the school, lacks positive political significance, lacks true political roots; so to speak, it does not represent, for the political life of the country, an “I want to be,” but rather barely the “I would like to be” characteristic of vague minds detached from reality, which are a natural product of student life. But if the positive aspect of this outlook lacks reality because of its own nature, the same cannot be said of its negative aspect, for the fact that this outlook is detached from reality is a real fact that has calamitous real consequences. The “I would like to be” of our student spirits does not have a positive reality, but its lack of reality is, in turn, a perfectly tangible and dangerous reality because it does not represent anything other than groundless nonconformity, which does not consist in preferring anything different from what has been rejected, but rather in a pure rejection, in a pure nonconformism and a pure aimless opposition. This is the aspect of the question that cannot be disavowed, because it is what reveals its true significance to the communist doctrines with which this deals. Communism does not have any importance at all here; it is only the pretext or vessel of the romantic nonconformity of our student spirits. What has real importance, to explain it, is the student nature of this oppositional romanticism. It makes clear that the citizen secretary of education is not dissatisfied with the ruling political regime, and for that reason with his own person, because he is communist; but rather, on the contrary, he is a communist because he is dissatisfied with his own person and with the rest of the national politics. The student nature of oppositional romanticism explains, in the same way, the passionately blind communism of Lic. Vicente Lombardo Toledano.1 For if the contrary happened, the natural thing would be that the two would not take their oppositionism to the school but rather to politics, and neither the secretary of education nor Lic. Lombardo Toledano would accept—the first to be minister of the regime that does not please him; the second seems to want to be a minister. I say that this oppositionist outlook has been preferred by the stu1 . Vicente Lombardo Toledano (1894–1968) was a leftist politician and intellectual who belonged...