Barrel effect
(… breaking one of the rules of this blog, for once I will deal with current events, but not only …)
In archive footage, the meeting between the new PD secretary and her natural electorate:
Exhausted with this cultured reference to auteur cinema, moved and heartfelt homage to my leftist roots, the comment on the event of the day, allow me to draw from this event a couple of useful lessons for others, but also and above all for us.
Last February, my work as a pastor of souls took me to Milan. In the Frecciarossa I meet a * colleague * from the PD and the speech naturally leads us to comment on the next congress, the one that would later elect Schlein. With a certain astonishment, I learned from my colleague that according to her Schlein, who was the worst of the possible secretaries, actually had an excellent chance of making it. I manifested astonishment: but how!? And Bonaccini, all RayBan and sleeves rolled up, Bonaccini, the allegory of doing and good governance (as the results show)? Wasn't he the natural candidate?
The answer stunned me: "Yes, but Schlein is new, and people like new faces! But it will be a disaster…".
The anecdote demonstrates that there are intelligent life forms even in the Democratic Party (despite the atmosphere there being saturated with that powerful corrosive of logic which is heurism ): but there are particularly "resilient" intelligences, especially when their career is at stake. ..).
However, this is not the only lesson that the anecdote provides.
I'll highlight others.
Meanwhile, one of the consequences of the debasement of politics is that since "I know politicians are all the same, it's all a magna magna, if I know everything magnates", the choices not only of the voters, but also of the ruling classes, are increasingly guided by characters exterior (the novelty!), rather than from a strategic plan that no one has the time or the desire to compose, for the trivial but crucial reason that they are not sure it will be worth it. As in the classic Keynesian beauty contest , each competitor has to pick, not those faces which he finds himself prettiest, but those which he thinks likeliest to catch the fancy of the other competitors . With a slight adaptation: each party does not choose the candidate (secretary, mayor, etc.) it finds best, but the one it thinks is best suited to arouse the voter's imagination. So if you think that voters want "the new" (advancing), you will undertake to give it to them, even when you are aware that the new will retreat.
It is the total, irrevocable abdication of the role of guide, of cultural mediation, of proposal, of some parties, which operate circumscribed within the ambit of a purely passive logic, a logic of somewhat groping interception of an unformed consensus ( shaped ) from them with their vision, but by others (in a nutshell: the media) with their marketing.
Upstream of this (Keynesian!) multiplier of degradation, of course, there is the dismantling of parties, the demonization of ideologies, the flattening of ideas under an increasingly overwhelming conformism, assisted by the death of pluralism (on which we will have to say), which leads to the total inability to give an organic alternative vision, not trivially flattened on the easy rhetoric of the "new". In short, there are all those cultural currents that have led you to the idea that you would have been stronger if you had weakened your representatives. God willing, the first victims of this fascist ideology (because it is anti-parliamentary) in this phase seem to be those who advocated it. But it's not a danger that only others run, of course, otherwise I wouldn't point it out to you. Grillismo runs strong among us too and I think it's better to be aware of it.
Then there is another, more delicate aspect that the beating effect (taken by Schlein, metaphorically) highlights, and it is the failure of the idea that mobilizing vocal minorities is the best way to obtain mass consensus. I'll be brutal (with you, because the voters were brutal with her): do you understand, yes, or don't, that #semomijoni doesn't work? Even the Young people are mijoni (despite the inversion of the demographic pyramid), even the LGBTQI+ are mijoni, maybe the landlords and conductors of wombs aren't mijoni, but they are very vocal , but in short we understand each other: create in specific groups, which no one wants attack, a sense of urgency and threat shouting homophobia (which does not exist) or the pension of fathers that destroys the future of children (while in reality it maintains their present) is a strategy that in social networks, in television parterres , in some polls, may seem successful. Then there is reality, which is something else.
What is true for the "left" #semomijoni also applies to the "right" #semomijoni. I give up listing them: we talked about them a lot, their only visible commitment was to shovel shit at us for years, their only result was not obtaining any electoral support. There are phases in which the "strong" message obviously doesn't help, either on one side or on the other. Of course, this does not mean that one should give up one's ideas. It means that consensus around them must be created by other means and along other paths, less satisfying in terms of "likes", but more decisive in terms of the conquest of power.
I know many of you are sorry. All the blather about "la strateggiah" crumbles in front of the numbers. Even those who, conceptually, ruled that "between the original and the copy the voter will choose the original" today must beat a retreat. It may be true (?) that a certain tactical prudence on certain issues brings the discourse of the right closer to that of the left, but it doesn't seem to me that this leads the voters to prefer the left! Conversely, the 500 spread and the big headlines of the newspapers (national and 'ndernescional ) would serve one and only one thing: to prevent us from continuing our work of contending for power over 80 years of catho-communism. I know all the enemies and many friends would like this, because it would preserve their market share. But unfortunately we learn from mistakes: from those of others, as we are trying to do today, and from our own.
See you soon!
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/2023/05/effetto-botte.html on Tue, 30 May 2023 09:12:00 +0000. Some rights reserved under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.