Mediatization, polarization, and intolerance (between environments, media, and circulation)

Mario Carlón 250 ment, giving a “ like ,” intervening in a hashtag, or sharing content on social media (which does not mean, in any way, that it does not imply involvement). On the other hand, they generate long-term loyalties and consolidate consistent collectives (which, moreover, are pe- riodically expressed in electoral processes). So they are also the other side of the tactical strategies that operate in the short term. Because they enable the construction of solid links that do not go through the conditions of traditional party politics, these links are generally present in militant minority groups, which are very active elements, with the capacity to intervene in all media and social spaces. Now, how are these poles constituted today? What is your mortar? One argument that can be sustained is that, in part, these poles are organized from the dominance of determined democratic principles, which is what the famous Italian political scientist Norberto Bobbio (1995) identified in his classic Right and Left . According to Bobbio, right and left uphold democratic principles. But what differentiates them is an accentuation : that the left gives more privilege to equality and the right to freedom 10 . The interest of Bobbio’s argument lies in that it is a thesis that helps to think, in an era of crisis of political institutions and of extreme personalization and individualization, of how polariza- tion is built. According to this logic, one of the poles - the pro- gressive one - is articulated from the dominance of the principle of equality while the other does from freedom 11 . 10 Bobbio’s prologue author, Joaquín Estefanía, synthesizes: “the essence of the distinction between right and left ‘is the different attitude that the two parties - the people on the right and the people on the left - systematically show in the face of the idea of equality: those who declare themselves on the left give greater importance in their moral conduct and in their political initiative to what makes men equal, or how to mitigate and reduce the factors of inequality; those who declare themselves on the right are convinced that inequalities are an inescap- able fact and that at the end of the day they should not even wish to eliminate them” (1995, p. 16-17). In that same text, Bobbio establishes a conceptual map in which he identifies four poles (he refers to “doctrines and political move- ments:” 1) the extreme left, 2) the center-left, 3) the center-right and 4) the ex- treme right (BOBBIO, 1995, p. 160). 11 To provide another foundation for this argument, we can recall what Daniel Innerarity pointed out more than twenty years later, already in the contempo- rary era, about the differences that characterize the culture of the left and the culture of the right: “In general, the left expects too much of politics, most of