It's not just here. The Italian Election and the further rise of the hard right.

Fratelli d'Italia, the "Brothers of Italy", have won the Italian election.

Not outright, but with 26% of the vote.  Enough of a command that, together with another right wing party and a center right party, Giorgia Meloni's neo-fascist party will govern.^1 2  The party, in second position, is the Italian center left Democratic Party, but it can't put together a ruling coalition.

This gives Italy, when in the 1945 to early 1970s period teetered on the edge of falling into Communism, its most right wing government since Mussolini was strung up.

The Fratelli d'Italia is nativist, anti-immigrant, anti-European Union, and traditionalist.  It's leader, Giorgia Meloni has said of herself; "I am Giorgia. I'm a woman, I'm a mother, I'm Italian, I’m Christian".  The slogan is sufficiently popular that it's been set to techno pop with her saying those things, in Italian, and it's pretty effective.  You can also find clips of her saying, but to members of the Spanish Vox party, in Italian;

Yes to the natural family, no to the LGBT lobby, yes to sexual identity, no to gender ideology... no to Islamist violence, yes to secure borders, no to mass migration... no to big international finance... no to the bureaucrats of Brussels!"

So where is she basically coming from: Well, here:

It's impossible at this point not to see that something is going on in the Western World.  It's not just Orban, or Trump.

Its the entire Western World.

Indeed, if anything, Trump's version of this is the most decayed and perverted.  Meloni's may be the most open and honest.

So how did we get here?

This might be the reaction, long delayed, to 1968, and all it brought about.

Indeed, it almost certainly is.  The question is what form that takes, and where that form takes shape.  In Italy, Meloni, running from the hard populist right, will form a coalition government in a parliament in which, perhaps ironically, nobody is claiming a minority government reflects corruption in the vote, whereas in our country, with a Federal democracy that's designed to work slow and defeat "coalitions", or parties, one side is.  Therefore, ironically, Italy, which has a history of fascism but never endured de-fascism, democracy may actually be less imperiled.

At any rate, we noted here earlier that in post Boomer generations, liberalism was waning and conservatism building.  What we missed is that it's waning quicker than we anticipated, and the reaction to 1968 seems to be very widespread, and increasingly strong.

Footnotes

1.  "Meloni" means just what it sounds like.  

Indeed, Meloni in a short video clip, can be seen holding two cantaloupes chest high making a joke about it. Something that's somewhat unique to Italian politics, which remains occasionally ribald.

2.  The FdI denies that it's neo-fascist, and while we've referred to them here that way, this wants again raises the topic of "what is a fascist".  It's not as easy to answer as it might at first seem.

The FdI may have a point here, although I frankly don't know.  At the end of the day, fascism implies an element of totalitarianism.  The Italian fascists of the 1920s through 1940s made no bones about not approving of democracy.  The Spanish fascist were of the same mind set. By and large, neo-fascist have also been anti-democratic.

This contrasts with the Illiberal Democrats, who tolerate a degree of democracy, but within a preset framework.  They're okay with the vote, up to a point, and that point is the point at which a society is supposed to have a cultural set of concepts upon which it operates. That's not up for a vote. That concept has a lot of sympathy, it seems, all over the Western World right now.