Yesterday’s television spectacle – that clash between Pacheco Pereira and André Ventura – was no debate. It was a demolition. Pacheco Pereira, who still labours under the illusion that ideas have a backbone, decided to try and have a conversation with a cement mixer. A cement mixer doesn’t argue; it pours. And what it pours out is the supreme national fiction of ‘us’ against ‘them’, the ‘elites’.
For the demagogue, ‘we’ always translates as ‘the people’, and ‘the people’ are never actual people; they are a blunt instrument. A rock hurled at the head of anyone using adverbs. In Portugal, erudition has become an admission of guilt and growling a proof of sincerity.
The truth is, you really have to be quite shameless to use ‘the people’ like this in public. ‘The people’ is not an entity; it is a hiding place. It’s where politicians flee to whenever they are afraid to say ‘I want’. The moment someone pumps up their chest to announce ‘what the people want’, what they are doing is ventriloquism: they stick their hand up the arse of an abstraction to force the puppet to repeat what the master desires.
Populism, in our case, is not an ideology; it is a problem of linguistic hygiene. It’s the mindless use of words that no longer hold any meaning, such as ‘pure’, ‘corrupt’ or ‘we’. Whenever someone starts talking about the ‘purity of the people’, the first thing I feel like doing is go and wash my hands. In politics, purity is always the prelude to a stain than cannot be removed with bleach.
André Ventura’s grammar is an interjection that has risen to power. It is a shout that has grown tired of waiting for the rest of the sentence. It is an “enough” that has decided the exclamation mark is the only punctuation mark worthy of a real man, dispensing with commas, ellipses and, above all, subordinate clauses. Subordination, for this pub-style syntax, is a sissy thing of the system: it requires patience, hierarchy and the ability to wait for an idea to finish before you start banging on the table. In the world of Chega, the sentence dies with the subject and the predicate is always a punch.
The greatest rhetorical coup of our angry right wing is the invention of the ‘good Portuguese’. It’s an expression that acts like a funhouse mirror: it distorts everything it touches so the observer feels taller and slimmer. The use of the adverb “good” as a badge of caste is a stroke of brilliant vulgarity. There is no explanation of what “good” is; “good” is simply the opposite of whoever we decide, at that moment, is doing “bad”.
It is a moral tautology that allows anyone to feel virtuous without having to practise a single virtue; all it takes is to share a hatred for those who don’t wear the same colours. It is the ‘us’ versus ‘them’ approach reduced to a football hooligan brawl, where grammar serves only to identify who is about to get beaten up.
This language is dangerous because its contagious. It is far easier to shout than to argue, and infinitely more relaxing to insult than to understand. Populism realised that the Portuguese language, with its wistful longings and its meandering pace, was in need of a whip. Well, the whip needs no grammar; it just needs to crack. We are witnessing the transformation of our public discourse into a series of onomatopoeic outbursts of indignation. It is the triumph of the ‘pum’, the ‘zuz’ and the ‘bang’ over the intelligence of a well-constructed sentence.
Enjoying these quick fixes is an exercise in retroactive jealousy. The Chega voter is not in search of happiness, but rather of proof that the system cheated him first. It is a love devoid of affection, built upon the wall of resentment separating us from those who still insist on holding onto hope. It serves only to ensure that our loneliness is shared by those who shout the loudest.
The Portuguese language is under attack from those who claim to want to save it — and Chega is not a political party. It’s a spelling mistake.