Are we getting lost?
Mauro Buti left a new comment on your post " History teaches ":
Gorgeous post. <3
One thing we're definitely missing out on as a community is that there are fewer and fewer great posts, to be honest. Which was one of those things that helped keep the mood high at the time, when you couldn't really imagine winning. Reading, understanding, taking an interest made you feel an active part of something big, which was better than being helpless, and just suffering.
For the rest, the reflection is that you have certainly won as a single, and with full merit, but (at least to me) it is less and less clear if you are actually winning on the broader issue.
A few years ago some evolutions seemed inevitable worse than death. Some things would end, some politicians would crash, and eventually at least something else and different would be born. Of course, because it was macroeconomics that decided that way. Today the macro-economic elements are more or less identical to then (or they will return shortly), yet the impression is more that the whole Debate is bogged down in mud. To say, someone like Macron, strictly speaking, today should have had less than half a percent (like Hollande before him). Instead he seems to be ahead, and it is not unlikely that he will win …
The rupture and anti-system forces are easing, and perhaps the pandemic is really moving the needle towards more "stability and system" as an alternative to the traumatic change that has always been prophesied.
Clear that some themes "never end", as per the post (I remember the one where we trolled on the amount of days for which we waited for Brexit …: D), but the feeling of "Tartar desert" begins to peep into the back, and the great reality is that I would like to read more post mileage of reasoning on all these issues and the present universe. Sure the 2011 stuff is still current, but I can no longer feel it as "really current". Something else is underway where it would be important to be a community, and to read stuff that stimulates the gray matter a little more than newspapers (we like to win easy, after all).
Instead it feels a bit lonely, or at least more lonely than at the beginning, the feed passes me a new goofy article every half century, and in the meantime they tear up the brownies of stuff that honestly don't care (-> * debate).
Small petition from an avid reader: more blogs, fewer figures, less telegram, less twitter. <3
M.
Posted by Mauro Buti on Goofynomics on Dec 6, 2021, 5:29 pm
I find this comment interesting because it raises questions that I too have often asked myself. In dedicating myself to you, I have taken on responsibilities that I do not want to shirk, even if they are not easy to interpret.
Let's try to do it together.
The first, probably, was to give you the feeling of "being an active part of something big", as Mauro says, of what we here call the Debate, of our community. Now, already on this sentence of Mauro there would be a lot of reasoning. All along the path of this blog I have defined membership as a cancer, I have considered it a negative value, if not the supreme negative value from the point of view of the pursuit of an accomplished democracy. It seemed to me that the main obstacle to the maturation of a democratic conscience was that Piddino way of "reasoning" by belonging, of arguing, that is, taking refuge, entrenching oneself, in the clichés accepted by one's community. The semi-crop who "knows he knows" because he knows what he has been told he knows and is not willing to put these certainties into play, appeared to us from the beginning as the current version, little revised and not at all correct, of the willing. executioners of good memory (and those of you to whom these words seemed exaggerated a few years ago will now have changed their minds). With how many of these little men with the truth in your pocket have you had to confront, regardless of my wise precept (which was not mine): the important thing is to desist !
But belonging is not necessarily the abolition of one's critical capacity, it is not necessarily the tribal homage to a totem, as in the little characters we used to meet. It can also be sharing, exchange, community, and therefore a stimulus, rather than obliteration, of critical thinking, ideal tension, rather than gloomy conformity, participation and therefore freedom, rather than obedience to stable orders. And the question we should ask ourselves is: but before this blog was there, where did you go looking for this stuff? Where was this sacred and just eagerness to participate, to plan? And the first answer that comes to mind is that this sense of belonging as militancy, as the ability to structure a resistance by associating in a community of peers, as a sharing of vision and ideals, was found in the parties and their ideologies. I understand from Mauro's words that he filled not one, but two gaps. What I was aware of was the cultural and intellectual void left by a totally bogus narrative of the causes of the crisis and the merits of the current system. But in filling this "rational" void, without wanting it or knowing it (?) I was also filling that "emotional" void left by the objective absence of places in which to engage in military, confrontation, ideologically and politically growth. In fact, I think I have written more than once, over the years, that this blog was the only place where politics was done in Italy, but probably not even I realized how much truth there was in my words. Here a story of the world was constructed, which is what every party should offer (of course, not mine and not the same for everyone), but which today parties neither know nor can afford to offer, just as they cannot afford. for various reasons, starting from the prosaically economic ones, to set up a (virtual) section like this one, in which for years you have come to discuss the issues of the present but above all those of the future.
Here, let's talk about the future, and about those "evolutions that seemed inevitable worse than death". Because of course, another responsibility that I have taken on towards you, in addition to that of giving you membership, of building a militant path, was that of giving you hope. On the construction of this "sense of imminence" they have even written an essay , a little dated, but no less interesting for this. Those who offer hope somehow take the responsibility not to disappoint it, just as those who gather a militia take the responsibility of not leaving it in disarray. Mauro's observation, however, makes me reflect on how my perception of political dynamics has evolved, and it could not have been otherwise. Macroeconomic fundamentals remain an irreplaceable key: if I had to choose just one, I would keep that. But there are also other analysis tools. After three years of frequenting the buildings I think I have acquired them ( and I have recommended them to you ) and to be able to observe reality from other angles. If I look at myself, at myself back then, with the eyes of myself today, of an insider, I appreciate Salvini's genius in pulling me on board. I would never join a club that accepted me as a member, I would be ashamed to have someone who follows Bagnai as a follower, and especially today, as a party manager, I would never pull in someone who behaved as I did! Because from that geometric vision, between the Cartesian and the Spinozian, objectively more elaborate and multifaceted than the one we see today caricatured (at least I hope!) By the sympathetic Musso , but still animated by a subtly hallucinated volition, a repulsive political posture in his intransigence and a naively simplistic reading of the motives of the various parties involved. It was by no means obvious that someone who reasoned as I reasoned would be able to preside over a Commission, to coordinate a team of parliamentarians, many of whom are more experienced than himself, to conduct negotiations with the "enemy", to earn the respect of the "palaces" . I, to say, the nice Musso would not even offer a candidacy in a town of 600 inhabitants (and instead, maybe, who knows: once faced with real life it would grow – I doubt it, but in short we understand each other)! And instead Matteo had the courage to pull into what could also legitimately seem, and, I am sure, still today he will seem to some of his fellow travelers, a madman.
This opens up at least a couple of further questions, which I only mention, because early tomorrow morning I am in the Budget Committee to negotiate on the maneuver for my party.
The first, in logical order, is: did the Debate really "get bogged down in the mud"? That is: have the tools of macroeconomics lost their ability to anticipate political and economic trends? Is the "stuff of 2011" still "really current" today or has it lost its edge? Given that no "traumatic change" has been prophesied here, precisely because it has been shown that the change, where it occurs, would not be a trauma (at least, not of the order of magnitude of the trauma we are still experiencing), I understand the perplexities, but it seems to me that I can reasonably say that in fact no, we are not bogged down. We continue to see first what happens next, and as an example I will take the take-off of inflation, which everyone is aware of today, and which we had seen arriving in March 2020 . This is for the economic part. On the political side, of course, Macron is still there despite France's twin deficits. But Macron, like Conte in his time (who was nevertheless about to crash in early 2020), was a great beneficiary of COVID. Calling a generalized "free lair", the pandemic has also allowed France to pursue expansive budget policies rather than "reforms" (ie cuts), and has plugged the yellow vests at home (another not insignificant detail). I don't know (no one can tell) whether in the absence of this precious opportunity Macron would have crashed. What I believe can be said (but we will go back together) is that the problems of France are still there, and the logic of the economy does not bend to the reasons of politics.
Then there is another question, more intimate and more decisive. There is to some extent a trade off between the conquest of power and the exercise of power. We saw it well in 2018. The "revolutionary" forces that came to govern did not arrive because they bowed to the strong powers or because they pursued the great center (that place frequented by the elected but not by the voters, as Capezzone recalls ): they got there because they offered a vision of the world and a hope for change (partly using our work, but that's another story). If they were then defeated, as Preterossi says , it is evidently because they did not know how to exercise the power that had been conferred on them by popular investiture . Exercising power is a different game: you don't have to offer a vision of the world, you have to understand how the world works, and to understand it you have to be able to dialogue with those who run it. Those who "I was you, at this hour I had already risen everything!", Besides avoiding asking the unpleasant question (why am I, and not you, dear Vernacular Rodomonte?), Also ignore that in order to exercise power, in addition to knowing where you want to go, it is also necessary to know how to accept compromises. Those many friends of ours who life has transformed, with my contained pain, into folkloric specks, when they make their shots that fascinate the most foolish of you so much, to the eye of the less foolish they show only one thing: that they would not come out alive from a normal condominium meeting! Imagine the MEF or Chigi … And so yes, against all my reasonable expectations, I learned the art of mediation and compromise, bringing home some results.
But the question I ask myself is: in exchange for those results, how much of my soul have I left on the table?
And nobody knows the answer: you don't know it, especially those who think they know it (you betrayed ooh! 11!), I don't know it, nobody knows it, and probably no one will ever know, because this answer will be possible. answer only later, with the tools of history. But first we should go through history, and this is not my ambition, as it was not, moreover, that of entering politics …
This is a machine translation of a post (in Italian) written by Alberto Bagnai and published on Goofynomics at the URL https://goofynomics.blogspot.com/2021/12/ci-stiamo-perdendo.html on Mon, 06 Dec 2021 23:01:00 +0000. Some rights reserved under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.