The right, the left and stereotypes

Dear Director Feltri,I saw a clip on Blob in which you, a guest on Piero Chiambretti’s show, when asked by the joking host “Are you a man of the left or the right?”, …

The right, the left and stereotypes


Dear Director Feltri,
I saw a clip on Blob in which you, a guest on Piero Chiambretti’s show, when asked by the joking host “Are you a man of the left or the right?”, replied self-deprecatingly “I’m a…..”. And I don’t dare repeat it, but let’s say a vulgar way of saying “bauscia”.
Well, in my opinion this epithet does not suit her, being a man of culture, intelligence and sense of humour, demonstrating this to us daily in this editorial of the newspaper.
On the contrary, there are people who use that term above, they are, but they don’t admit it, not even as self-deprecatingly as you.
Pablo Malvasio
Milan

Dear Pablo,
I thank you for your expressions of esteem. Thank you also for reading me every day. My answer was ironic because the question itself, in my opinion, is meaningless, as it requires us to classify ourselves hastily and this leads to some misunderstandings. Before being able to say whether I am right-wing or left-wing, it would be necessary to specify what it means to be right-wing and what it means to be left-wing. Nowadays I believe that the values, objectives and references that we historically attribute to both currents have changed profoundly. Once upon a time the left was concerned with the working class, the workers, their rights, the humblest classes of society. Now it has become snobbish, detaching itself from the ordinary citizens, it has distanced itself from the suburbs, from the real problems of ordinary people and families. Maybe I’m from the left, but from the left that has been dead for a while. I certainly don’t recognize myself in the battles of the Democratic Party, such as feminism reduced to war for its declinations, such as the demand for a rented womb, the possibility of making children by renting a woman’s womb. I don’t share the ecologist delirium that has turned into a fight against progress, against wealth, against cars. I don’t even share the idea that occupying someone else’s house can be a right or in any case a non-punishable conduct. The right to a home must be protected, but anyone from whom it is taken away by the illegitimate occupant also has a right to a home. Why do we forget this? I reject political correctness which leads one to weigh every syllable and to be scandalized by what should not arouse indignation but at most a healthy laugh. The left has embraced the causes of gays and immigrants, that’s fine, but as long as we don’t forget the vast majority of citizens, who demand a role and also attention, consideration and listening. Here, this is precisely the point: the left has become insensitive and deaf, concentrated on marginal issues elevated to questions of life or death, excessively polemical, hypocritical, when it claims, for example, that it wants to fight hatred but then foments it towards political and intellectual opponents and, as if that were not enough, tolerates and justifies violence when it targets antagonists. Today the right has become left. It is the right, which is also unjustly defined as “fascist”, which is present in the suburbs, defending the rights of the last, supporting work, responding to the needs of the people, which do not consist in opening the borders to illegal immigrants, in ‘to purge the language of words deemed “sexist”, in clearing gay adoptions, but – I will summarize one – in the need to make a living in decent and safe cities, where there is no risk of being robbed in the street, attacked, killed at random by the vagrant on duty, in the need to live in a State that protects the rights of citizens and not the non-existent right to enter Italy illegally and settle there in total contempt of the rules of our system.

The dominant prejudice is that anyone who calls themselves left-wing is

virtuous and supportive, while those who call themselves right-wing are fascist and ignorant. This is why I prefer to jokingly proclaim that I’m an idiot rather than pigeonhole myself into one or another false stereotype.