Culture wars

In this half-century, marked by the military coup of April 1974, the radical shift that followed, the consequent hegemony of left-wing thought, even among parties to the right of the Socialist Party, and a culture in which information far outweighs education, attempting to bring any rationality and contextualization, however basic, to the heated political debate on Left and Right is an unrealistic goal. But perhaps it's worth the effort.

The leftist drift in Portugal had as its main consequences, in the Metropolis, nationalizations and collectivizations; and, in the "Overseas", an uncontrolled decolonization (or skillfully controlled by some) that left the then overseas territories to long and bloody civil wars in Angola and Mozambique. Timor in Insulíndia suffered a similar fate. Of the others, Guinea, which was at the root of the problem, went to the single-party PAIGC; Cape Verde followed suit, and São Tomé and Príncipe as well. Confucian wisdom, or a sense of state and history, led the Chinese national-communists to, starting with Hong Kong, rescue their territories from the West, which allowed us, years later, to undertake a decent transition and decolonization in Macau. The only one.

The strength of the PC

In 1974, the Portuguese Communist Party was not seen as a branch of a party that had dictatorially oppressed Russia and much of Eastern Europe for half a century; a party with a secret police, concentration and death camps for dissidents, and millions of victims; a party that, in the name of social justice and development, had installed a regime that oppressed and impoverished people, a regime that didn't work, and that had already proven itself to never work. No. In Portugal, in the Portugal of the late Estado Novo, communists were, above all, "resistance fighters"; "anti-fascist resistance fighters," and, within that category, the most organized and the oldest.

It was with this prestige that Dr. Cunhal returned from exile and implemented a policy that largely determined the country's future. Not only in decolonization, with the transfer of power to independence movements aligned with his ideological and internationalist allegiance, but also with a scorched-earth strategy that aimed for the nationalization of industries and the collectivization of Portuguese agricultural properties.

The PCP gained strong support within the MFA. Some say that when a soldier is unpatriotic, his or her own organizational structure tends to lead him or her toward socialism. This is how it was here: the communists used the MFA to neutralize right-wing political resistance so that, later, by seizing opportunities and provoking coups like March 11th, they could move toward "nationalizations" that would deal the death blow to the national economy. A blow from which the country never recovered.

In the beginning was the Economy

It was precisely this radicalization of the left and the nationalizations—and the slow and unfinished process of trying to reverse them—that, until recently, characterized the right-left opposition in Portugal. This opposition focused largely on economics, also influenced by the international right, which, in the 1980s, in the "Free World," with the conservative-liberal movements of Thatcherism and Reaganism and their successes in the Anglo-Saxon world, paved the way for the end of the Soviet Union.

Thus, in Portugal, the Right-Left issue has been almost exclusively economic; moreover, the existence of a free society is incompatible with total dependence on the State and public administration, on economic life and on people's lives.

And now?

But with the Cold War over and a large market economy established urbi et orbi, along with a supposedly broad consensus on its virtues, the key to all real political distinction became the national question, or rather, the nationalism-globalism confrontation. No less important also became the concept of family and the concept of reality and common sense.

And because their ideas made their way through institutions and into our reality, we still live or coexist with the version of History that the Left shaped and instituted and that it now begins to defend with the arrogant desperation of the powers that be and those under threat.

Gone are the days when the Left dominated publishing and magazines of thought and culture, and the Right, then in power – a decadent Estado Novo that relied on television to broadcast what it wanted and on censorship to expunge what it didn't want – dismissed these other, less systemic avenues as fake news from elitist social networks for irrelevant groups.

Those days of more than fifty years ago are over. Times have changed, and so have the terms of the culture wars. Especially since, apparently, the roles have been reversed.