A day of everyday Italian life, to understand populism on home soil

In Falling Down, Michael Douglas plays William Foster, a divorced former defence engineer from Los Angeles. A restraining order prevents him from approaching his ex-wife and daughter, but he insists on seeing them. The film unfolds through a series of incidents, each of which illustrates his growing exasperation against the backdrop of ordinary urban life: the Korean convenience shop where they won’t give him change for a banknote and the prices seem unfair to him, the encounter with a gang, the fast-food restaurant that has just stopped serving the breakfast he wants, and so on. As the narrative unfolds, Foster’s actions grow increasingly violent, unleashing chaos across the city.

On his ‘titanic day’, Professor Rossi does not give in to violence, though readers might perhaps excuse him if he did. Rocco Pezzimenti, a historian of political thought well known to anyone who has delved into the interplay between Catholicism and liberalism, has written a political fable that appears to be an attempt to explain populism and anti-politics. Not populism in general, but that found on our own doorstep. Pezzimenti chooses not to look at major international trends, the rejection of globalisation, or the effects – real or imagined – of the new media. He simply recounts a day of ordinary Italian life: supplementary pension funds ending up in the INPS pot; interminable waiting lists even for the most routine medical tests, which people ‘jump the queue’ for thanks to a providential connection; work on the lift to be installed in the block of flats that keeps getting delayed because a permit is missing… That is enough to understand why people no longer bother to vote and, when they do, see their vote as a way of saying ‘fuck off’.

The difficulties faced by the public are mirrored by a sense of disorientation in private life: rising rents, shops closing down, the urban landscape changing without individuals fully understanding why. Professor Rossi continues to believe that “freedom is (also) participation”. He knows, however, that “in public law, the eternal struggle between power and life is evident. Political activity seeks to reduce the state to pure power, always subordinating life to it’. Describing how a normal day, with its usual problems, can turn into an obstacle course, Pezzimenti explains how the legitimacy of institutions crumbles. These institutions are not defeated on an ideological battlefield: they are simply seen as obstacles to the most mundane claims and desires. The bureaucratic ordeal, on the one hand, and the inability to guarantee the minimum conditions for a stable and secure life, on the other, drive even mild-mannered scholars – who nevertheless refuse to give up their belief in the public good – to despair.