I propose a simple exercise.
Try with all your might not to think of an elephant.
What do you see?
An elephant.
Please try again.
What comes to mind over and over?
The same elephant.
Now try not to think about Francoism.
Surely the same thing happens to him.
The short guy with the mustache doesn't get out of his mind.
Please try again.
Nothing, there is no way to shake the Franco regime from the head.
Although George Lakoff's book on the mental frameworks and politics on which this idea is based is very old (
Don't think about an elephant
was published in 2004), there we continue.
Since then, every communication guru advises their leader to divert the public conversation towards those topics that harm the opposition and avoid those that harm you.
Politics, they tell us, is not about what is done, but about what is talked about.
So, according to the manual, the left has to talk about equality, but never about citizen insecurity, and the right has to insist on lowering taxes and keeping the streets safe.
The trick survives and politicians reproduce it ad nausea.
However, afterwards its electoral results are miserable, which makes one think about its effectiveness.
Today, the American Republican and Democratic parties are very comfortable with the image of the elephant and the ass.
But many are unaware that Thomas Nast, the cartoonist who popularized the association in the newspapers of the 1870s, wanted to portray the politics of that country as a chaotic circus dominated by unintelligent, easily panicky Republicans and loud, headstrong Democrats. and shortsighted.
Make the translation to national politics.
Although political strategists think that we are constantly thinking or not thinking about what they tell us to think or not think, chances are that, like Thomas Nast, most people think that politics is an insufferable circus full of louts. yelling at each other.
With a crisis of the caliber that we have before us, the combination of a communicative overacting and a great deficit of management and results can cause the opposite effect to the desired one.
Unless we're all as primal as they are, of course, which would make everything easier.
Do you know how to get the elephant out of your head?
Think of Dolores Ibárruri and Rafael Alberti, both of the PCE, acting as vice presidents of the Congress of Deputies in July 1977, after the first democratic elections.
The Transition was the host.
And everyone's thing.
Think about it.
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