Twenty Years Later

María Elvira Roca Barea is the favorite historian of Spanish right-wingers. She writes about the importance of national pride and how we shouldn’t equate liberal with good and conservative with bad.

What I find extraordinary in her very erudite and brilliantly researched books is how identical what Roca Barea says is to what my self-avowed Communist professor taught us when I was in college. Down to the smallest details, the names, the titles, the facts, twenty years ago it was OK even on the far left to know history and teach it. The early Spanish Enlightenment of the Novatores, Romea y Tapia, the nationalist work of Böhl de Faber, the importance of leaving behind the post-colonial indigenist pouting of Latin America and choose the road of pan-Hispanic solidarity. Twenty years ago, this was not far right. It was normal. In 2002, my Communist professor received a whopping $600,000 grant—an unheard-of sum in the Humanities where there are zero costs to conduct research—from the Canadian government to conduct the research that today is considered fascist Nazi far-right heresy.

I’m reading Roca Barea not to learn anything new. I’ve already been lucky enough to get educated twenty years ago, and I know all this stuff. I’m reading for nostalgic reasons. The text brings me back to my youth when everything was fresh, new, and sparkling. It’s extraordinary, though, that Roca Barea’s books are huge bestsellers and people buy them to be edgy and protest the treacly floods of wokism that engulf the country. But none of this was forbidden knowledge even just a couple of decades ago.