Víctor de Currea-Lugo | January 24, 2026
1. The crisis is not the problem; the problem is the system
We are witnessing a systemic reconfiguration of the global order, where violence is normalized, and the law’s ineffectiveness reveals the system’s functioning, not isolated failures. This can be seen, in different forms, in Palestine, Haiti, Ukraine, Venezuela, and Greenland. That’s not an anomaly: it’s the system working.
We are not facing a passing disorder, but rather a capitalism increasingly incapable of sustaining its social legitimacy and which, therefore, resorts to violence, permanent indebtedness, and dispossession. The economic model explains both open wars and silent adjustments. This is not only a diagnosis of the world: it is the framework from which we must also read the political responses that claim to be alternatives.
2. Authoritarianism as the Logic of the Current Order
Understanding that authoritarianism is a systemic necessity, not an anomaly, should make the audience feel a collective responsibility and urgency to challenge the current order.
Trump is not an anomaly, but a symptom. He did not create authoritarianism or the contempt for rules: he made them visible. His electoral success expresses an order in which the rules no longer bind those who concentrate power.
Global warming intensifies territorial disputes, displaces populations, and redefines trade routes. The problem is that this reconfiguration of the global order does not encounter projects capable of challenging it in a coherent and sustained manner. This lack of coherent projects is not only global; it is also strongly evident in governments that claim to want to change the system.
3. Governing Is Not the Same as Having Power
In this context, today, demanding social justice, equality, or redistribution is enough for you to be branded a ‘radical’. The political spectrum has shifted so far to the right that some alternative voices are worried about causing discomfort. In the name of realism, equality is relinquished. In the name of governability, an exclusionary system is deliberately administered. That is not a political strategy: it is a form of surrender.
This resignation is compounded by a problem that progressivism often treats as taboo: its own corruption, not as an individual anomaly, but because of governing without changing the rules of the game. When an unjust system is administered, its corrupt practices are also inherited—and sometimes reproduced.
Sometimes it is assumed that being in government already means having power, when it’s often just about managing expectations without changing the structures that generate inequality and violence. And of course, real power—economic, media, financial—remains untouched because no one challenges their privileges.
Meanwhile, the far right is not advancing solely through its own strength. It is also advancing because of our own political ambiguities. It is advancing because instead of offering visible changes, we offer stability without transformation. Because we confuse peace with passivity and consensus with progress. A progressivism that avoids real political conflict is not moderate: it is fragile.
In Latin America, this void is expressed in the rise of authoritarian projects in Argentina and El Salvador, for example, which capitalize on social discontent where progressivism fails to offer clear, tangible solutions. It’s not that people vote for them because they are right; it’s that many voters feel no one else speaks their language or offers concrete solutions, even if they are just promises.
4. Moralize or Transform, That Is the Question
This hollowing out of democracy would not be possible without the technological infrastructure that sustains it, such as the digital platforms controlled by a few corporations. This has turned disinformation into a business model. Lies don’t circulate because people are naive, but because they generate profit, segment audiences, and weaken any collective vision. In this ecosystem, politics ceases to organize material interests and instead manages emotions, fears, and resentments that serve the existing order.
Let’s ask ourselves: how do we understand the people? They are not depoliticized masses, but rather accumulated experiences of frustration. It is not enough to summon them as voters every few years. If they don’t see real and coherent changes between what is promised and what is done, disenchantment becomes electoral punishment.
Blaming the adversary is a convenient way out that allows us to evade our own responsibilities. Of course, there are concentrated powers, external pressures, and media operations, but when promises don’t translate into sustained material improvements, disillusionment becomes a punishment at the ballot box. Faced with this difficulty, part of the progressive movement has shifted the conflict to less costly terrain: symbolic and moral disputes. The result is not the accumulation of power, but political fragmentation.
Struggles for recognition are legitimate, but when they replace the struggle for redistribution, the result is no more justice: it is fragmentation. A progressivism trapped in these debates, disconnected from the material conditions of life, doesn’t expand its social base: it shrinks it.
5. Radicalizing Hope: The Responsibility of Discomfort
Occupations are no longer carried out solely by armies; they are carried out through sanctions, embargoes, debt, and financial control. This is clear in Venezuela, where economic sanctions have not led to a political solution.
The UN’s impotence stems from its design to avoid challenging power, transforming it into a space where moral frustration replaces real justice, urging us to rethink multilateralism.
If we want to talk about the Global South as an alternative, we can’t just stick to slogans (in fact, it’s not even clear what this notion means). The truth is, there is no multipolarity if the countries of the Global South act as diligent students of the old order, repeating its rules without questioning them.
This is evident, for example, in the states of the so-called Global South that maintain their financial and commercial dependence while adopting a sovereigntist discourse in international forums. Without their own agenda, without effective political coordination, and without assuming real costs, the rhetoric of the Global South becomes an ornament that, paradoxically, helps maintain the status quo. That’s why the discussion is neither rhetorical nor moral: it is strategic and profoundly material.
Then an uncomfortable question arises: do we want to manage a world that is falling apart, or do we want to transform it? Radicalizing hope is not a call to violence; it is a call to coherence. We cannot continue promising structural changes and governing out of fear of causing discomfort. We cannot confuse stability with justice, nor management with transformation.
All of this has a concrete translation in daily life: insufficient wages, inherited debts, jobs with no future, and rights transformed into privileges. This is not a crisis of abstract expectations, but a material crisis of the reproduction of life.
When broad sectors feel they are working more to live worse, the democratic promise is emptied, and the conflict shifts toward authoritarian or punitive solutions. It is not that the majority has become reactionary: it is that the left’s inability to offer credible material solutions has left the field open to authoritarian projects that have been able to appropriate social discontent.
The current situation does not demand rhetorical moderation, but political clarity. Discomfort isn’t a problem: it’s a responsibility. And the real risk isn’t the advance of the right wing, but rather that progressivism will settle for managing an unjust order, believing that this constitutes resistance.
The task isn’t to interpret each situation separately, but to recognize that they all form part of the same power realignment. Faced with this, a real alternative lies in deciding what we are willing to change and what costs we are willing to bear.
The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of the institution for which he works.
