Secularization and populism – working world

The crisis of parties, from secularization to populism: the horizon has disappeared.
It is now a fact that the national social and political-institutional horizon is darkening. The pressure from the parties on the Budget Law, the trade union threats of a general strike in defense of the insiders against the younger generation outsiders, the recurring Saturday street demonstrations against the Green-Pass, the predictable and strongly desired parliamentary bankruptcy by the PD of the operation DDL Zan, the imminent date of the election of the new President of the Republic are producing an explosive mixture.
The formation of the Draghi-government had been the effect of an unexpected, surprise calculation proposed by Matteo Renzi and personally imposed by Sergio Mattarella, in a surge of virtuous Italian presidentialism. The direction of march, the objectives, the timetable were dictated with a clear blitz to the system of dazed and confused parties and to the yellow-red majority sailing in a windless swamp.
The paradoxical effect of Draghi’s recovery in Italy is that, now, even the parties have slowly recovered from the shock and are besieging Draghi. A schizophrenic division of labor has taken place: the parties have almost unanimously delegated the defense of the country-system, i.e. of the common good, to Draghi and his “technical” staff of ministers; but in the meantime they have risen from the Curva Nord and the Curva Sud to clamor for submission to the particular and corporate interests of their real or presumed electorates, competing to see who “protects” them the most. Landini’s CGIL, having severed the roots of the old “national” union, attentive to general interests, entered into a populist alliance with Salvini to defend the interests of the present generations at the expense of those who are arriving or, worse, are no longer able to get on the job market. Draghi must devote himself to creating the conditions for the accumulation of public money, while the parties have assigned themselves the task of distributing it through the various channels. Hence drives of welfare and public debt, aimed at transforming the “good” into the “bad”, in any case leaning on future generations, less and less numerous.
From this point of view there is a profound continuity between the First Republic and the imaginary “Republics” that followed, invented by the mass media: it is that of public debt policy, with the exception of the transient exceptions of Amato, Ciampi, Dini, Prodi between 1992 and 1998.
Hence an easy suspicion: that there is a direct causal relationship between the party-institutional system of parliamentary representation defined by the electoral system, in whole or in part proportional, and the socio-corporate configuration of the “noble mass society”.
The party-institutional system has generated, while reproducing itself, a corporate swamp, of which we are now prisoners and in which we debate like the Baron of Münchhausen. Starting from the “Glorious Thirty”, it seemed to the parties that the development of the productive forces proceeded automatically, to such an extent that the Trontis of the time denounced the risk of an incorporation of the political and trade union system into the capitalist economic system. Since the institutional structure of politics is configured only on representation and not on the government of society, it dedicated itself, after the crisis of the centre-left, to distributing money and setting up corporations, privileges and annuities. The reforms slipped hastily behind them. This modus operandi has increasingly lowered and deformed the horizon of politics on immediate interests. Presentism, i.e. keeping one’s eyes cast down on the present, which is often denounced, most recently by De Rita, arises from the transformation of parties into pure blotters of particular interests. Only the Republicans of La Malfa, heirs of the Action Party, and the Communists of Amendola attempted resistance. The moral crisis of politics, denounced by E. Berlinguer in July 1981 in moralistic tones, was yes! real, but it arose from the inability of the parties, including him, to position themselves from the point of view of statehood, from the point of view of the destiny of the nation-state, from the point of view of the history of the country. With the disappearance of the constituent and reconstructive spirit of the post-war period, politics has progressively become a corporation among corporations. And with this it has ceased to produce that ruling class, whose lack we lament every day. To which many factors have contributed, first of all the incapacity of secular political philosophy to fill the voids of the secularization of Christianity and Marxism. Norberto Bobbio and, in his wake, Salvatore Veca, who recently passed away, and other socialist, meliverist and reformist intellectuals waged a meritorious battle, which, however, lacked the political-party side. Thus the intellectual and educational crisis of the parties has opened the cataracts, which have led from secularization to populism. Thus the theory and political philosophy have been replaced by the aggressive and obtuse faith in identity, which revels in anti-fascism and flags in the wind.
The enormous expansion of the Infosphere, which would have bypassed the cultural mediation of the parties, is very often cited as an explanation for the ideological crisis of politics. Today, it is true, everyone can draw on the well-stocked ideological shelves of the media for themselves. But on these shelves the parties stopped offering their products some time ago. They have long ceased to wage battle, to go against the tide, to form intelligences and consciences. And this depends on the institutional and material position they have given themselves with respect to civil society and the nation-state: at the service of partisan interests and stop.
It is certainly difficult to balance on a tightrope between factional interests and the state of all, between the spirit of division and the spirit of the nation, between the reasons of the bourgeois and those of the citoyen, between the parts and the whole. And yet, at the bottom of politics there is and must be a universalist tension, all the more necessary the more powerful the particularist impulses are. What is at stake is the stability of civil society and of the entire country.