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Rating: Anyone who cares about the future of Italy necessarily knows that it does not only depend on the effective governmental activity of the current moderate majority but also on a renewal of the identity of the left, which is finally capable of presenting itself as a credible alternative to the ideological and value model embodied by the People of Freedom, through a synthesis that knows how to speak to the mind and heart of all voters.
There is no doubt that, over the past decades, especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the transition from PCI to PDS, DS, Ulivo, PD, etc., the main fault of the Italian left has been not reflecting on itself and its identity, finding occasional and never lasting cohesion only in the face of an external enemy and unifying factor like Silvio Berlusconi.
Allow me - with respect to saying - to use a comparison: at times, the left seemed to me, over these years, like a flock all engrossed in grazing its pastures, wandering disorderly and without prospects, that suddenly regrouped at the appearance of a more or less imaginary black wolf (Berlusconi indeed: sometimes described as an enemy to perform a function that the nature of the left would never have produced), thus relying on a good shepherd to lead the flocks to the pen to preserve them in their group identity.
The good shepherd, in this case, necessarily had to be a good Samaritan, whether of Christian Democratic or otherwise Catholic origin like a Prodi, or a solidarist like Veltroni, or a sort of ferryman who was not asked to turn lambs into lions - like Ridley Scott's Robin Hood - but simply to keep the flock alive: in other words, to initiate conservative policies to protect those with a fixed income, such as state employees, wage earners, pensioners, unionized workers, reproducing a sort of neo-corporatism aimed at continuing with other means, and under the guise of what was the Italian welfare state, the policies of prudent immobilism of a left that never, in Italian history, took the responsibility to lead an authentic and mature change. And it's no coincidence that when the good shepherd tried to leave this pen, leading at least the flocks to modern and European pastures (as with Prodi), some of the more authoritative cashmere mouflons preferred to roam freely in pastures exposed to the perennial threat of the wolf, as happened in '98 and '06.
In the coming months, I intend to verify the existence of answers to these questions, and the possible ways out of the deadlock in which the Italian left has seemed stuck, roughly speaking, since the times of Italy's Unification to today, identifying the possible models of development for this political side, without refraining from some criticism and observation, also for the benefit of those site users who, in public comments and private letters, sometimes criticized my excess of balance, mistaking it for stagnation or fear of expressing my opinion.
A first model of development, on which we focus today, is well summarized, in my humble opinion, by this documentary, in which journalist Fulvio Grimaldi identifies in the South America of Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Cuba (the latter is a Caribbean reality, to be honest) a part of the world where left-wing ideals have not only been developed at an intellectual level - as happened in Marx's Europe - but have been effectively realized under the push of Governments led by the likes of Morales, Correa, Chavez, Castro as well as their collaborators and followers.
The documentary examines the situations of the four considered countries and describes their historical-political evolution within a path that starts from the emancipation of Native Americans from European and American imperialist slavery, by claiming their own sovereignty against external dominators and related economies, and the subsequent autonomy in identifying possible political, social and economic development paths, alternative to both the classic communist model of the USSR and the Comecon, which historically failed, and the Euro-American capitalist model.
The narrative has epic and at the same time moralizing characteristics, describing a kind of "war of liberation" of the second and third world towards conquerors who have trampled on the rights and freedoms of peoples (of "peoples" more than of "individuals", note) imposing values and political systems foreign to them, and deeming this war, in addition to being necessary, just and aimed at progress.
Grimaldi's approach to history seems to me to be therefore fundamentally optimistic, and at the same time imbued with that messianism disguised as historical materialism that constitutes, as known and in light of my previous essays, the real genotype of every Marxist and leftist ideology.
I would now introduce a novelty in my method, and, responding to the prompts of the site's users more involved in the political debate, I would begin to highlight, in simple and comprehensible points, the weakness profiles of the assumptions underlying the documentary, in such a way as to channel the debate into fairly defined tracks and avoid everything turning into the usual insults or entirely apodictic positions we have witnessed over the recent months, with the risk of reducing my collaboration with the site to a sterile object of a priori criticism.
The weakness profiles seem to me, therefore, at least three, and on them, I hope for a mature debate among users, also defending the positions expressed in this documentary.
In affirming the existence of an axis of good like the South American and Caribbean one, the charismatic and populistic dimension of the considered political leaderships seems underestimated, paradoxically much more similar to the Italian Berlusconi (who nevertheless moves within moderate values) than to forms of mature democracy like those we can primarily see in Scandinavian countries like Norway, Sweden, Finland, but also the Netherlands and England, or, to stay in the Continent, in Germany, without going to the States or Canada.
The charismatic perspective of these rulers does not seem to me to be underestimated, given that in asserting their leadership, they seem to sacrifice the values of democratic dialectical confrontation - in the context of free elections like those held in the rest of the world, and in Italy itself despite critics - introducing among the hypothetical benefits derived from the promotion of Good for those populations the costs of a populist regime that always risks taking the slope of authoritarianism.
In other words, even admitting that a Castro, a Chavez or a Morales come to Government for the good of all, it is not so automatic that, in a charismatic and plebiscitary system like the one typical of many South American systems, there are suitable counterbalances to avoid the risks of dictatorial drifts of the same leaders or possible successors, which, in the medium term, could lead the people of those lands to lose all the benefits gained in the short.
Consider, after all, what happened in the old continent in the '20s and '30s of the last century, where the various Mussolini, Franco, and Salazar - not to mention Hitler - presented themselves to the people as liberators and promoters of good, with the outcomes we all know as inherent in the charismatic bond between leader and masses, where the passage from populism to authoritarianism and then to totalitarianism is not so arduous.
Secondly, it seems problematic to me to propose as an exemplary model of development, even for South America itself, forms of Government that necessarily base their "revolutionary" primacy and control of the territory on Armies and Law Enforcement, which in such contexts, with low or absent democratic content, could easily act and in a violent manner to protect the established order, even through forms of detention and torture that, in South America, have already been seen as typical of the Argentine and Chilean regimes of the '70s and '80s, not by chance based on the charisma of military leaders, regardless of the political ideologies practiced in concrete, which, more than right or left, were characterized by the already mentioned forms of paternalism and authoritarianism towards a society seen as weak and lax.
This model also seems difficult to propose in Europe, and especially in Italy, where the Law Enforcement and Armies have been acting for decades in full respect of democratic values, and where any suspected deviation from methods of democratic control of society are stigmatized especially by the same left forces, as happened in the well-known events of the G8 in 2001: in other words, it would be difficult to propose a European or Italian development model based on means that the left itself criticizes persistently. In short: it is not that a police that exercises violence in Havana in the name of communism is ontologically better than a police that, hypothetically, exercises it in the name of conservatism in Genoa (albeit with due differences).
The third and final profile of weakness, structural, seems to relate to the same Idea of Good that would be conveyed in South America and proposed as a potential goal for the entire global left: personally, I am wary of those who indicate a single and true Good to achieve, as an abstract ideal, believing that such a dimension is not proper to men and politics, but more to Religion (taken seriously), and that the definition of what is Good and is Evil belongs to great religious leaders, from Mahatma Gandhi to the Dalai Lama or the Pope, who will show the ways to achieve the Best in an otherworldly rather than earthly dimension.
To us humble living beings, only a stipulative, relative, and conventional idea of good and evil remains, destined to change in relation to subjective points of view, social context, personal conditions, and realizable only in daily life, through concrete political actions, individual choices made even at the professional level, vocations of various kinds, always and in any case in respect of those essential forms and guarantees typical of parliamentary democracy, which have accompanied us since the times of the French Revolution, certainly with limits and reconsiderations.
Hence the South American flavored recipe for Good risks being a bit too spicy and indigestible for our palates (besides the South Americans themselves, who should more often visit the doctor to check their blood values): other models and traditions are those the left should perhaps be inspired by, rediscovering perhaps its modern European roots, since our cultural paradigm is made not only of Spanish or Portuguese Conquistadors, nor of the Comintern of cold Moscow at the gateway to Siberia and the vastness of the East, but also of free thinkers in whom the left should finally recognize itself, as Italian moderates have been doing at least since 1994, following the trail of Erasmus of Rotterdam, Locke, Rousseau among others.
In conclusion, it seems to me that the South American development model turns one of the recurring nightmares of the left - a Berlusconi conducador - into one of the possible alternatives to the Berlusconi model itself, highlighting already logically the need to rethink the problem differently and following paths, in my opinion, different from those practiced in South America.
A different model that could then be exported to a South America to give it a true and new left, rather than the surrogates on which the politics of those places are based.
There is certainly much to ponder, raising, as moderates we are, a doubt: is this the left we need?
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