Versión español

Cover of Puerto Rico en el mundo

A characteristic of today's political dialogue is the tendency to evade the terms right and left. Despite their ubiquity in other parts of the world, the homogenization of local electoral politics, due to the prevailing populist tradition, has replaced the debate of alternate social visions with the conten­tiousness of the status issue (the issue of the formal relationship of Puerto Rico with the United States) and the struggle for politi­cal power.

This section proposes to outline the importance for free societies of facing today's fun­damental ideological debates. By doing so, the public dialogue can incorporate the discus­sion of the real possibilities of change in public policies and in the structure of State institutions. We hope to contribute to reverse the present tendency among political parties and the com­mercial mass media to privilege the triviality of partisan politics, personal confrontations, scandals and the demagogic language of publicists. Democracy today does not have external enemies, in spite of the official rhetoric of the Bush administration and other fundamentalists groups. The real enemy is internal: indolence, cynicism and the abandonment of the political.