We need more coolness

As was inevitable, in these hours the knots are coming to the comb, to an extent honestly unexpected even for the writer. That there was something substantially fallacious in the argument according to which Trump or Elon were "one of us" here, since nobody reads us, we have always allowed ourselves to say. It is a general methodological problem. The world is too complicated to give us the guarantee that the enemy of our enemy (in which battle?) is mathematically our friend, or a friend of our friends (that is, of other enemies of our enemies). As a corollary, therefore, there is nothing so strange in the fact that two enemies of our enemies discover that they are not friends!

We must always keep this in mind. The cries of victory for battles won by others, in other countries, on other grounds, in other contexts, can have the tactical meaning of reinforcing the morale of the troops, of consolidating consensus. It happened to me too, I too gave in to this temptation. I remember my speech, which perhaps few of you will remember, at the Palazzo delle Stelline in Milan in 2016 when I ironically began with: “God is with us, and now Trump is with us too!” I am obviously speaking of the same Trump who then, in a difficult moment for this country, made the famous endorsement of Giuseppi. Things that at the time were practically impossible to imagine, even for those who had recently written the post in which they predicted that the Democratic Party and the 5 Star Movement would merge (but honestly I had not imagined the blessing of the United States to this unlikely marriage, since it was not clear to me then, as it is not now, the attitude of the United States towards the Problem, which is and remains the euro, which suggested to me not to delve into predictions for which I was missing an essential element).

Of course, this does not mean that the emergence of disruptive facts or people should not be welcomed as a positive element. It certainly is! It does not even mean that what terrorizes, destabilizes, or even simply annoys the Holy Sanhedrin of the Democratic Party is not in itself a positive tactical fact. Since we do not like where we are, anything that shakes things up is obviously welcome, because in some way it helps us move. But this is tactics, that is, the answer to the question: how do I move, or how do I create the conditions to move? Strategy is a different thing, it answers another question: where do I want to go? Trying to briefly define this objective, we could say that we want to move towards a world in which market distortion and foreign interference (both to our detriment) are not the very essence of the institutions that govern us, contributing to increasing inequality and social tension. A world, that is, in which the middle class and the productive classes can regain a minimum of voice and improve their income position after years of relative backwardness.

We'd also like to get there alive.

The question that arises is on which banks we must play to send the ball into that hole there. This does not necessarily presuppose that our fellow travelers think like us or have our goals. It does presuppose something else, however: that we never forget that our interest concerns us, not others, that we cannot ask others to fight our battle, that if we are not on our side, no one else will be, and that any “victory” that is not achieved by us does not give us any guarantee of getting significantly closer to our goals. In other words, it presupposes a minimum of coolness, that which consists in being aware that there will be no palingenetic event, a “resolving victory”, that nothing will relieve us from the hard task of militancy and conflict (which is the reason why I continue to keep this blog alive).

For this reason, I would advise against siding with one or the other of the contenders. Yes, it is quite evident that Musk has a somewhat rudimentary vision of public debt. However, I do not believe that the main problem is exactly there, and even if it were, I do not believe that it can be solved with a didactic moment (in this sense, what happened with Salvini is probably an exception in world history), I do not believe that his former friend with whom he is now arguing is a refined analyst of the post-Keynesian theory of debt sustainability, and, to move to another level, I am a little skeptical about the fact that one can ignore the technology that Musk has at his disposal (and I am not talking about cars). As for the other contender, there is no doubt that he has chosen as his deputy an eloquent singer of the epic of the middle class, it is (or seems) evident that in the conflict between Wall Street and Main Street he has chosen to side with the latter, however, if I had a euro to bet, I would prefer to bet it on the Pizzoferrato Wolves in the Champions League final, rather than on the idea that an American billionaire spends his nights reading the analyses of productivist capitalism by Froud et al. (the last time we talked about it here , and in the meantime it seems that the ECB has also noticed the problem ), reasoning on how to break away from coupon pool capitalism perhaps by re-establishing a minimum of financial repression . I don't think so, and I don't wish it on him, considering that they shot him for much less!

As I was saying a few nights ago at a table of managers, the fact that the left no longer defends workers is a disaster for us, because it forces us to do so, doubling our work! It was obviously a joke and that's how it was meant (to be serious, we should instead have a discussion about why the left has given up, branding it as interclassism, the attempt to draw a demarcation between class interests that responds to today's reality, not that of two centuries ago), but it brings us closer to a point with which I would like to conclude my sermon.

The problem with expecting others to fight our battles is not only in inducing us to adopt a passive posture, in suggesting that we lie under the palm tree of history waiting for the banana (or coconut?) of the result we hope for to fall. The problem is more subtle, and consists in the risk of deluding ourselves, in a general ideological vacuum, that the objectives of our pro tempore ally, his ideology, must necessarily be ours. This is not the case and the risk of being mistaken is present and concrete. Just to give an example, the thing that worries me most about the whole issue of tariffs is the counter-proposal of "zero tariffs", which in addition to being quite senseless in itself, contradicts everything we have always said here (mainly from the left) and the League has always said (likely from the right) about the limits of free trade (think of the battle against TTIP and CETA, for example).

It seems to me to be a slightly more serious problem for us, if only because it concerns us directly, than the fact that the well-known billionaire has overly conventional ideas on public debt.

But I'm writing this here, where no one will read it, with the usual caveat: let's hope we're wrong!

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/2025/06/ci-vuole-piu-freddezza.html on Fri, 06 Jun 2025 06:28:00 +0000. Some rights reserved under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.