Yascha Mounk: Long Live the Fascist?
[Yascha Mounk is a PhD Candidate at Harvard University with research interests in political theory, intellectual history and comparative politics. The founding editor of The Utopian, he has written about European and US politics for the International Herald Tribune, the Boston Globe and Unità, among other newspapers and magazines.]
Yesterday, at a dinner party of left-wing Italians, a radical friend with a provocateur’s smile suggested a toast to Gianfranco Fini. Gianfranco, whose very name was chosen to honor a fascist “martyr.” Gianfranco, who for decades has led the post-fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano, and then the Alleanza Nazionale. Gianfranco, who as late as 1994 pronounced, “Mussolini was the greatest statesman of the century. There are periods in history when freedom isn’t one of the most important values.” But the toast did not provoke anybody. On the contrary. Eight left hands stretched out to clink glasses, and eight loud voices—fortified by the frequent anti-government protests of the last decades—called out in approving unison: “Gianfranco Fini!”
How was this unlikely toast possible?
It was possible because two remarkable stories, one that gives reason to hope and one that gives reason to fear, dovetailed over the last days. One of these stories recounts the utter demise of a respectable, democratic Italian Right. Democrazia Cristiana, the grand old party of postwar Italy, had its serious flaws, from a deep-rooted culture of corruption to an excessive closeness to the Vatican. But it also stood for a substantive political program and genuinely aimed to safeguard a limited form of liberal democracy. On the whole, it was a stabilizing force in an imperfect but democratic political regime.
Then the established parties crumbled during a particularly shocking corruption scandal in the early 1990s, and Silvio Berlusconi became the new face of the Italian Right. Berlusconi did not only bring to the Right the disdain for all tradition that is often said to be typical of self-made men; he brought to the Right a disdain for all tradition befitting a man who made his fortune by using his dominance of the airwaves to make anew the aesthetic preferences, material aspirations, and shopping habits of ordinary Italians....
Read entire article at Dissent
Yesterday, at a dinner party of left-wing Italians, a radical friend with a provocateur’s smile suggested a toast to Gianfranco Fini. Gianfranco, whose very name was chosen to honor a fascist “martyr.” Gianfranco, who for decades has led the post-fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano, and then the Alleanza Nazionale. Gianfranco, who as late as 1994 pronounced, “Mussolini was the greatest statesman of the century. There are periods in history when freedom isn’t one of the most important values.” But the toast did not provoke anybody. On the contrary. Eight left hands stretched out to clink glasses, and eight loud voices—fortified by the frequent anti-government protests of the last decades—called out in approving unison: “Gianfranco Fini!”
How was this unlikely toast possible?
It was possible because two remarkable stories, one that gives reason to hope and one that gives reason to fear, dovetailed over the last days. One of these stories recounts the utter demise of a respectable, democratic Italian Right. Democrazia Cristiana, the grand old party of postwar Italy, had its serious flaws, from a deep-rooted culture of corruption to an excessive closeness to the Vatican. But it also stood for a substantive political program and genuinely aimed to safeguard a limited form of liberal democracy. On the whole, it was a stabilizing force in an imperfect but democratic political regime.
Then the established parties crumbled during a particularly shocking corruption scandal in the early 1990s, and Silvio Berlusconi became the new face of the Italian Right. Berlusconi did not only bring to the Right the disdain for all tradition that is often said to be typical of self-made men; he brought to the Right a disdain for all tradition befitting a man who made his fortune by using his dominance of the airwaves to make anew the aesthetic preferences, material aspirations, and shopping habits of ordinary Italians....