Asking “what can America learn from Italy,” Guardian reporter Stephanie Kirchgaessner has written about the resemblance between former rightwing Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, a billionaire media tycoon and walking political joke during the eight years of his tenure, and and our own media-generated bad political joke, billionaire President-elect Donald Trump. She outlines six points where there are politically significant parallels between the two. Her comments are instructive, although there are some significant differences in the political environments of the two countries that could lead to dissimilar consequences.
What opposition strategies work and which don’t. Based on the Italian experience, Kirchgaessner advises us to refrain from ridiculing Trump and his groupies; no matter how outlandish, she advises, take his voters seriously. She quotes Italian political writer Giovanni Orsina:
The most powerful way to oppose him [i.r., Berlusconi], but it was never really done seriously, was to try and understand what his voters want and try to address the need of his voters. No jokes, stop shouting, stop crying, stop saying: ‘It is a horror and disaster’; try and seriously understand what his voters want, and the left was never really successful in doing that, …
Progressives are making nods in that direction. In the wake of the election there’s been reams written about the economic displacement and resulting anomie of the white working class that we are told make up a large portion of Trump’s supporters, along with suggestions, some good, some not so good, about how to do better in this regard.
However well taken this admonition is, though, one aspect of the election it fails to acknowledge is that the Democratic agenda included good policy responses to the inequity that is the result of this displacement. Why didn’t it help? Who knows. Perhaps it was a failure to communicate effectively on the part of the Clinton campaign. Perhaps it was a flibbertigibbet media. The relative complexity of Clinton’s solutions as opposed to the cartoons offered by the Trump campaign also helped insure that they could be ignored or easily misrepresented.
Trump, on the other hand, in his starring role as Big Daddy, could essentially ignore policy; his promise was that he is so powerful that he can expel any bogey man by sheer force if we just give him the go ahead. He didn’t offer policy solutions, but danced around the ring in a colourful costume throwing metaphorical punches at policy scapegoats. Chief among the scapegoats were those suggested by the racial resentment of a demographically and culturally challenged older white population. Trump validated their cultural and racial biases and inflamed their anger.
This is the point at which the lesson derived from Italian example does not serve us. The fact is that Democrats do understand what Trump voters want. The problem is whether or not we can accept the total package. Economic security and reliable social institutions? Fine, these are actually progressive goals. Restoring white male hegemony while planting a foot on the necks of uppity women and minorities? No way. How can we bridge this divide between the understandable and the deplorable? Should we? Is it a matter of communication? Framing? Will Jesus come and take us all home someday?
The role of the press. Berlusconi had his own media empire that he used to promote his goals, but he didn’t hesitate to go after unfriendly media outlets and journalists. Kirchgaessner cites one particularly chilling example:
In what was later called “the Bulgarian edict”, Berlusconi in 2002 accused journalists at state-controlled RAI of using “television as a criminal means of communication”, in part because of reports that alleged Berlusconi had ties with organised crime. The journalists were subsequently fired and banned from working for RAI.
Try substituting NPR for RAI. Just as effective as direct intimidation, though, was the fact that Berlusconi was able to set pre-conditions for dealing with “compliant” journalists. Sounds familiar, yeah?
Even without overt media complicity, there are many traditional journalistic norms in the U.S. that are ill-fitted to covering Trump and his acolytes who are very clever about manipulating media, creating distractions, and using social media to bully and circumvent traditional media. To their credit, at this point, at a few outlets seem to be pushing back — witness Trump’s recent meeting with New York Times staff and journalists, where he was not only challenged to repudiate his white supremacist supporters, but asked to justify the presence of Steve Bannon in his administration if he truly disavowed racism.
Nevertheless, American journalists rarely confront politicians with the fervor of, say, British journalists — and while NY Times reporters may have asked some difficult questions, they seem to have tamely accepted slick, unconvincing answers without pressing further. They also went after the easy targets. I may be wrong, but I haven’t yet read any reports of questions relating to racism in a Trump administration to the appointment of civil rights opponent Jeff Sessions as Attorney General. It’s just so much easier to go after Steve Bannon who lacks the respectable veneer of a Senate seat.
How it all eventually rolls out remains to be seen.
Mysogyny. According to Kirchgaessner, Berlousconi’s “tenure became synonymous with the everyday demeaning of women – particularly on television – as sex objects, as the prime minister regularly insulted and mocked women in public, even making sex jokes at public events meant to honour women’s achievements.” Once again, does this ring a bell?
However, Kirchgaessner also points out that Berlusconi’s piggishness prompted a feminist backlash. She quotes the former foreign minister, Emma Bonino, who noted that “Berlusconi’s attitude prompted a sort of revolt from women, and women’s groups, who had been silent and absent for years, even on important women’s issues.”
I am not an expert on the Italian women’s movement, but I think that feminism has always been much stronger in the U.S. Even many of the women who eschew the feminist label, endorse feminist goals for themselves and their daughters. And already, at this early date we are beginning to see a strong feminist pushback.
Women are rapidly organizing to physically protest the inauguration of a sexual predator and to defend women’s rights during his presidency. Vox tells us that the Women’s March on Washington (and sister marches in other cities) may well be“the biggest mobilization yet in response to a presidential inauguration.” To which I say “right on, sisters.”
The role of conservative religion. Kirchgaessner asserts that Berlusconi enjoyed an “unspoken agreement with the Roman Catholic church that helped him hold on to power,” and that “Italian bishops looked the other way and did not criticise what might otherwise have been deemed less-than-Christian behaviour, as long as Berlusconi helped them on their legislative agenda, including blocking same-sex unions, limiting fertility treatments opposed by the church [...].” Sounds like the score to Trump’s own opera.
What to do? It looks bleak. Unless progressive legislators and fair-minded judges can provide a counterweight — which is unlikely — it looks like fundamentalists will get to reinstitute back-alley abortions and we’ll have the fundie version of Christian-privileged “religious freedom” imposed on all of the rest of us regardless of our religious beliefs. And bear in mind, when you hear folks telling you that we have to make common cause with Trump’s white working class, lots of them will be cheering the religiously motivated effort to lock gays in the closet and pregnant women in the kitchen.
Personal legal complications. We all know about Trump University and other instances of potentially illegal activity on the part of Donald Trump, both before and during his campaign. His presidency threatens to be what I have heard called “a swamp of corruption.” And, of course, there’s always the potentially treasonous collusion with a foreign power to influence an American election and maybe even foreign policy.
Here, the Italian experience suggests the possibility of a more positive outcome. Kirchgaessner notes that Berlusconi, “faced similar entanglements with the judicial system and the issues ultimately pressured him and constrained his ability to pass legislation.” He was, she observes, unsuccessful in his attempts to intimidate and pressure the legal system.
The question for us, though, is if our public institutions are adequate to hold Trump accountable or to use his malfeasance as a mechanism to check the policy aspirations of the teams of rightwingers that promise to make up his inner circle. Part of the answer, of course, depends on the media and its willingness to focus and maintain attention on Trump’s ethical lapses. Expressions of public outrage, if forthcoming, might encourage a traditionally timid Democratic opposition to pursue or at least make a mighty noise about what could amount to impeachable offences. Progressives cannot let Trump’s ethical and legal lapses be swept under the rug just because the story begins to get a little frayed with constant repetition.
Minority rights. Kirchgaessner writes:
Like Trump, Berlusconi’s rise was fuelled by his anti-immigrant views, particularly against the Roma and, later, migrants. In his final years in office, defections from Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party forced him to look to Italy’s far right – even more than he had before – to keep his coalition, essentially forcing him to lock arms with the xenophobic Northern League, which has called for the expulsion of migrants. A similar dynamic may soon be at work in the US.
And she hits the nail on the head — except for one point. The same dynamic is not “soon to be at work in the U.S.” because it is already part of the air we breathe; it is one more upsurge of the nativism that has bedevilled our history. It’s why Trump’s most fervent working class voters have ratcheted themselves up into a roiling rage of Trump love. They think that expelling the foreigners and beating down the brown people will make their lives as good as they imagine it used to be. Pause here to remember the commentators who tell us we need to focus on the white working class and its discontents, and then tell me how to incorporate white nationalism into a message that will bring them into the progressive fold.
Lasting damage. Kirchgaessner asserts that while Berlusconi “did not ultimately vanquish Italy’s democratic institutions” he did lasting damage. She quotes an Italian journalist who observed that:
… the lasting impact of Berlusconi was “the cultural idea that you could do anything in your own interests.”
“He legitimised every kind of infraction of rules, going back to his television career in the 1980s. It was as if to say: ‘You Italians like to be gross with women? Well, I say to you, you can do this.’ I think this [idea you can do anything to further your own interests] is much worse than even the legal accusations.”
While we are already seeing that rightwing bullies have been similarly energized by Trump’s election, and feel encouraged to publicly indulge their interior ugliness, there is, I am afraid, potential for far more lasting damage here than in Italy where established social welfare systems are not only different to begin with but have had a different genesis.
In spite of Trump’s faux-populist rhetoric, indications are that the naive and seemingly dim-witted President-elect will be led by rightwing Republicans whose long-term goal has aways been to roll back progressive change starting with FDR’s New Deal reforms. This expectation is enhanced by the fact that GOP political Daddy Warbucks types like the Koch brothers will very likely have a big role in determining the make-up of the Trump administration. Theda Skocpol and her associates have researched the conservative ties that bind in some detail and find that:
During the election campaign, Trump relied upon well-established conservative organizational networks that could reach into many states and communities. He made overt deals with the National Rifle Association and the Christian right, and he benefitted indirectly from Koch network operations centered in a nation-spanning, political party-like federation called Americans for Prosperity. Even more important, after his campaign squeaked through on November 8, an unprepared President-Elect Trump started to fall back on people and plans offered by the Koch network, which aims to dismantle not only Barack Obama’s accomplishments but much of what the federal government has done for 75 years to promote security and opportunity for ordinary Americans.
And just in case you think I exaggerate, note that last night Kellyanne Conway was on the PBS Newshour signalling that Trump, in spite of his promises to preserve Medicare and Social Security, was getting ready to endorse House Speaker Paul Ryan’s Medicare privatization plan to phase it out. Just today he appointed Betsy DeVos, a long-time champion of privatizing education to be Education Secretary.
And, of course, apart from the destruction of the social contract between the government and the American people, there is the issue of over-turning Roe v. Wade and undoing decades of progress towards building a tolerant and inclusive country. Nor can we dismiss all the people who will suffer in the short term and whose suffering will surely have long-term consequences. And these considerations of course, assume that Trump’s authoritarian appeal does not manifest itself in ways that we currently hope are no more than paranoid bad dreams.
It doesn’t look like the U.S. is going to get off lightly. The best that we can do is to try to contain the damage where we can and work to make sure that the Trump era is as short as we can make it — preferably, ending in 2018 with the election of a majority Democratic Congress who can be counted on to defend progressive values. Not probable, perhaps, but possible if we get right to work.