We miss the elites in these years of formal democracy, successive elections, major episodes and minor events, hopes and unrest that characterized society, influenced the economy and culture.

The abdication of the elites and the renunciation of their role were the threads of the plot that extend from that time that began with the illusions of a assumed democratic re-establishment, way back in 1979, and which ended, with successive crises, in deep institutional exhaustion. live.

At the same time, those years saw the transformation of elites into pressure groups, and in other cases into stone guests in the national drama. Never before has the trajectory of “respectable” been more ambiguous and contradictory. Never before have intellectuals, academics, businessmen and politicians left such mediocre traces, nor has there been such a pronounced disorientation due to lack of ideas. The country has never been thought of so little, nor has political and other advantages been so compromised.

The time of reopened democracy, now as far back as 1979, was a time of minor caudillos and endless battles to achieve sectoral advantages and group security.

In many episodes, calculation has supplanted greatness, lies have supplanted truth, and discourse has obscured reality. Leaders, with few exceptions, preferred to blend in with the masses or act as managers of small transactions, a task in which they did not hesitate to use institutions and mediate the roles they had to fulfill.

What is unique and contradictory is that in those years there were great human reorganizations and important cultural modifications. Society was changing, generations were changing, but all this was happening in the absence of leaders who, breaking away from party, trade union or trade union calculations, had to realize the call of the elite to call for an understanding of what is happening in the country, the interpretation of new times and gestures which enables national unity. They renounced the obligation to lead from better and different platforms than party politics.

Elites, when they existed, were exemplary leaders, with a high sense of duty and honor, devoted to national goals and more inclined to responsibilities than rights. The elites were neither parties, nor movements, nor pressure groups articulated to achieve advantages and profits. The exemplary elites were the counterpart of the great conglomerates, their direction, their path and their teacher.

When the elites gave up their task, they became negotiators in the corridor, and then came the apathy of societies, the habit of obeying without answering and the habit of not thinking. And came the refinement of accommodation capabilities. Sometimes there was a rebellion, as the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset said.

Is it possible for the elites to renew themselves, for the new generations to accept such a challenge, and for the rest of us to recognize our inaction? (OR)