Alice in the Welfare State

Abstract

In this article, the author equates the Wonderland visited by Alice with the welfare state in order to demonstrate, as a metaphor, the “fantasies” of a state model destined to collapse and the solutions with which it tries to correct itself. The powerful inertia of <em>status quo</em> as a starting obstacle, strengthened by the spiral of silence that conditions public opinion small reforms and “leopardism” as distraction maneuvers and models and axioms described as “myths” or “demons” to standardize a political thought reluctant to restructure the state are presented as the most important resistances to change, especially referred to the Spanish case, due to which the effects of reform processes stay, like Alice’s adventures, in the world of imagination rather than in reality.