Wanting to analyse the crisis of contemporary democracies, and with particular attention to the case of Italian politics, Bobbio (1986) already tried to lubricate the cultural-ideological flywheel necessary for the correct functioning of the institutional apparatus and the civil fabric, the latter creaking since the first years following the establishment of the republican regime and highlighting their inadequacy following the reaction to the impulses of 1968.

Index

Italian political culture: the first defeat

With the themes we will explore here, Pasquino has sought to provide continuity to this thirty-five-year-old controversy, enriching it with current developments in our political culture. Furthermore, in a not-so-subtle manner, some Italian political scientists have come forward to challenge intellectuals and political science as a whole, as they are somehow responsible for supporting the tendency for cultural discourse and political (and other) practices to atrophy.

The defeat, not only political, of the two large mass parties and their respective territorial subcultures (the two churches) has left a void in the democratic framework undermined by unresolved territorial and social fractures, excellent fertilizer for the manifest rise of neo-populisms (inclusive and exclusive) that are radicalized by anti-parliamentarianism and anti-politics, unfortunately chronic in our country.

For too long now, voices and people of comparable influence have been lacking. This shortage has inevitably had a negative impact on the state of political culture, not just in Italy. Where a political system without robust political cultures and political intellectuals to represent and interpret them might end up remains a question painfully in need of an answer. (Pasquino, 2021, p. 138)

Italian politics, a unique case

Anyone who has looked, even out of timid curiosity, at the Italian political and civil landscape has surely become aware of its uniqueness and of its interest to political and social scientists internationally (from the pioneering comparative analyses of Almond and Verba in the 1960s to Putnam's evocative explorations at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries), perhaps to a greater extent than the interest shown by local scholars. A unique but not specific context. Defining a horizon, in this panorama, has proven/remains a daunting and increasingly inscrutable undertaking, like the boundary between sky and sea. What, then, are the entities, actors, and events that have complexified democratic and institutional dynamics, characterizing Italy as a privileged case study to this day?

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To a large extent, the elements that, more or less jointly, make Italy unique are: the development of a uniquely Italian phenomenon (Pasquino, 2021, p. 70) such as fascism and the overwhelming and exquisitely symbiotic presence of the Church and the most influential Communist Party in the West. To venture a simplistic historical excursus, on the one hand, communism, fascism, and anti-fascism have cyclically characterized the first half of the twentieth century —from the advance of the labor movement and the revolutionary wave fueled by the 1917 revolution, through the Red Fear that culminated first in the March on Rome and then in the Twenty Years, to the anti-fascism formally constitutive of the Italian Republic—on the other, the presence on Italian soil of the material and spiritual center of the Christian religion has permeated and permeates our political and civil fabric even before the rubble of Rome.

Italian Political Culture: The DC and the PCI

While Christian Democracy and the PCI (re)animated the spirits and oriented the moods of the electorate and families (ibid., p. 117) for the first fifty years of the Republic, fascism, and its related anti-fascism, should not be underestimated, given their impact on the dynamics of the country since the pre-Republican era and whose echoes are still audible in public debate. The consequences of these socio-political phenomena and the respective actors who rode them can sufficiently justify the troubled contemporary democratic (r)esistance, but not entirely: an analysis, if it is intended to be accurate, cannot ignore other processes that have inexorably marked the rhythms of the democratic pendulum fueled by the project of a substantial application of constitutional principles (a project whose completion, as typically happens in Italy for "Major Works", is defined sine die).

Adopting a meso-situated perspective, institutions come into play, the true center where conflict and democratic dialogue are played out and, perhaps, the most controversial realities of the country system, since among the "insiders" are those who have most poorly embraced the habitus entrusted to them on June 2, 1946, and reacted to the challenges that arose from that day onward. Here and for now, we are interested in substantiating that adjective [controversial] referring to republican institutions, anything but inadvertently or unconsciously attributed. For example, their role during the Years of Lead was controversial , characterized by a tragic and ambiguous political terrorism, whose manifestations, on the one hand, were directly aimed at undermining the stability of the institutions, but on the other, were parasitically linked to them, highlighting a hidden Italy (see Giuliano Turone, 2018).

The "Years of Lead" were characterized, like no other country, by the coexistence and conflict between left-wing and right-wing terrorist groups. The first group had launched the assault on the imperialist state of the multinationals (SIM); the second was, to a large extent, within the state, in its apparatus, enjoyed some explicit and implicit support, including international, eroded its operational capacity, aimed to harden the state, if not to subvert it, and had as its ultimate goal the downsizing of the Italian left and, in particular, of the Communist Party (and the CGIL) and an authoritarian transition. (Pasquino, 2021 p. 93)

From the Years of Lead to the Years of Mud

The stain on the institutions (of that habitus previously mentioned) spreads and changes from a blood-red hue to a mud-red one, thus from the Years of Lead we move to the "years of mud" (an expression dear to Montanelli, 2001): the mafia massacres and the "clean hands" investigation. Although, even questionably, the hands have been (re)cleaned, the same cannot be said of the facades of the buildings and the symbol they were supposed to represent, but which they have sadly (dis)honored.

Prime Minister Draghi's 2021 declassification of documents relating to the Gladio organization and the P2 lodge both partially sheds light and adds complexity to the unfortunately obscure past that has characterized our national experience. Given these particular vicissitudes, a purported condemnation of the failed, if not limited, realization of the polity (and thus of the constitutional project) does not justify blaming, as an end in itself, those who were supposed to draw inspiration from that founding spirit. Far from a sense of irresponsibility as a victim, our society and its liberal shield have had/must deal with events as undesirable as they are, in all likelihood, difficult to address by any other state. That said, it is important to outline the effects of these events and the socio-territorial fractures they generated, their politicization, interpretation, and radicalization—perhaps the most influential dimension—within a more general Italian political culture.

The (Sub)Cultures of Italian Politics

“We are mercilessly confronted with the limits of our political culture: we are the people who are least satisfied with our own lives and, as we have seen, with the functioning of democracy; and all of this, it is worth underlining, emerges from the data collected before 1988” (ibid., p. 25)

 (Cartocci, 1994)

Before defining the ideological/ideal contents that animate and characterise Italian democracy, and the actors – cultural entrepreneurs included – who have interpreted its dialectics and conflicts, it is necessary, here at least, to recall the terms within which "polarised pluralism" has developed.

To adequately explore these aspects, it is essential to consider the socializing role played by institutions, closely linked to the civic sense established, and differentiated, starting from the communal and republican experience in Central and Northern Italy, from foreign dominations and the pre-Risorgimento regional states that administered the peninsula differently for several centuries. Furthermore, it is essential to analyze territorial political subcultures and their influence on the construction of respective identities, voting patterns (the scourge of vote-trading and clientelism), the divide that affects the fracture between Southern and Northern Italy on several fronts , and the forms assumed by social capital with familist particularism, localism, etc. (Cartocci, 1994).

Italian political culture: polarized pluralism

In this regard, Cartocci (ibid.) and Almagisti (2016) offer a substantial argument describing the democratization, observing the necessity, of the social capital coagulated around the white and red subcultures and social and aggregative movements. At the center of their discussion are the dimensions of identity—individual as well as national—and the ways in which it is determined and perceived ("feeling part"), thus the dimension of citizenship, and the intertwining of these with the "great transformation" of political-economic structures, emancipated from the chrysalis patiently constructed since the Second World War.

“The underlying, long-term trend is widespread dissatisfaction with politics and the functioning of national institutions, especially parliament and political parties—not just other parties, but also the ones voters chose from time to time for lack of anything better.” (Pasquino, 2021, p. 143)

The assassination of Moro and the fall of the Berlin Wall

In Republican Italy, the parties were the primary interpreters in defining these dimensions, circumscribing them within a relative and fragile balance; this balance was not a goal, but rather a path from which to begin, and certainly not to be abandoned when the new and impetuous challenges presented themselves to democracy as a whole. This fragile balance was such, both because of the new difficulties that the democratic system had to face – between the Seventies and Eighties the neoliberal advance , the assassination of Aldo Moro and the consequent decline of the spirit of historical compromise and alternative, the fall of the Berlin Wall (“the litmus test of the disappearance of the political (sub)cultures of republican Italy”, ibid., p.111, my italics) – and because of the weight, placed on the fragile keystones of the national architecture (recalling the famous phrase of Massimo d'Azzeglio), and exercised by anti-parliamentarism and anti-politics, happily conveyed in the now consolidated Italian-style populism (ibid., p.145).

The latter is, rightly, the theme on which studies have focused for nearly thirty years, recalling phenomena such as political and party personalization, the effects of a new, data-driven and hyper-informed society and the resulting disintermediation of institutions, and recalling the aggregative and atomizing tendencies prevailing under the globalizing and globalized sceptre. In Italy's case in particular, many scholars attribute the struggles that local politics has endured since the birth of the "Second Republic" to cultural and institutional confusion, further accentuated by the incompetence of the heirs of the two major national mass parties.

Neopopulism in Italian politics

Neopopulism (embellished with its inseparable -isms, such as sovereignism, nationalism, etc.) represents the funnel through which the excursus outlined thus far flows, its infusion well suited to the liquid society, as defined by Bauman and evoked by Pasquino. Our task now is to define the forms of the container in which this society is immersed and whose shape it inevitably takes: a society, precisely, contained and not containing, unable to define itself in the evolution of its flow—more than panta rhei, a stagnant society, nothing flows.

“Practices seem to precede cultural (and political) developments, without which, however, their breath is inevitably very short.” (ibid., p.192)

In our feature film, which is progressively scaled (from the macrophenomena that cradled the republic to the more contingent and particular ones in which it took its first small and uneven steps), the temporal dimension seems to have assumed a secondary, if not caricatural, role: time and its flow are perceived merely as a conditio sine qua non for spatiality to evolve.

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Temporality has been constantly restricted in memory, constrained by the contingent and rarely constrained by the possible; this is the perspective of a nation that has failed to reckon with the roots of the past, to assess the present, and to explore the limits of the future. Hence, an awareness of the dialectic that links space and the material with time and the ideal is necessary: ​​the more indefinite our horizon, the longer it will take to reach it.

The ideological profile of Italian politics

"Here lies a paradox of new ideologies that constitutes their essential flaw. They cannot extricate themselves from the tension between the particular and the universal. […] Fragmented visions of life take on the appearance of globality, and the need to gain social accreditation leads to their being presented as universal, that is, valid for every man. If the new ideologies are those that elude public debate and any instance of revision, then this defense of pluralism will become a defense of ideological thought" (Viola, 1996, pp. 23-26)

As we have seen, the energy and new life injected by the republican impulse have progressively lost power and support, and with them the ideological elaborations from (and with) which they drew legitimacy. The entirely ideological ambition of seeking truth (ibid.) fulfills the socially shared need to interpret reality and provide meaning to existence ; if not the salt of democracy, ideologies contribute to flavoring its essence. Knowing how to orient oneself, in fact, presupposes the acquisition of the essential coordinates for signifying time and perceiving space, as previously recalled, and through these, acting according to the same conflictually shared and negotiated meanings.

The relationship of direct and reciprocal proportionality between ideology and practice (political and otherwise) is clear; as Pasquino reminded us, they must both motivate and motivate each other. This relationship, however, does not equate to a self-referential suppression of conflict and its potential for innovation and integration, typical of democratic pluralism: avoiding this conflict, on the contrary, fuels a diametrically opposed spiral (including its effects), the spiral of silence.

Grafts with advanced capitalism in Italian politics

We must not forget the importance of regulating these dynamics and the very desire to regulate them ; we have rightly emphasized several times the shortsightedness of institutions and political parties in exercising this role. The mediator is increasingly the market and finance, no longer at the service of politics and civil society in achieving and satisfying collective good and needs ; it is now advanced capitalism that dictates the means and ends of politics and citizenship, using them to assert its own objectives.

In the ideological profile outlined by Pasquino, following in Bobbio's footsteps, the weight exerted by the global market is pronounced , so much so that its laissez faire has permeated cultural and ideological development from every point of view, highlighting how self-regulation is a non-regulation: our challenge lies in verifying whether ideologies are effectively fragmented – I prefer to use the term "disoriented" to avoid considering them merely fragmented resulting in a lack of argument – ​​or whether, instead, they sin of an overdetermination unilaterally influenced by accumulative logic.

Davide Agus

References

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