Of Paolo Mossetti
Source: Esquire
It is not true that sovereignism has no intellectuals. On the contrary, It counts on several scholars who had little luck with the previous elite.
A culturally reactionary alliance, winking at right-wing extremism and the uneducated. A perfect expression of the countryside, of the suburbs and small urban centers. A force that favors simplicity of thought, practicality and communication to the belly of voters, even at the expense of the facts, of logic and truth. A political home for racists, provincial and superstitious. The Lega-5star government is usually described, In short, as anti-intellectual.
For their part, the national-populists do everything they can to confirm this image. “Salvini against intellectuals” is the title of a television broadcast from March 2019 2016, in which the future Minister of the Interior met with the philosopher Umberto Galimberti and the writer Antonio Pennacchi. In the summer of 2018 Salvini himself responded mockingly, in a Facebook post, “the anti-racist and anti-Salvini intellectuals” who had signed an appeal to open the ports to migrants. On the bank 5 place, Alessandro Di Battista had spoken of "sickle and cashmere" intellectuals to respond to the criticism of those who accused him of the decision to form a government with the League. Five years earlier, when the remote hypothesis of a government between 5 stars and PD, its leader and political guarantor, Beppe Grillo, he reacted by parodying an old Giorgio Gaber song on the blog, who recites: “Intellectuals are rational / impartial transparencies always conceptual / they are very substantial existential / superstructural and decisional”.
For Grillo, “The Italian intellectual is predominantly left-wing, endowed with good feelings and with a post-dated political foresight... he is never touched by doubt, supported as he is by an intellect out of proportion for ordinary mortals”. When, a decade later, Grillo will give his approval to the government pact with Salvini, he will thus liquidate contrary opinions: “The intellectuals of the left show their fangs and growl that we are fascists, they have lost any form of composure… they are like ghosts who can't touch the ball in the real world”.
It was immediately understood that the national-populism of the yellow-greens should not be framed in a historical sense – for example by reviving Russian populism – but rather in the sociological one, to describe a phase dominated by primordial feelings, and by the revolt against certified experts and scholars. “The revolution of common sense” – one of the most powerful and well-known slogans of the League – describes this desire, ultimately shared by both the right and the left, to overcome a heartbreaking decline, caused by corrupt elites and traitor intellectuals, and to lead Italy towards a future that looks a little like the past: when young people could hope for the future, the elderly retired at a reasonable time, the natives ruled in their own home and children were born to a mother and a father. Something comparable to the interventionism of 1915, which was a revolt against liberal Italy also fueled by the passions of left-wing fascism, with his apologia of "proletarian nations" as opposed to "demoplutocracies". We've been there before. But the intellectual map of Italian national-populism is much more complicated than that.
The leaders of Lega e 5 stars know that they belong to an era of rupture with respect to the role and traditional methods of intervention of intellectuals in public life; they know they cannot yet rely too much on moderated newspapers with a decades-long history, or secular, like the Courier, La Stampa or Repubblica; and even less so on respectable foundations or study centers such as the Christian Democrats or the Communist Party had (and they often ignored them).
Those in government today seem used to it, rather, to a foolish ecosystem of tabloid news, populist newspapers, alarmist sites, cartoonists born and become famous on social media, disseminators of counter-information who have proven themselves more than once to be quite crass. As shocking as it may seem, It is also thanks to cultural subjects of this kind that the Lega-5s duo managed to demolish the Second Republic, impose one's own "common sense", and to inaugurate a honeymoon with the Italians. Anyone who sneers when reading the cultural map of national-populism would do better to consider its effectiveness.
Ma, beyond the results in terms of consensus, it would be wrong to believe that the yellow-green government embodies pure anti-intellectualism. If we end up falling into this trap it is because the representatives of the new course are nourishing, towards liberal democracy, ambiguous feelings: aggression and suspicion, resentment and inferiority. National-populism, both from the Northern League and from the Grillina side, he usually has spokespeople, advisors and organic voices that they are, at least up to a certain point, of the "competent", just like the others who have governed so far: the point is that their expertise has been marginalized in the last twenty years.
So much so that in this new course we find names from the old Berlusconi propaganda such as Marcello Foa, Franco Bechis and Maria Giovanna Maglie, Christian fundamentalists such as Magdi Cristiano Allam and Antonio Socci, decidedly daring political men like Paolo Savona and Daniele Capezzone, university teachers such as Giulio Sapelli or Paolo Becchi, true marginal intellectuals like Gianfranco La Grassa, beatnik like Melchiorre Gerbino, anti-communist lecturers such as Maurizio Blondet. More than an ignoramus or a gaffeur, how the opposition wants to portray it, the typical yellow-green intellectual is usually an intellectual kept for years in the lower ranks, among the aspirants or among the disappointed, and who has now found a cause to redeem himself, to bring it back to the attention of the public, whether young or old, powerful or irrelevant.
It is true that the obsession with discredited or outdated ideas can be found in the yellow-green ecosystem, like the mythical welfare state of the Seventies combined with an ethnically homogeneous society, or completely false, such as the alleged relevance of the Kalergi Plan or the protocols of the Elders of Zion – two classic "measures" of contemporary conspiracy theory. But Italian national-populism is less insular than we think: What follows is a change in the balance of power between ideas that involves the entire West, and it would not be fair to describe him as categorically hostile to academia, or intellectual.
Also think of profiles now dedicated to anti-European propaganda 24 hours up 24 like that of Alberto Bagnai, senator of the Northern League, or Vladimiro Giacché, historian of Marxism, in which the passions of committed men can be traced, profoundly erudite, which once gravitated around the parties of the moderate left. Rather than contempt for complex thought and culture, what this ecosystem has in common is, if anything, the poisoning of civil conquests in the 1960s, and the profound disgust for the things left-wing intellectuals have been concerned with in the last fifty years; it is a world that expresses the desire for reconquest and revenge, rather than censorship and brutalization.
Being very reassuring, the idea of ​​reducing populism to its conspiracy theories alone is certainly not new. In the 1964 historian Richard Hofstadter published Society and Intellectuals in America, in which he outlined a mode of thought that in his opinion was dominant in politics, in religion, in education and business. Hatred for the educated, according to the author, in the United States it assumed almost the value that the class struggle has in other modern societies. This is the widespread intolerance that Hofstadter brought – still smart from Adlai Stevenson's defeat in the presidential elections of 1952 and by McCarthy's hysterical campaigns – to formulate the famous theory of populism as a "paranoid style", a phenomenon traceable in the long history of movements that arose in the depths of the country. “The paranoid spokesperson sees the fate of the conspiracy in apocalyptic terms… He is always there to defend the barricades of civilization. He is constantly at a turning point. Like the religious millennialists, expresses the anxiety of those who are living their last days”.
A certain bell rings, you have to admit it. It is no secret that national-populists have as their programmatic objective the demolition of the presumed technocratic competence "of those who were there before", and of class conflict as understood by classical Marxists, in favor of the common man and his common sense, and of the clash between globalization and community. And in fact Salvini dedicated several video messages to the "professors" (who is "Solon") who know everything and know everything, those who nitpick the government's maneuvers every day.
But it must be said that the claims of the national-populists are not always without foundation. For example, it is undeniable that technocratic competence has given a terrible account of itself for twenty years: with support for wicked wars, wrong economic policies and dubious intellectual champions, with the result of alienating ever larger sections of the electorate. Looking beyond national borders, national-populists observe an American president truly betrayed by the elusive "Deep State", and a European Union that appears to discriminate against its poorest members inexplicably. As Alessandro Lolli wrote, if there is a country in which conspiracy theories have made history, it's exactly ours, with hundreds of deaths caused by interstate intrigues, fascists, mafias and secret associations. In short, the tools to defend what exists are more blunt than ever.
Taken note of this, many young Italian intellectuals approached national-populism after coming across the Marxist philosopher Costanzo Preve, who theorized the radical deconstruction of the right/left compass. This is where the usual unscrupulousness of his students in their political interactions comes from, and the willingness to weave ramshackle ideological networks between neocommunists and neofascists. In an interview with 2011, which perfectly anticipated the position of many populists, in particular of the so-called "red and brown", on the question of left-wing conformism, Preve explained: “While in the times of Hegel and Schopenhauer, but also in Adorno's time, intellectuals were generally more intelligent than ordinary people", today “intellectuals are in the vast majority stupider than ordinary people. It's a novelty from the latest 50 years and we see it when they are questioned on television talk shows because they say a much greater amount of nonsense than what they hear from taxi drivers, from bartenders or housewives at the market".
Secular thinkers like Umberto Eco – intellectual-monument and novelist with millions of copies who had dismissed the thought against relativism of the then Pope Ratzinger as childish rubbish – they were none other than "centre-left Enlightenment fundamentalists" for whom obedience must be reserved for the economy and the "judgment of the markets" while the sphere of customs and religions must instead be entirely liberalized.
But the fascination for anti-modernity against absolute individualism, the contempt for the dominant intellectual order on the left has much older precursors than the current government, or the “red-brown” philosophers. As the journalist Valerio Mattioli recalled, it was precisely a daily champion of anti-populism and liberal cosmopolitanism like Il Foglio that was mocked, for many years, do-it-yourself theology and the opportunistic character of many progressive Catholics. It was always Il Foglio that tormented, not without some reason, the alleged subversion and true conformism of the radical middle class of some neighborhoods of Rome, with the same fury that is found today in the national-populists.
Long before the students of Preve, in the 1910s, concluded that the time had come for an alliance between Marxists and xenophobes against the dictatorship of Capital, it was precisely the neoconservatives of Il Foglio, in the Noughties, to fuel the confusion: passing off Oriana Fallaci's Islamophobic interventions or Bush's military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan as "true left", and hosting declared fascist cultural commentators such as Adriano Scianca as cultural commentators, Casapound militant.
For the historian of populism Christopher Lasch, Hofstadter's student, the problem with liberal intellectuals like his teacher was their tendency to portray themselves as a class apart, ending up building a trench around the status quo. Hofstadter counted on intellectuals to save the country from irrationality; the younger Lasch had instead seen the elites plotting an absurd Vietnam war and rationalizing an abominable social landscape.
In the 1995, while Italy witnessed the first advent of the technocrats, Rebellion of the Elites was released posthumously, in which Lasch described a society in which politicians had renounced power and ideology and where the educated classes had chosen eradication as their mission, indifferent to the suffering of manual workers and the decline of states, leaving the experts to manage interest rates, rates, budgets and health reforms. Both left the job halfway done: if Hofstadter crystallized an irrational feeling of terror for the masses, Lasch had too much faith in a “participatory democracy” in which the masses would become, without too many conflicts, in turn ruling class.
Nevertheless, even though he detests the corrupt and stateless elite, national-populism implicitly betrays that it is dominated by it; o, at least, of wanting to imitate her. Yellow-green economists like Ilaria Bifarini and Fabio Dragoni present themselves as “repentant Bocconians”, denouncing orthodox thought, but making it clear that they were insiders. “Debunker of debunkers” like Luca Donadel or Francesca Totolo, close to the League and the far right, both under-35, they are examples of how a new class of activists is forming in opposition to the radical left. Other economists such as Giacomo Bracci or Gabriele Guzzi, organic ai 5 place, born in '92 and '93 respectively, they are prepared and confident scholars fully integrated into institutional environments and the mainstream, and ready one day to be part of the new post-liberal establishment: a power bloc that wants the same technical and social recognition that the ruling class had before, but driven by goals, different motivations and priorities.
Anything but anti-intellectual, so, national-populism is a response to the contradictions of liberal democracies: on paper it promotes the "reinventive" function of common people, welcoming and putting issues and figures that have long been humiliated by the elites back at the center of the debate; in practice, is preparing to create a ruling class of its own made up of technocrats, experts and thinkers, with ideas, alternative proposals and solutions to those that currently govern society. They won't always look revolutionary or coherent, On the contrary: sometimes they will be blatantly realistic, and even more often in competition with each other. Let's put our minds at rest: as long as liberal democracies exist, national-populist intellectuals will follow them like shadows.