Something in the wind, part 2 of 3. The rise of the radical populist right. A second look at the Italian election. . . and a bunch of other stuff.

Giorgia Meloni not sounding like Donald Trump.  In a sort of "make Italy great again" speech she calls for uniting the country, governing for all Italians, and doesn't sound like some sort of cheap badly done rendition of Goodfellas.  Indeed, her articulate nature comes across, even if you don't grasp Italian, in comparison to Trump's nearly complete lack of it.¹ Her victory message is certainly different, but the proof, of course, is in the cannolis, not in the menu presentation.

Does the election of Giorgia Meloni tell us something about what's going on in the US right now?

I think it does, or at least did, and therefore explains in part how we got to where we now are.

More than that, does it tell us what isn't going on, and what Trump's backer's might get, or rather the country, if we keep going down this road?

It probably does.

First, we'll note, her victory has already been heralded in parts of the English-speaking world as a non-fascist victory for true conservatism.

At the same time, the American usual suspects, probably none of which actually would be comfortable with Meloni's actual world view, rolled into congratulate her:

Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Ted Cruz under fire for celebrating Italian far-right victory

Italian politician Giorgia Meloni’s party traces its roots to the Second World War-era fascist movement founded by Benito Mussolini

All of this tells us a few things.

The first is that the FdI's rebranding of itself as a non-neo fascist party is taking root successfully, but it remains challenged.  The party certainly had its roots there, and its symbol is made up of flames from Mussolini's grave, after all. But maybe it has reengineered itself as a right wing populist party that's no longer an anti-democratic fascist one.

Secondly, the English-speaking right is switching its attention from Viktor Mihály Orbán to Meloni, and maybe that's a good thing, if the FdI is no longer fascist and is democratic.

Of course, at the same time, the populist American right remains basically captive to a large degree to Donald Trump and his acolytes.

Finally, it really shows us what the populist Trumpite wing of the GOP, which anymore we might as well just call the GOP, is, and isn't.

So, what is Meloni's platform?

Well, I'm not Italian and I hadn't heard of the FdI until just the other day, or if I had, I hadn't paid all that much attention to it.  Italy has had more than one neo Fascist party over the years.  But it's easy to find videos of her giving really fiery speeches.  A lot of those have been condensed into snippets, but if the full speech is listed to, they go in directions that you don't really expect.  As far as I can tell, and I may be way off, the FdI, under Meloni, is hugely and unapologetically traditionalist and right wing populist, by it retains some syndicalist economic views.  It also has dabbled, to some surprising extent, in social legislation which would be regarded as left wing in the United States, as trying to pass a bill regarding child care for working mothers.

So what caused more Italians to vote for it than any other party?

Probably that traditionalism, which is grounded in a sort of philosophy of nature, or new essentialism, or even a combination of classical Western thought and evolutionary biology.  It appears, at least in its Italian form, to be of deeper thought than that of the normal American version.  Indeed, American conservative intellectualism is of a much different type, and really hasn't evolved in any concrete form since Buckley's day.

What it might simply boil down to is what we've already mentioned.  The FdI and Meloni are enormously anti-Woke and aren't apologetic about it in the least.  They are also very nationalist in the "Italy for Italians" sense of things. And all that instinctively appeals, all around the globe, to people who aren't keen on being as multicultural as progressives assure them they should be and who, deep down, don't believe that a species that is male and female and has had marriage as its central fundamental societal element needs to now change that view.

It's a huge reaction to 1968 and the things 1968 foisted upon Western Society.

It's also, we might note, a reaction to the 1970s and the Greed is Good ethos that a triumphant capitalism brought in everywhere in the 1980s and 1990s.  That part of Meloni's public platform seems missed.  Meloni, however, has attacked modern globalism, and therefore that part of capitalism, pretty openly as well.

These themes all appeared in the far right before.  Mussolini's original fascism was actually extremely radical in a left wing sense, reflecting a radicalism he'd grown up with, and his original membership in the Socialist Party.  The Italian Fascist, however, combined some really left wing concepts with some extreme right wing ones, which was common to early fascist movements in many, but not all, places that it took root, that being one of the things that has made fascism so difficult to define.  Because it did that, however, it also appealed to societal voters in the countries where it took root, who would adopt some of its views while blinding their eyes to others, and indeed blinding their eyes to the most radical elements of it.

Indeed, that's what made and still makes fascism really dangerous.  We can see it in this example, maybe, and we can now see it in the U.S.

Indeed, we'll turn to the U.S. here, with this entry by some conservative journalist:

He’s Still the One
Sohrab Ahmari & Matthew Schmitz

Republican voters face a clear choice in the 2024 presidential cycle. Those who think the conservative movement has the solutions to the nation’s crises should vote for a conventional GOP candidate. But those who believe the conservative movement is part of the problem should support Donald Trump.

Only Trump defied the deep state empowered by his Republican predecessors. Only Trump has broken from the disastrous foreign policy championed by the conservative movement. Only Trump has taken on the mania for free trade and outsourcing. No other figure of the right has shown the same willingness to break with his own side’s orthodoxies.

We've noted it here before, but we'll start with this and add in the Meloni element.

What's causing this hard right turn?

Well, in the U.S. and in Italy it's a feeling by rank and file, working people, that their politicians have completely abandoned them and their concerns combined with a reaction to modifying millennia old, and DNA rooted, institutions.  That's pretty much it.  The FdI promises to do something about that. American Conservatives have promised to do something about that since at least 1976, if not earlier, failed to do so, and even basically lied, in some instances, about their devotion to really doing so.  They've started to do something, and ironically it's really Mitch McConnell, through his Supreme Court appointments, whose really started to change the social aspect of this around, in part.

The part where this isn't true had to do with unchecked illegal immigration.  Trump, once again, did do something about that.  Progressives and many others hated what he did, but he did do something, and that made him the first President since Teddy Kennedy's immigration reforms altered what had been in place to do so.

Economically, Trump had a good three-year run until COVID-19 came by plane, most likely, and ran through the country killing people and destroying the economy.  Trump never acted like an economic conservative, however, and the GOP was pretty comfortable spending money like sailors on a three-day shore leave.  As, by and large, people are happy with a good economy, it didn't really matter.  

A person is free to view this anyway they wish, but Trump's far right policies, which appealed to many rank and file Republicans of the far right, and appealed to rust belt Democrats who came into the GOP, were nativist, traditional WASPish, and very socially conservative.  To a very large degree, if they had been advanced by a more conventional politician, that individual would have been regarded as a huge success.

They were not advanced, however, by a conventional politician, but by Trump.  It can be doubted, quite frankly, the extent to which Trump believed in any of the things he advocated for, or believes in anything at all other than himself, whom he appears to believe in obsessively.  Trump is not an admirable man.

Trump may simply have picked up, as a salesman, on what his demographic wanted to buy.  If he had done nothing more than that, he could not be criticized for it.  Indeed, politicians of all stripes do that and in a democratic system, they must.  There's no reason to believe, for example, that Harriet Hageman really thinks the election was stolen.  Her base believes that, and so she must.  It's an irony of the democratic system that really effective advocates of certain positions, truly believed by a politician's base, might find no real sympathy with the politician themselves.  Indeed, that's why we find advocates of traditional family values caught up in sex scandals of all sorts, or advocates of law and order involved in crime. 

Selling to your base, we note, is probably also why we find Kyrsten Sinema a Democrat looking out for monied interests.  For that matter, it also may very well explain why politicians in certain regions seem to take positions that are contrary to their educations and backgrounds.  They likely don't believe what they're saying, they believe they need to say it.

All of that is how democracy actually works, in part, but only in part.

Trump departed with that, however, in a truly fascistic sense.  Appearing to believe principally in himself, he created a personality cult, some of which adopted the worst beliefs and inclinations of his supporters.  And he became his movement, which is what Mussolini became, for example, to Italian fascism.  His supporters still believe in him, but he believes in himself more.  He essentially advances the concept that he, and only he, can save the nation against forces which are illegitimate.

And that is the core of fascism. FWIW, it's the core of Communism, too.

We said there may be lessons here.  If so, what would they be?

The principal ones are the ones that Trump learned before he ever took office, and what Mitch McConnell, for all his differences with Trump, also knows.  1968 is over and much of what it brought has been ruinous.  People look back instinctively to core societal traditional values and do not want change forced on them from above, or at all.

But what is also there is that there's a major society wide rejection of the consumerist economic revolution. People everywhere are wealthier than they used to be, but they are also more tied to their occupations than ever, and they don't want to be.

And people look at their countries and communities differently than capitalist do, and they don't want to look at them differently. They don't really want ever expanding this and that, and they often would just as soon have things be as they once were, rather than where they seem to be going.

All of those things can be advanced democratically.  Meloni claims that she will now do that.

We'll see.

But this raises another question, particularly for American populists.  Are you really wishing to buy the entire package?

Footnotes:

1.  Meloni has a very direct and highly pithy form of delivery.  In contempoary American politics it would be nearly impossible to find an analogy, in part because she very clearly means what she says.  An interesting contrast would be to Trumpite Harriet Hageman, who is articulate enough, but who lacks the element of sincreity that Meloni obivously has.  Perhaps only Liz Cheney, whose delivery is different, is comparable.

Trump's style nearly defies description, but it's odd and sort of oddly childish, as if he's delivering a rambling address to himself, or to a group in a children's club.  That he's gained a wide following is surprsing in part for that fact, as people generally don't like being talked down to.  He doesn't come across as consdesencing, but as not too bright.  Interestingly one realy diehard fan of his that I spoke to some time ago, who couldn't imagine anyone not admiring him, related that "he speaks like us".  Of note, that person was of a highly blue collar background from the East, which gives some creedance to the theory that New York politicians of recent years have learned their speaking style from dealing with East Coast mobsters.

Prior Threads in this Series:

Something in the wind, part 1 of 3. The rise of the radical populist right. A second look at the Italian election. . . and a bunch of other stuff.

Prior Related Threads:

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