The rebound
There is a lot of work to do and it deprives me of the pleasure of confronting you here. I must also say that from what I see the infection of grillism has now spread. It happened to me not only on Twitter (there is!), But also in the territories, to meet our voters sensitive to the siren of the castacriccacoruzzzzione, against which, with a foresight as praiseworthy as useless, I tried at the time to warn you. It shouldn't take long to understand that your enemy is the one who points you to #aaaaaabolidiga, that is "politics" understood as an indistinct blob, where all roles and responsibilities are confused. This communication strategy is complementary to the attack on representative democracy in the name of direct democracy: to ensure that you do not feel represented, on the one hand giving you the illusion that you can do it yourself (with a click on a direct platform, or with a referendum a day, which keeps the politician away), and on the other aizzandovi with the idea that both "I politicize them all the same", so that, since one is as good as the other, no one can represent you. To my little surprise, I see that almost everyone falls into this trap. Yet it would not take long to understand that those who want to deprive you of representation are not helping you to count more, but less. Surprisingly, some of you are fine with that, and others apparently have more serious things to do than worry about this assault on democracy.
The (achieved) result of this aggression against democracy is that we live in a system in which the media are whatchdogs of the opposition, rather than the government, in which the masses take to the streets against the opposition, rather than against the government, and in which many voters apparently do not understand that in a system where decisions are taken by majority, the government, not the opposition, is responsible for the choices that are made. But to many voters (or, more often, self-styled voters) of the opposition it seems natural to take it out on the opposition, rather than the Government, and waste time by bothering those who have brought certain issues into the debate and have so far managed to avoid catastrophic outcomes for the country (from the use of the MES, to the sending of millions of files, to the IMU on the first home …). In a democracy it would be normal to attack, always in civil terms, those who govern and are therefore directly responsible for what is happening (and first of all for a double underestimation of the situation, both in economic and health terms). But the Grillina infection managed to make you forget the grammar of democracy.
I observe this triumph of grillism with disenchantment.
On the one hand, I derive the intellectual satisfaction of having, in any case, accurately guessed years ago how much it was a force of conservation and not of change. The message is clear: since "I know them all the same politicians", since "it's all a magna magna", if you are unhappy you have to attack the opposition as much as the government, or, better still, instead of the government. So the government will never be confronted with its responsibilities, precisely because in the brain of the median voter infected with grillism, the person responsible is #aaaaabolidiga, not the government.
On the other hand, I despair, as I have always despaired, of being able to witness a democratic outcome of this crisis. The words I said at the group leaders' conference in February (let's not transform a health emergency into an authoritarian emergency) I would have done better not to say them, because like so many others written on this blog they have come true. To the religious dimension conferred on the debate by Europeanism, with all its set of totems and taboos, is now added the grillina infection: not only can certain issues not be addressed in a rational way, but the very essence of political dialogue is subverted from the fact that for the voters the roles are indistinct, to the point that it is impossible, for example, to face up to their responsibilities those who, after presenting themselves as an anti-system force, have decided to perpetuate themselves to accompany the political force that has implemented this program !
I see recurring, on a larger scale (now that many who slept have woken up), the dynamics that characterized the Debate (ie this blog) in its beginnings. I see many willing people who, in good or bad faith, pollute the confrontation by biting with adorable naivety to any diversion, taking exhilarated tones that discredit arguments that are also correct in themselves, but which in such a radicalized context it would be necessary to make intelligent use (which, as by now we understand, it is not an intelligent use (TM)). My repeated appeals to caution on social media were completely useless. I see many people who follow me, and I don't understand why, since it seems to me that I haven't been able to teach them much. Even the most fundamental of my teachings, which is, moreover, the most obvious, are regularly put aside: your world is a representation of them, where "they" are the media of which here, over the course of a decade, you I documented the manipulative techniques and the objective distortions of reality.
But even this was not understood.
This does not bother me too much, partly because the predicted lightning bolt comes slower (although, I do not hide it, some members of this community, some people I knew, disappointed me, or maybe what disappointed me was my inability to guess its actual consistency, or, to put it another way, the naivety with which I continue to give credit to the human being), and partly because despite continuing to believe in the value of the individual, and in the fact that in certain circumstances man (if he is such) can make a difference, I have never deluded myself that I can subvert certain trends in history either alone or in good company, precisely because, as you know and as documented in this blog and in At the end of the euro , I knew I was immersed, with all of you, in a story of the crisis built to deprive the victims of the ability to react.
So what?
And so I continue to do my job , which is to fight.
And you, please, try to reason, and in any case be careful.
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/2020/11/il-rimbalzo.html on Sun, 01 Nov 2020 11:24:00 +0000. Some rights reserved under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.