“For a new right”: an invitation to liberals to stop being anti-Italian
Peter Thiel, the billionaire entrepreneur and venture capitalist of PayPal and Palantir , patron, in the manner of Lorenzo the Magnificent, of liberal-conservative thought, and a thinker himself, and heir to Rupert Murdoch's scepter of babau of all the English-speaking left, observed recently reviewing Ross Douthat who:
“Unbridled optimism and fatalistic pessimism might give the impression of being in stark contrast to each other, but both degenerate into apathy. In fact, if things could only improve or were destined to fail, in both cases our actions would have no importance ”.
“For a new right” , by Daniele Capezzone, is a little book to savor both the lines and the spaces between them; both the said, the whispered and the implied. There are two distinctive features: the first, which Thiel would very much like, is the moderate and proactive optimism of an author who, while aware of the position of cultural and institutional hegemony of the left in Italy, describes himself as skeptical about the "prospects or impressions too catastrophic. […] Everything changes, nothing is precluded, much is entrusted on the one hand to the whim of chance and on the other hand to our tenacity. […] if at least half of the time and energy devoted by the right to this justified complaint had been committed to building an alternative network, today we would find ourselves in a different situation, more open, more balanced, more competitive. "
The other is the effort to propose, alongside a liberal line in the economic and libertarian sphere in that of public morality, the search for unusual enemies for the Italian liberal repertoire: elites instead of the average Italian, supranational organizations instead of the elector, the high state bureaucracy instead of the janitor. In short, this is not the umpteenth pamphlet of a non-Marxist who, with the fervor of his presumed moral superiority, orders the Italian right to be more liberal, but an invitation to liberals to stop being anti-Italian, because it is supporting the denigration of the Italians who found themselves useful idiots of those who had always intended to deprive them of their freedom. This is one reason we will return to later.
Here then is the author's vision, informed by a real tour de force : by the theorists of supply-side tax cuts of the Reagan era (who enjoy in Italy the disapproval not only of the socialists, but more generally of all the ayatollahs of the balance of balance) to Clint Eastwood (with whom the author resorts to a figure dear to the right to warn her of an uncritical law-and-order agenda), from the ubiquitous Telegraph to Ebenstein's Friedman and Infantino's Hayek, from Jack Kemp of Kondracke and Barnes at Reagan and Thatcher of Wapshott, Charles Moore's official biography of her, the Federalist Papers , and even a little bit of Fox News with Pete Hegseth and Mark Levin. It will not be surprising that, after this set of citations, the author confesses to be an admirer of American political bipolarism, and even proposes to replicate its party structures. Finally, two very lively chapters follow on the European Union and China, observed with British eyes, one, and “neo-con” , the other.
Of course, the reader could object that there is too much Anglosphere, or that the author is carosoning, wants to be American , but it would be a serious mistake: Capezzone knows very well the conditions of Italy in 2021, the very narrow spaces left to freedom and to democracy, and describes it with luminous precision:
Whatever you think of the Recovery Plan (in the previous chapters I have not spared perplexities and criticisms of a liberal and anti-director style), it establishes a double and rigid bond. On the one hand, the classic external constraint, in the form of a careful EU monitoring of our choices, after Brussels has always already oriented the fundamental decisions on investments in a "green" and "digital" direction: therefore, the room for maneuver of a hypothetical new government, following a vote in 2023, would be fatally limited. […] The risk of “automatic pilot” seems very high to me. On the other hand, in the same and opposite sense, there is also a sort of unprecedented "internal constraint" linked to the governance of the Plan. Few have noticed (we wrote the deputy director of the Truth Claudio Antonelli and myself, on several occasions), but otherwise the silence was almost general. In fact, reading the decree-law passed at the end of last May on the governance of the so-called PNRR and on simplifications, the question arises spontaneously: but they realized (all: for and against, majority and opposition) of the weight and extent of superpowers they handed over to the government? Reading the article, one has the clear sensation of a sort of "commissioner of the Republic" which, by verticalizing in an ultra-accelerated way, gives the central government and its apparatuses a kind of power of life and death over much of this. that will happen in Italy in the next 5-6 years. […]
How not to resort to English-speaking sources, one might think, if Italian orthodox liberalism described this PNRR as a "masterpiece of neoliberalism" ( Il Foglio , 24 April 2021), anchored as it is to a hierarchical, statistic-organicistic vision, in which bureaucratic authoritarianism plays a key role in guaranteeing the discipline and mortification of Italians who, as Capezzone effectively jokes, entrusted to themselves, "would risk getting away with it". An "ideological tic", this of the external constraint, a "mentality", a "mindset" , of which the left would be a "gold medal", both in the form of "the communists (ex, neo and post)" and "The old Christian Democratic left, in turn an enemy of competition and the market", which is not known if it loves "the external constraint because it is a shortcut to impose more taxes", or if it focuses "on tax increases knowing already that this will satisfy the external juries called to judge us ". A left that "in its race to the external constraint, is no longer satisfied with European beatings, but is also looking for others, for example from the International Monetary Fund and the OECD."
It goes without saying that Capezzone – despite his youthful appearance and intellectual vivacity, a long-time liberal – knows very well that the responsibility for what he calls "autoracism" does not all lie with the anti-market left, and that the external bond has its own locus classicus in a personality with excellent anti-communist credentials such as Guido Carli. And here is the reason we mentioned at the beginning, here is the implicit indictment against the Italian liberal orthodoxy, against those who, by denigrating the Italians and wishing their submission to foreign nations or supranational organizations, have placed Italy in a condition of powerlessness in the face of the imposition of the progressive agenda of ecological economic planning; here is the implicit indictment against the anti-Italianism of the localists, who have produced a new wave of centralization, since, thanks to the Quirinale "Guarantor of relations with Europe" according to Gianfranco Pasquino, the Roman ministries are the most reliable implementer of 'Brussels agenda.
To an accomplice Italian liberalism, Capezzone offers the opportunity for an appropriate reset. The most well-founded of the criticisms that can be advanced is that, in privileging English-speaking voices, he ignored a cultural heritage that is not entirely to be scrapped, and that, as an Italian, could better be an example: personalities such as that of Maffeo Pantaleoni , who, while enjoying the license issued by orthodox liberalism, are particularly interesting for the new right: in addition to being everything the IBL describes, he was a nationalist and finance minister in Rijeka for d'Annunzio, as well as a fierce critic of BCI, Banca Commerciale Italiana, which had only the name of Italian, being, in that young Italy of the late nineteenth century, poised between central empires and Intesa, an imperialist weapon of the characteristic German economic and political penetration. Mutatis mutandis , the Italy of our time.
The post “For a new right”: an invitation to liberals to stop being anti-Italian appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/per-una-nuova-destra-un-invito-ai-liberali-a-smetterla-di-essere-anti-italiani/ on Tue, 02 Nov 2021 03:49:00 +0000.