It sometimes happens that the more vehement and extreme the reactions to a cultural and political phenomenon, the more they reveal how much that phenomenon is touching very sensitive nerves and deep layers of a society.. And they highlight how the conflicts of forces and ideological alignments in a specific moment of history are being redefined around the theme raised by that phenomenon.
This is exactly what happened in recent days at the World Congress of Families held in Verona. The very violent campaign of denigration, dispute, intimidation unleashed against the event – but also, on the other side, the decisive endorsement towards it by right-wing political leaders such as Salvini and Meloni - are the unequivocal sign of the fact that those connected to the family, to motherhood, sexuality represent central themes of the political debate in our country today more than ever, as throughout the West.
Gli issues “biopolitici” – all those connected to primary instinctual drives as well as to genesis, treatment, manipulation of life – began to break into the political dialectics of industrialized democracies with the youth rebellion of the 1960s and 1970s, overlapping and replacing economic and social ones, and since then their relevance has continued to grow, until it is established, as seen today, one of the main watersheds between the political identity of the left and the right.
Half a century ago it began in the West, in societies “opulent”, a radical cultural and anthropological revolution, with the destabilization of every constraint and limit to subjective self-determination in the name of the full realization of personal desires. In particular, the family institution - an element of stability in a logic of substantial continuity for many centuries in societies with European roots through epochal economic changes, political and cultural – has suffered decisive repercussions from this revolution: the massification of divorce, the legalization of abortion, the “liquefaction” of couple bonds, the growing loneliness and abandonment of the elderly combined with the pressing propaganda in favor of euthanasia, the confusion and often the actual eclipse of the parental figures in the growth of the young generations, up to the institutionalization of homosexual unions and the request for legalization (by the latter but not only) of acquiring children through external fertilization and pregnancy.
A panorama of general disintegration marked by the univocal tendency towards demographic collapse in almost all Western countries, where the now consolidated contraction of the fertility rate below replacement levels is coupled with a dramatic aging of the population. All this while the countries of the so-called “first world” appear increasingly weakened economically by the dynamics of globalization, and their planetary relevance is drastically reduced by peoples and civilizations experiencing impressive growth - on an economic level, demographic or both. Peoples and civilizations that are increasingly physically pressing Western countries with powerful waves of migration, raising profound problems of coexistence between cultures, and the widespread sensation, in the countries “host”, of a rapid dispersion of one's security and identity.
E’ It is in this context that the strong revival of interest must be placed, in Western societies, for political issues related to the protection of life, to motherhood, to the family. An interest that, never dormant in Anglo-Saxon societies, in recent decades it has been spreading and taking root in continental Europe, materializing in the birth or strong rise of movements “pro-life” of both religious and secular inspiration.
In Italy, the first is already part of this trend “Family Day” held in 2007, and subsequently the even larger demonstrations organized in 2015 and in 2016 against the approval of the law on “civil unions” homosexuals and against propaganda “gender” in schools by the committee “Let's defend our children” and from movement “Family Generation”.
The conference held in Verona in recent days represents the evolution of the phenomenon and its transformation into a more composite and articulated movement, with international ramifications. It must be read, Therefore, as one among various identity reactions, dictated by the survival instinct, found in societies with European roots in the face of the widespread perception among them of their decadence in the context of the globalized world.
The proposals put forward in Verona fit fully into this logic, as tools intended to encourage the consolidation of family units, e, through them, of the community: search for alternatives to abortion through economic and psychological assistance to parents, fiscal and economic support policies for motherhood and large families, measures to encourage conciliation between motherhood and female work, determined fight against the practices of “uterus for rent”, e, in general, safeguarding the psychological integrity of minors.
They appear, so, the very harsh accusations made by many Italian political and intellectual circles are totally out of focus, already weeks and even months before it takes place, to Congress, and powerfully relaunched by almost all the major mass media. A Congress that has been portrayed as a dangerous gathering of obscurantists, intolerant, extremists, intent on driving women home to knit stockings, to persecute homosexuals, and similar. We could and we can, naturally, disagree with all the proposals put forward in the meeting and the analyzes that inspire them, as well as expressing doubts about their concrete feasibility. But the ferocious and malevolent caricatures elaborated by many to radically delegitimize the movement of which it was an expression quickly showed the rope in the face of the actual reality of the event. Which had nothing to do with nostalgia for an Arcadian world that no longer exists, but it was instead a classic “response to challenge” with respect to new and urgent problems, and expressed a widely shared and transversal concern for the future prospects of an increasingly lost society, precarious, unstable.
On the other hand, such virulent reactions should not be too surprising. We are in front, Indeed, to a truly new class struggle, to an epochal clash of a social nature, political and cultural inserted in a dialectic that, within liberal democracies, it is increasingly polarizing between globalist elites and identity movements. What remains of the left and of “progressivism” Western Europe is now entirely focused on supporting multiculturalist immigrationism and claims connected to hedonistic/biopolitical individualism, of which radical feminism and movements “lgbt…” represent the most vocal representatives. Fight head-on and with every means against support for motherhood and the family “traditional” (as on the left the one formed by a husband is derogatorily defined, wife and children obtained naturally) it means for progressives to strenuously defend their residual electoral gains and their social class of reference: that “bourgeoisie of knowledge” deterritorialized – rooted above all in the cultural-media industry, in the management of the hi-tech production system, in international institutions e “neutral”, in the higher education system - which in recent decades has conquered practically all the most influential positions of social power in Western societies, which defends a radical ideal of limitless self-determination and which it brands as “populist” any political opposition to its hegemony.
The progressive/globalist socio-political bloc has, moreover, inherited in Italy from the twentieth-century communist regime the claim to total monopoly of mass culture and public discourse. Hence the defamation, bordering on monstrosity, which we have witnessed in recent weeks. Which echoes equally aggressive campaigns already unleashed in the past against adversaries deemed dangerous and pointed out as “anthropologically” different, like Craxi or Berlusconi. Which goes so far as to unscrupulously use scientific institutions for the purposes of pure ideological invective (see among other cases the petition signed by many professors of the University of Verone, or the anti-WCF communiqués born within the Italian Society of Historians, and to the Society for Contemporary History Studies). And that even denies legitimacy to the article 29 of that Constitution so often brandished as a fetish, that article that “recognizes the rights of the family as a natural society founded on marriage”.
Conversely, It is not surprising that the pro-life and pro-family movement is perceived by the sovereignist-led new right as an opportunity to gain consensus around issues that are close to the hearts of a large part of its electorate.. Hence the ostentatious presence, at the Verona Congress, of many of its leaders and prominent exponents, mentioned above.
Another thing will be to evaluate whether the emphatic declarations of principle on their part will also be followed by facts, on terrains that remain highly conflictual and exposed to media controversy. Or whether the associations promoting this and other awareness-raising initiatives will have to equip themselves in the more or less near future with their own organization and political leadership.
source – https://www.loccidentale.it/articoli/146958/vita-e-famiglia-ecco-la-nuova-polarizzazione-ideologica