If your goal when voting is simply to topple bad governments, you can ally yourself with people you disagree with without being morally contaminated by their tenets.

The left that believes itself to be morally superior is always subject to the reproach of "equidistance." When it says "no to war," it is reproached—rightly so—for objectively supporting the murder of citizens by the Islamist fanatics who have ruled Iran for decades. When it sides with Palestine, it can be accused—rightly so—of effectively defending Hamas, which is to say, the most repugnant terrorism of recent times. When it criticizes Trump’s capture of Maduro, it can be accused—rightly so—of supporting the dictatorship of that despicable individual and his henchmen—including the current interim president, the criminal and torturer Ms. Rodríguez, who is responsible for other crimes against humanity.

It is no wonder that Popper is the most successful philosopher among scientists when it comes to explaining how we achieve new knowledge and how scientific progress advances, while simultaneously being denigrated by many philosophers and political scientists—academic fields dominated by the far left.

There is a better option for the left: to become Popperian.

As I have explained many times, Popper maintains that political elections do not serve the social function of choosing the best possible government or the one that best represents the voter's ideology, preferences, or identity. When voters choose "their own" (be they those who think like them, those of the same tribe or group, or those who share their preferences regarding the distribution of national income), they pay a price in terms of general welfare. This opportunity cost is very high because such voter motivation prevents the harnessing of the "wisdom of the masses," which ensures the correct selection of a government if voters were to aggregate the information they individually possess regarding the performance of the outgoing government (the incumbent).

Furthermore, voting based on ideology, identity, or distributional preferences divides the population because it encourages the exaggeration of ideological, identity-based, or distributional differences.

What, then, is the function of elections? Popper repeats: to peacefully topple bad governments. Elections aggregate the information voters have about the performance of the outgoing government. In that performance evaluation, good faith can produce strange coincidences. An Orthodox Jew might vote for the continuity of the current government alongside a trans woman and a Stalinist, because all three agree that, as of election day, we are better off than when the current government came to power.

Governments, knowing they will be judged exclusively by the increase in the population's welfare achieved by their policies, will not play at pitting citizens against one another. Meanwhile, the opposition must be relentless in "informing" voters of the things the government has done wrong. On its part, the government will have no incentive to denigrate the opposition, since citizens are not going to judge the latter, but only and exclusively the government.

This method of analysis—or model—can be applied to any historical or political event. For example, I read that Josep Fontana, the far-left Catalan historian, said:

"I confess I have never understood how one can value in the same way a Republic that trained teachers, opened schools, and created public libraries in villages, and a fascist military regime that murdered teachers, closed schools and libraries, and burned books."

I do not know if Fontana was a good historian (I don't recall reading more than one of his books in my adolescence), but I allow myself to doubt it because he does not seem to "think well." Anyone reading that sentence will realize it incurs a false dilemma fallacy and a petitio principii. No one "values in the same way" the Republic and Francoism. Neither the Francoists, if any remain, nor the Republicans, of whom many remain. At the same time, Fontana omits that, under the Republican government, dozens if not hundreds of convents were burned—with nuns inside—and tens of thousands of innocent people were murdered without trial, including nearly ten thousand priests and nuns. Socialists and Communists were permitted to carry out a coup d'état (in 1934) and, finally, the leader of the opposition was assassinated (among hundreds of political murders) and electoral results were falsified. In contrast, Francoism pulled Spain out of underdevelopment and eliminated hunger and illiteracy for the first time in Spanish history, generalized compulsory education, and created a nearly universal healthcare system.

The comparison changes quite a bit compared to Fontana's, doesn't it?

That is why the "Fontanas" of the world do no good for the nation. It is preferable to be Popperian. Calvo-Sotelo could vote against the Republican government, and Fontana could do the same right alongside him, without that coincidence forcing the conclusion that Fontana is allying with a Francoist or that Calvo-Sotelo is allying with a Communist. What they both agree on—what they both need to agree on—is exclusively the assessment of the Republican government's performance. If the Spaniards of 1936 had voted Popperianly, Franco would have had no need to launch the coup that started the Civil War. Calvo-Sotelo would have been Prime Minister, and the Republic could have been reformed.

Nearly a hundred years later, we Spaniards continue to suffer bad governments for longer than necessary because we vote ideologically or based on identity instead of simply assessing the government's performance. Public discussion should revolve around government performance.

Fortunately—but only by luck—the 2030s are very different from the 1930s. But if we Spaniards continue to refuse to vote Popperianly, we may be contributing, without knowing it, to bringing those cursed years closer rather than letting them fade into the history books.