The brigade of left-wing know-it-alls

Among right-wing voters, ‘there are people who haven’t even finished secondary school’. No, these are not the words of Stefano Bonaccini, in the year 2026. They are those of Diego Novelli, former Communist mayor of Turin, in the year 1994. Thirty-two years on, exactly the same, word for word. It is an endless obsession. Because 1994 was the year of trauma, of the left in shock, feeling betrayed by the people. When the educated class – those with a touch of intellectual nobility – plunged into apocalyptic resentment, lost, stunned, breathless. It wasn’t even the usual Christian Democrats, however reviled they might be. Worse, catastrophic: it was the people who had chosen the anthropological antithesis embodied by Berlusconi, the Black Knight with his entourage of neo-fascists and Northern League supporters. Workers with CGIL membership cards voting for the Northern League, the once-red suburbs choosing the tycoon of telecracy. A nightmare. A cataclysm. It is said that a well-known left-wing intellectual fainted at Laura Betti’s house upon hearing the results of 27 March 1994. And for thirty-two years, the trauma has continued to spread its painful poison.

With a few differences, it is well known that the world has moved on in the last thirty-two years: now social media is to blame rather than television, and Giorgia Meloni has taken Berlusconi’s place. For the past thirty-two years, however, the left—trapped in a cycle of depression and recrimination that has cast a shadow over the spirits of so many Bonaccinis, the left that was moved to tears at the sight of Pellizza da Volpedo’s "Il Quarto Stato"—has been gripped by an ‘elitist cramp’. It began, as if by spontaneous combustion, to console itself with the myth of its own ‘moral superiority’. Once, when it was Marxist, it saw itself as the custodian and guardian of the laws of history. Now, after history had taken the opposite course, it began to see itself as the custodian and guardian of ethics and even aesthetics. No more ‘forward, or the people to the rescue’. Now the people – uneducated, vulgar, consumerist and snarling – had to be treated with pedagogical condescension. The Left became pedantic and elitist for the next thirty-two years, right up to the blameless Bonaccini. ‘Why has the Left become so unpopular?’, asked Luca Ricolfi. This anthology seeks to provide an answer.

“The rabble”. Yes, Luigi Pintor railed against the rabble – not the one “always bent over their work”, but now, rebelling against the left, the “bourgeois rabble”. Pintor, who, as well as being a political leader, was a writer of the finest sensibility, also coined what would, over the decades, become the second part of the painful lament over the betrayal of the people. A self-critical lament: “the Left’s proposals, the language and the self-image it presents, speak to a minority within this vast social body”. Yet this lament has had little effect if, thirty-two years on, we still find ourselves – once again with identical words – facing a ‘left that fails to make itself understood’. The plebs then descended into the nightmare of the ‘plebiscitary drift’ (or, depending on the variant, ‘Peronist’ or ‘populist’ – terms more in vogue today than they were then), fuelled by a people left to their own devices, an unruly multitude without the support (and control) of a reference community (the party, the trade union, the people’s house), the solitary crowd of poorly educated, lonely, weak individuals, unreachable save by that all-powerful ‘electrical appliance’ which had taken centre stage in the nightmares of those who felt, then as now, ousted and betrayed. The Left, which had once chanted ‘el pueblo unido jamás será vencido’, underwent a sort of genetic mutation in its vocabulary, behaviour and mannerisms. It began to speak like the conservative, old-fashioned right of yesteryear – the right of a century earlier, terrified by the ‘grey democratic deluge’ and the ‘advent of the masses’; the right of Ortega y Gasset who, despondent yet lucid, deplored this new modern phenomenon well before the advent of television (and social media): ‘the everyman, long the one who was led, has decided to rule the world’. In that year, the TV-addicted voter became, for Dario Fo, pure ‘imbecile-people’, an exemplar of a populace now on the path to the most total and irredeemable ‘imbecility’ (verbatim). Giorgio Bocca railed against “the housewife who watches soap operas”. Mario Pirani proclaimed that “freedom does not always win at the ballot box”. Giovanna Zincone, writing in the magazine Reset, stated “that only an individual with a modicum of culture has the tools to understand”. The discussion appeared to be edging toward a rejection of universal suffrage, and some commentators, rubbing salt into the wound, were already sardonically reminding their readers that, according to Lenin, in the glorious future of the working class any cook would be capable of steering the course of public affairs. But what about now?

Giovanni Sartori, a die-hard conservative who had even moved to the United States in the mid-1970s for fear of the advance of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), began a new life as a leading intellectual of the left with the discovery of ‘video-power’, the creation of a ‘new man, the homo videns, destined to supplant the homo sapiens’: a monster that “stunts our ability to understand”, prey to manipulators. Nothing new; a few years earlier, another independent thinker, Ernesto Rossi, had lamented: “Whilst reading stimulates reflection and develops critical thinking, the radio generally tends to appeal to the most basic emotions”. A new phrase burst onto the left’s lexicon: ‘the gut of the nation’ (later ridiculed by Checco Zalone) – the ignorant right, which votes with its gut; the educated left, with its head and reason.

Bonaccini can boast of noble cultural origins in 1994. “It can generally be said that all those who sanctify the people do so in order to use them; that whenever one says ‘the people have spoken’, one is faced with an instrumental conception of democracy,” wrote Gustavo Zagrebelsky in his Il crucifige e la democrazia, where the condemnation of Jesus (and the two thieves who got off scot-free – a detail which, in a context of punitive justice, is by no means marginal) was taken as a ‘paradigm of the manipulable masses’ with ‘the incited people’ – two thousand years ago as in 1994 – ‘shouting themselves hoarse with “Crucify him!”’. Zagrebelsky, a serious and rigorous scholar, did not deny that this touched upon a classic theme of anti-democratic culture: ‘How can the will of the imbecile who forms part of the crowd carry as much weight as, or even more than, that of the wise man?’, of the wise man but also of the Honourable Bonaccini? Nevertheless, the scholar could not abandon the idea of some barrier (what sort?) to stem the appeals to the “unstable, emotional and therefore extremist and easily manipulated crowd” – which, incidentally, and this is the point, is “terribly similar to the ‘people’ to whom ‘democracy’ might entrust its fate in the near future”. How might one neutralise the overwhelming influence of the mass of uneducated and inelegant (right-wing) ‘imbeciles’ at the expense of the monopolistic aristocracy of ethics (on the left), which has been pushed to the limit by populist upheavals? By abolishing universal suffrage? Paradoxically, Luciano De Crescenzo wrote this in his landmark 1994 work, posing the ironic question: “Who is more easily swayed: the ignorant man or the educated man? Undoubtedly the ignorant man. So let’s only allow the educated to vote.” De Crescenzo delivered the line with irony; others have not, repeating the argument with the same thoughtful stubbornness for thirty-two years right up to the present day.

It was the triumph, wrote Giorgio Bocca once again in a book significantly entitled "Il filo nero" – published, incidentally, by the publishing house owned by ‘Il Cavaliere’ with the fez-wearing Berlusconi – of the ‘average Italian’, resistant to the values and rules of a healthy society, vulnerable to the ‘virus of authoritarian culture’ that had flourished – the words are again Bocca’s – in none other than the “proto-fascism of the Counter-Reformation, the mother of Italian resignation”: “proto-fascism”—shortly thereafter came Umberto Eco’s “Ur-fascism”, with a touch more or less of eternity, but always the same twisted narrative. The same twisted narrative of “uncivilised Italy” (“alle vongole”, according to Scalfari’s interpretation), the incurable disease of a country, as Cesare Garboli wrote, where “ignorance pays, lack of culture pays, rudeness and vulgarity pay”, and therefore, “since there is no longer any point in being indignant, all that remains is confinement to one’s own home with the television switched off”. Confinement, like Ventotene? No: ‘in one’s own home’, voluntarily abstaining from plebeian television. It is, as Garboli went on to say, the disheartening ‘Italian inhumanism’, which thwarts ‘the desire to elevate the country’. Always the two Italies, from 1994 to 2026, without interruption: the barbaric and ignorant one, and the civilised one, ‘the other, minority Italy’. The early signs of that phenomenon which Luca Ricolfi has always defined, with blunt brutality, as ‘anthropological racism’, that sense of haughty moral superiority, the intractable, permanent “clash between two different ethical and cultural models” as the historian Giovanni De Luna wrote, the final gasps of which are evident today in Bonaccini’s words, albeit filtered through a discourse that seeks to appear as an objective sociological and statistical analysis of the current electoral landscape, not only in Italy.

Then, of course, given that in a democracy – despite the ‘proto-fascism’ that alarmed a frowning Bocca – elections are won and lost, suddenly, when the left crushed the right in one election, here comes the reversal: the people do good things too. According to sociologist Giampaolo Fabris, that vote signalled “a visible sign of a shift in values”; according to Giorgio Bocca, Italians “have grown tired of the shouting, the insults and the bluster”. Eugenio Scalfari praised “a mature and vigilant country, capable of making rational rather than emotional choices”. According to Dacia Maraini, it expressed “a great desire for redemption, as this vote demonstrates”. For Giorgio Strehler, who had previously threatened: “Let no one play music, act or dance in Italy any more”, it was instead time to appeal to “Gramsci’s optimism of the heart”. But the period of optimism was short-lived; the uneducated masses began winning elections once more.

Not everyone could boast the bitter humour of Paolo Virzì’s cult film Ferie d’agosto, which depicted the contrast between two opposing ways of life: that of boisterous, uncultured Italy – all karaoke (even ‘right-wing’ karaoke, if they were so inclined – poor Fiorello), giant TV aerials, boorish behaviour, the buzz of mosquito killers, and zero books, set against that of the perfectly proper intellectual, whose table was laden with vegetarian fare, enlivened by intelligent conversations featuring apt quotations from Gianni Vattimo’s books, yet horrified by the carnivorous nature of his boorish neighbours. This tension, as memorably encapsulated by the late Ennio Fantastichini, culminated in the famous retort: ‘You intellectuals haven’t understood a bloody thing for ages now!’

Without a trace of irony, his horrified flight from the sweaty, vulgar masses who voted for the right instead led Antonio Tabucchi to express his utter horror at any ‘contact with those who go to nightclubs and football grounds’. Eugenio Scalfari asserted the anthropological otherness of his creation: “This newspaper and its readers constitute a sort of enclave”; you, the readers of our newspaper, are not like those others; “you are not very cunning; you are passionate about noble causes – and therefore losing ones; you prioritise what ought to be and the moral law”. The philosopher Gennaro Sasso, who recently passed away, deplored this tendency, of Gobetti-esque origin, “to put Italy on trial”. But the dam had burst on that night in ’94. The actress Lella Costa even took it out on poor Ambra, who, along with karaoke, was singled out as the cause of the victory of the hordes of the uneducated: “I have two little girls and the programme I’ve forbidden them to watch is precisely ‘Non è la Rai’”. For Edoardo Sanguineti, it was all down to the “idolatry of commodities and money”. According to Norberto Bobbio – though tempered by the benefit of a faint doubt – “the only conclusion to be drawn is that, since Italians are not idiots, the indoctrinating power of television is truly disproportionate”. Moreover, this rift was by no means unique to Italy. In the US, for example, Christopher Lasch (a figure whom the educated classes ought to have the patience to read) had, long before, described in his book The Revolt of the Elites the establishment’s tendency to lose all connection with the way of thinking and living of “the average American, whom they perceive as prudish, backward, reactionary, squalid and in bad taste”. Exactly. Except that in Italy, nostalgia for the people who once were and are no longer became an almost heart-rending lament even for the ‘very small-town middle-class man’ portrayed many years earlier in Vincenzo Cerami’s novel, which had been adapted into a film starring Alberto Sordi. As Sandro Onofri wrote in L’Unità: ‘The petty bourgeois of that time wanted his son to read the newspapers, just as he saw the intellectuals doing as they wandered the corridors of his office, always with a copy sticking out of their pockets. He lived within the confines of a culture that showed him exactly which path to follow.’ Not so anymore. No one listened to the intellectuals any more, and few heroes read the newspapers. The triumph of the barbarians. Without a degree.