Incongruity in Action

There is a particular kind of political scene that tells the truth by accident. A march is called in the name of democracy, institutional balance, or republican virtue. The participants clothe themselves in the language of freedom and legality. Then, at the first encounter with an unwelcome voice, the language slips and the body speaks more honestly than the slogan. A shove, a punch, a torn memorial, an eruption of contempt. Suddenly one understands that what is being defended is not democracy in any universal sense, but the right of a certain social world to continue recognizing itself as the natural owner of public legitimacy.

That is what the so-called vest march revealed. It presented itself as a defense of institutions, of the Supreme Court, of pluralism, of civilized life against barbarism. But the spectacle of the day cut through the script. Participants assaulted those who disagreed with them. White crosses commemorating the children who died in the ABC Daycare tragedy were torn down. A movement that claimed to speak in the name of democratic tolerance performed, in public, its intolerance for the existence of another political reality. It is hard to imagine a clearer demonstration of the distance between democratic rhetoric and democratic disposition.

Violence here was not incidental. It belonged to the logic of the scene. When a social group experiences its moral self-image as a form of property, dissent appears not as disagreement but as intrusion. The other person is not merely wrong; he is contaminating a space presumed to belong to the respectable. This is why class matters so much in these demonstrations, even when class is never named. The vest, the tone, the indignant performance of civility, the horror at being contradicted by the wrong bodies in the wrong accents: all of it reveals that the institution under defense is often inseparable from a style of social hierarchy.

One should be careful here. Institutions do matter. Courts matter. Electoral bodies matter. Independent legal structures matter. To say this is not to side automatically with those who invoke them most loudly. The problem is precisely that institutions can be converted into moral masks. They become objects of selective reverence, defended not because one believes in equality before the law, but because one wants specific forms of power protected from democratic pressure. The judiciary is sacred when it restrains the enemy and suspect when it does not. Pluralism is noble when it protects one's own speech and intolerable when it makes room for voices one has already judged illegitimate.

What made the attack on the ABC Daycare memorial especially obscene was that it condensed this entire structure into a single gesture. The white crosses marked real deaths, deaths already entangled in the long Mexican story of impunity and institutional failure. To tear them down while claiming to defend democracy is not just contradiction. It is a revelation. It shows how quickly memory itself becomes disposable when it stands in the way of a desired political image. Mourning is welcome only when it flatters the narrative of the righteous. Otherwise it too must be removed from sight.

There is something psychoanalytic in this kind of political performance. The more fragile the internal certainty, the more violently it must be staged. Public indignation becomes a way of covering over social anxiety. The institution is idealized precisely because the subject feels its own authority slipping. The march then functions not only as protest but as self-reassurance. One walks with one's peers, hears one's worldview echoed back, and mistakes that echo for the voice of the nation. Anyone who interrupts it has to be expelled from the frame.

This is why I distrust any politics that speaks too easily in the name of civilization. In Mexico that word often arrives carrying an unspoken social map. It tells us who is educated enough to rule, whose anger counts as reasoned concern, whose disorder is forgivable, and whose is proof of barbarism. Under this logic, democracy is tolerated only so long as it confirms preexisting hierarchies. The moment it opens space for other subjects, other idioms, other resentments, the defenders of institutional purity begin to look less like democrats and more like proprietors.

To criticize that proprietorial politics is not to celebrate every government decision or every majoritarian impulse. It is to insist that democracy cannot be reduced to the emotional comfort of the already recognized. If one truly believes in institutions, one must also accept that institutions mediate conflict among subjects who do not resemble one another, who do not share the same class codes, and who will often bring incompatible visions of the country into the same public space. The test of democratic commitment is not how elegantly one praises pluralism when surrounded by allies. It is how one behaves when the other appears.

That is why the contradictions of that march matter. They are not only embarrassing inconsistencies. They are windows into the social unconscious of a certain opposition politics. Beneath the language of legality one could hear entitlement. Beneath the defense of democracy one could see aversion to actual disagreement. Beneath the white vests and public virtue one could glimpse the old fantasy that the country belongs, by right, to those who already know how to speak in the voice of order.

The punches, the torn crosses, the outrage at dissent: these were not deviations from the message. They were the message stripped of decorum. What they revealed is unpleasant but necessary to say. For some, democracy remains acceptable only as long as it preserves the familiar arrangement of class, prestige, and institutional shelter. Once democracy threatens to become social rather than ceremonial, the mask slips. Then the body moves first, the fist arrives before the argument, and one sees just how thin the moral theater really was.