The wasted opportunity to treasure the liberal vision of Antonio Martino
I confess it. With rare exceptions (I am thinking of the warm, human, and at the same time sharp and focused memory of Nicola Porro in the Giornale , or, on another level, of the profile traced by Paolo Del Debbio on the Truth ), most of the pieces in memory of Antonio Martino, who passed away on Saturday, they seemed to me to belong to the category of missed opportunities.
Someone (I am thinking of Repubblica ) missed the opportunity for avarice, even post mortem: a hasty and marginal column, a practice to be completed without wasting time or energy. A painful but basically predictable story: a certain Italian culture conceives only what is within its perimeter of intellectual and moral "acceptability". And what is outside? Tamquam was not , as if it were not there: thrown into the pit of irrelevance, of not being. For years, however, page after page to tire on the last sigh of the former, neo and post communists; tearful paginoni to celebrate anyone who could or could be internal (or in any case useful) to the "pantheon" (often at the hard discount ) of the left. But for a heterodox liberal there are no more than two thousand hasty jokes to hide in some forgotten corner: not even the intellectual curiosity to question oneself, to try to understand, to think about the "other". They love to talk about “diversity”: but when they encounter a really different thought, they dismiss it in this way.
Someone else, on the other hand, lost the opportunity because he was a prisoner of the usual "me, me, me". This is also an Arciitalian history: burinist presence with a view on the body, a superficial attempt to credit some intellectual kinship with the missing person, but more than anything else for the purpose of quick self promotion . And next time, without delay, go on with another body. Nothing is thrown away.
Finally, someone else (often in good faith, which aggravates the gaffe) spoke of "provocations" regarding Martino's thought. But what "provocations"? Friends: it was a vision. Martino was not just an economist, nor was he just a political exponent, unfortunately more respected than listened to. Martino was instead – in my opinion – one of the most important Italian intellectuals of the last fifty years, and by detachment the most important liberal intellectual in our country from the seventies onwards.
The compactness, integrity and depth of his vision are under our eyes: distrust of big government (and, in hindsight, also of government ); propensity, above all, to broaden the sphere of private decision and to compress the public and collective one; a euroscepticism in the name of freedom, against the constructivism and superstatalism of the EU (other than a clamorous misunderstanding, typical of the "right-wing communists", of the non-existent "neoliberal Europe" …); the ability to always keep together economic freedom and freedom without adjectives.
And then there was a special talent in Martino: that of making himself understood, even with the help of a joke, of a smile. Just like his teacher Milton Friedman, Martino did not have an elitist and priestly vision, but had the aim of making himself understood by 100 percent of the common people , of making his message "reach" everyone, of popularizing it.
The center-right is said to have often used his words in the past without putting them into practice. And it is sadly tragically true. Yet, even in this painful observation, there is a positive lesson: those words were and are winning, they have proved capable of persuading, of warming the hearts of a large social majority, of mobilizing and motivating it. Then, the lack of conviction of a casual and improvised political class was unable, unable or willing to follow up on that system. But this does not mean that that vision remains, and maintains an efficacy and a freshness that advise us to propose it again, to relaunch it, in every location: political, media and cultural. We can and must try again, despite everything.
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This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL https://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/rubriche/loccasione-sciupata-di-fare-tesoro-della-visione-liberale-di-antonio-martino/ on Mon, 07 Mar 2022 03:53:00 +0000.