I have few principles that, as Prezzolini said, I consider irrefutable; For everything else, I rely on political realism. There are three or four at most, the same ones I had as a boy and who probably will accompany me until the end. I believe in the sacred, in community identity, in family and traditional ties, but I avoid fanaticism and ideological illusions. I observe reality for what it is, without deforming it with artificial constructions or ideologies, be they nationalist, Europeanist or world. For this, I do not make my principles the foundation of an ideology and I would now find it difficult to marry me under some flag.
On stage, yesterday, there was only ideology and livery: they did not defend principles, but a rigid and monolithic system from which responses depending on the convenience. They are sleeves, and they always repeat the usual solfa: on the one hand the good, they; on the other the bad guys. Reality can change, the eras change, but the world must always bend to their narrative, made of pompous words – peace, freedom, democracy, equality – which, in practice, struggle to translate into concrete actions.
It is easier to bull up Musk and Trump as unbalanced (and, to tell the truth, not even “nice” to me) rather than recognizing that the problem of the insidious relationship between multinationals, capitalism and democracy has existed for at least three decades and that all this is necessarily affected in the events of geopolitics. They only notice it now because, in their vision of Pusillanime and Manichea, Sauron is located in Washington, and has a cotton tuft. If he had won Kamala Harris, suddenly the problem would have disappeared: Vecchioni would not have kept yet another lesson on the value of cultural melting pot, dark would have silenced the American fascism and the rest of the troop would have recited, without variations, the usual script.
They have reduced to this: each question, large or small, is traced exclusively back to the dichotomy between the right and left.
A vice that obscures the mind and precludes any possibility of lucid and free judgment, because, in this Manicheism of Accattto, anyone who dares to deviate from their ideas is automatically labeled as Trumpian, Melonian, Orbán, supporter of Putin or even sympathizing of the Naziskin. With extraordinary ease, they manage to place Descartes, Marx and Leibniz on the one hand and the attackers of Capitol Hill on the other. So, if you dare to criticize their ideological dogmas, you are assimilated to that with the horns that breakdled the windows of the White House. And if you try to develop autonomous thought, end up pigeonholed in the obsolete center -right or center -left categories.
But, beyond the rhetorical pompity of evoked quotes and philosophers, the scheme is actually disarming simplicity. Everything that does not belong to that world and that square is automatically branded as a threat to democracy, assimilated to the government parties, to the autocracies, the nationalist rights, to the extremist beat that breaks through the skull at the Tunisian on the street, and so on. Yet, there is a whole world out there, a world that was not in the square yesterday, who perhaps does not vote, does not bite to the demagogies of one and of the other, or that perhaps votes but tries – as it was once said – to rightly separate the grain from the pulle and therefore, immediately recognizes a wing shooter (there are a myriad), despite voting it.
And instead, they are trapped in an intellectual bubble from which they cannot go out. They delude themselves to raise the cultural debate (perhaps they really believe it), with their prizes, their television lounges, their packed pump for decades, but in reality they are stopped at a football cheering level, where a curve shouts against the other, however forget to be in the same stadium.