And the right stumbled over culture

“The most stable government, the strongest Italy.” So reads the banner at the port of Bari, where the leadership of Fratelli d’Italia is gathering on Friday to celebrate a record for longevity – surpassing the fateful 1,412 days of Berlusconi II and achieving the most quintessentially Italian record there is: clinging on to Palazzo Chigi. The term “longevity” might evoke images of Galápagos tortoises, gnarled pines that live for five thousand years, or those light bulbs left on for years because they give off so little light – here, however, it signifies action, strength, almost a superpower. Meanwhile, everything is ready for this golden anniversary: a stage, a parade of ministers, a giant screen, huge banners, party supporters in flip-flops, a sort of Atreju summer camp, perhaps with an after-party at Borgo Egnazia, formerly the G7 resort. There is, however, one detail in this celebration that opens up a whole new world: the long-awaited ceremony was due to take place at the Fiera del Levante, a symbol of the city, but the stage had already been booked, which is why they’ve ended up at the harbour. But occupied by whom? By a massive concert by Caparezza: a rapper from Molfetta, nostalgic for Rifondazione Comunista, someone who gets sad if he sees anyone letting their hair down to his ‘Vieni a ballare in Puglia’ as if it were just any old catchy tune – when in fact it’s ‘a protest against illegal hiring practices, workplace deaths and the toxins from Ilva’ (bear that in mind the next time you dance to it). Is it a sign of destiny? The fateful cultural hegemony of the Left – that thing, always lurking in the shadows – taking its revenge, striking again, even sabotaging the festival of longevity?

Amidst one record-breaking event after another, it is indeed time to ask where all that cultural counter-offensive promised four years ago has gone, when everyone – including the foreign press – was talking about the fateful ‘hegemony’. What has become of all that Gramsci? In the lengthy interview with the New York Times, there is no trace of the Big Issue. Meloni talks about Trump and deteriorating relations, about migrants, about Pope Leo, and about the unity of the West. The only word that touches on the subject is, in fact, ‘woke’, evoked almost with nostalgia. No more hegemony, no ‘reconquest of the imagination’ or other highlights from the last election campaign, with the Great Cultural Battle at the top of the agenda (and come to think of it: what a luxury to dust off Gramsci now that Vannacci has placed remigration, Mediterranean patriarchy and military training in schools at the centre of the agenda). Let’s take ‘woke’. This milestone was reached after heated squabbles over a target which – whatever it was, and by now no one is quite sure – perhaps the right should have been the ones to demolish. But no. Here, Giuseppe Conte brings it down with a letter to La Repubblica; it is unclear whether this is to do the enemy a favour or to reiterate that, when it comes to ideas, trends and cultural dogmas, everything is decided on the left as usual.

The hegemonic escapade went on, as you will recall, for months on end: cinema circles threatened with running out of funds, Tolkien-esque epics, Atreju awards handed out left, right and centre, blonde, Melonian-style female conductors, mass graves in Sanremo, Strega Prize-winning novels never read by the minister (much to our admiration). Bit by bit, however, the operation began to stumble: missteps, misunderstandings, gaffes, feuds between factions, and a rapid rotation of undersecretaries. Gradually, the Grand Design became clouded. Now that the time for records and assessments has arrived, and as we enter the heart of the election campaign, the issue of cultural hegemony deserves careful reflection.

“Overturning the cultural hegemony of the left” was the mission, the mandate received from the electorate, and nothing seemed capable of preventing it. By the end of 2022, armed with appointments, decrees, lengthy Instagram posts and statements on Tg1, the new cultural conquerors were advancing with the enthusiasm of novices, even though they were not exactly novices. They were making their mark at the Collegio Romano, amongst the ranks of the cultural-ministerial leadership, at major festival gatherings, and within biennials, foundations and think tanks, declaring themselves to have always been Gramscians (interpreting Gramsci from a right-wing perspective is nothing new, but the blatant nature of the operation heralded a new phase). Putting all the proclamations, statements and praise for the many counter-hegemonic moves of the government’s first phase back into order, what emerges is a viral, hypnotic, heavily reverberating remix – like ‘I am Giorgia, I am a mother’ and so on – the Gramsci version. Images flash by, as in an old film: Ignazio La Russa, newly elected President of the Senate, calling for ‘the demolition of the casemates’; Sangiuliano, in a particularly frenzied state, immediately demanding a plaque for Gramsci at the Quisisana Clinic (though the clinic says no); then proclaiming Dante our father of the tricolour flame. 

Then there is Giuli’s pamphlet (Gramsci is Alive), the Fratelli d’Italia conventions with their cardboard cut-outs of Flaiano, Diabolik, Hannah Arendt; and the ‘Estati generali’ of national culture and other somewhat gloomy and old-fashioned gatherings, amidst many ‘policy guidelines’ and opposition to the ‘woke culture coming to us from American campuses’, though with a vocabulary more in the vein of Holden Caulfield than Gramsci – changing the narrative, another narrative, new narratives for Italy. All around, however, it’s all about denial and downplaying: a cultural hegemony of the left that is always “alleged”, “possible”, “supposed” – us, hegemonic? As if! “The cultural hegemony of the left has never existed,” Dacia Maraini explained on La7. ‘If it exists, I’ve never seen it,’ replied writers and filmmakers, shrugging their shoulders at festivals and literary events – ‘a whingeing, paranoid invention of the right’; ‘yes, perhaps in the days of the great Italian Communist Party, but now it’s all about the hegemony of neoliberalism, my dear’. There was no hegemony to dismantle because hegemony – like ‘woke’ – didn’t exist. Except that they would then go on to repeat, like a mantra, that “those who vote for the right are people who read little and have studied even less” – most recently Bonaccini, but it’s a great classic, a refrain and a spectacular, unwitting confession of hegemony: the more books you read, the more qualifications you accumulate, the more left-wing you become.

How could one forget the Tolkien exhibition in Valle Giulia, Rome, the first stage of the Grand Plan for a political turnaround? A self-congratulatory exhibition, a settling of scores, the revenge of fantasy on the part of those in power, with a bombastic opening: plenty of bodyguards and official cars parked along Viale Gramsci (would you believe it?), a beaming Meloni cutting the ribbon, a moved Sangiuliano declaring, “after so many years, the cultural hegemony of the Left is over” – whilst others, more cautious, remarked, “it’s about to collapse” (just in case). My left-wing friends, naturally without making too much of a fuss about it, appreciated Buttafuoco’s appointment – “he’s doing a brilliant job at the Biennale; what elegance, what talent; I swear I never thought…” – whilst others went on the sly to see the exhibition on Futurism, which was immediately put under the microscope by Report with the usual rubbish – “but you know, it wasn’t bad at all… in fact…”. Even at the Tolkien-themed event, there was a constant stream of personalities, celebrities and the Roman underworld, just like at Veltroni’s book launches. In short, things weren’t going all that badly at first. Then, one after another, the problems began. A barrage of problems: the brawls and barricades over the cinema bill, the Boccia affair with its shift from Gramsci to “Temptation Island”, the Beatrice Venezi fiasco – first hoisted onto the stage at La Fenice, then escorted to the exit – the huge, very Italian row at the Biennale, that’s for sure, with the Giuli-Buttafuoco duel fought with quotes from Il Gattopardo; then the Regeni affair, understood as a documentary not funded by the ministry – and I’m sure I’m forgetting something. Cultural policy, which has always been a largely insignificant trappings of any government, became the stumbling block for Palazzo Chigi. Its Achilles’ heel.

At that point, some began to have doubts. Some began to ask themselves under their breath – do we actually need this ‘hegemony’ or not? Alessandro Campi wrote at the time: “It seems that the fate of this government, and that of the Republic itself, now depends on what happens at the Ministry of Culture, which has evidently become a symbol”. But a symbol of what? Never, in fact, had there been such a row over a ministry that all the governments of the First Republic had regarded as minor ("We'll give culture to them" – that was the standard phrase in negotiations between factions and parties down to the fourth or fifth tiers). So, to be honest, the right has achieved one thing: there has never been as much talk of culture as there has been since it came to power. Funding for the cinema, La Fenice, the Biennale, every appointment, every euro allocated or withheld, every ministerial call for proposals. We’ve always complained that nobody in Italy gives a damn about culture. All it took was putting Fratelli d’Italia in the Collegio Romano to bring it back to the front page, into the hearts of Italians. Easy.

When asked about the Biennale debacle and the Russian affair, Giorgia Meloni delivered the quip that sums up the entire period of her dominance: “I confess that I’ve got a bit lost in this story.” We stand in complete solidarity with her. It remains, in fact, an emblematic chapter. The story is well known; there is no point recounting it again. The image with which it concluded suffices: the Russian pavilion, open for three days only to remain barred for six months, yet with its windows wide open – no one can enter, from outside people peer at the ‘imprisoned’ artwork, there is outrage over the censorship, and the ambassador serves drinks. A solution so quintessentially Italian that it deserves a pavilion of its own. On that readmission, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco also secured the endorsement of Luciano Canfora, the guiding spirit of the Stalinist left. Because sooner or later, it always ends like this. In the great chaos of the Biennale, the secret homeland of the Italian intellectual comes to light – whether right-wing, left-wing, centrist, pro-government or dissident, in a cassock or a headscarf, a bow tie or a keffiyeh, an oversized jacket or a cloak, but always with a touch of anti-capitalism about them and perhaps a longing to leave NATO.

As has been said and written ad nauseam, the very premises of this whole hegemonic stunt were flawed. No in-depth knowledge of Gramsci is required to understand that any form of cultural hegemony, if anything, is orchestrated before the seizure of power, not after – certainly never during – and certainly not by announcing it on TG1 – “It’s time for a new hegemony!” – just like that, by decree, imposed from above, slipped into the budget bill, rather than having been ingrained in the language and myths over the course of decades. That phenomenon whereby ‘committed writer’, ‘critical thinking’, ‘civil society’ and ‘activist’ function as synonyms for ‘the Left’, without even needing to specify it. In short, it is a massive, long-term undertaking. Talk about a celebration of longevity!

In practice, however, it is clear that there is no such thing as ‘cultural hegemony’. It does not exist in the reality of our behaviour; it does not exist in the age of memes, scrolling and AI – where everyone, if anything, is prey to their own hegemony, their own bubble, their own algorithm. It does not exist in that disorderly, chaotic, contradictory way in which things come at us every day: the latest song that gets stuck in your head, the daft meme that makes you laugh, the series that keeps you glued to the screen, the story you read on Substack. Becoming foot soldiers of an ideology that reads the ‘right’ books, watches the ‘right’ films and condemns everything else is something that only comes easily in theocracies, dictatorships or Putin-style autocracies. But what about ‘woke’ – you might ask? Isn’t that proof that cultural hegemony can still be manufactured today? But ‘woke’ – yet another long-term legacy of ’68, updated for the age of hypersensitivity and gender transitions, that familiar intolerant temptation from which the Left believes itself immune (and it’s not clear why) – tells us, if anything, the opposite: how cultural fads work as long as they remain language, sensibilities, the spirit of the times, and begin to crumble the very moment they try to become hegemony: norms, prohibitions, committees, and a badge to be displayed at the entrance.

In a country with a very ageing population, few university graduates, where one in three adults is functionally illiterate and struggles even with the internet, Rai still warms people’s hearts more than algorithms and menacing artificial intelligence. In Trumpian America, the cultural upheaval centred on Harvard, Stanford and Columbia – where money flows, ideas are generated and tomorrow’s ruling class is forged – whilst here the bulk of the battle has centred on Viale Mazzini, where the forbidden dream of a right-wing voter might perhaps have been its dismantling or privatisation, but certainly not its hegemony. Of all the versions of Rai we have seen, the only one missing was, in fact, the right-wing one. The Rai of the heirs to the Social Movement: the last of the line, the underlings of the political carve-up. Now the cycle is complete. Perhaps it’s the end. The lament over Rai over the past four years – from Pino Insegno’s takeover to Ranucci’s sacking – has become a fixture of public discourse, a litany recited regardless: there’s no one left, they never do anything, they’ve taken it all over; now even grandparents complain about it in front of the telly: they only give us rubbish, not even ‘Techetecheté’ is what it used to be.

It seems that, once again primarily due to pressure from the right, observers have recognised that Rai is a political circus, an unmanageable behemoth, a state within a state whose only hope of salvation would be radical downsizing, retaining only the bare essentials, and privatisation wherever possible. Yet, as the saying goes: everyone knows what ought to be done; the challenge lies in understanding how to get re-elected afterward. If only the issue were TeleMeloni. In truth, Rai was born entwined with the state and politics, and TeleMeloni is not the corruption or self-destruction of a healthy body, but rather the final chapter of a system that has been sick from the outset. The only way to manage it is not through hegemony: forget Gramsci’s Quaderni, the essential reference should always be the Cencelli Manual. Having received his Christian Democrat membership card at the age of seventeen from De Gasperi – who passed away a few weeks ago at the age of ninety – Cencelli was a beacon of national reconciliation in a country prone to constant strife.

The handbook was a mathematical guide, the golden ratio of consensus, an algorithm – as we would say today. The most liberal, most moderate, most civilised thing to come out of Italian politics in those years. It is always spoken of with distaste – ‘carve-up’, ‘divvying up’, ‘malpractice’ – yet it was in fact the exact opposite: Kant’s perpetual peace, the Treaty of Westphalia with a Christian Democrat twist. Each group’s weight—party membership cards, factions, votes, the Doroteans, the Fanfanians, Taviani’s friends, even the most microscopic ones—was translated into fractions. One point eight ministers for you, three point twenty-four undersecretaries for me. Arithmetic, not ideology. And where, pray tell, is the horror in that? Gramsci wanted to win over consciences; for Cencelli, a percentage was enough. Gramsci wanted to convince you – which is always the first step towards wanting to correct you, before getting rid of you if that fails. Cencelli was simply trying to make the numbers add up. In a pluralistic country, divided on every issue, composed of tribes that will never convert one another, Cencelli is far more useful than Gramsci – and even than Tolkien. One seeks to win the culture war, to annihilate the enemy. The other knows it will never end, and merely divides up the spoils, without too much bloodshed.

This is all the more evident here, where commentators cry ‘fascism’ even when ‘Rai Scuola’ – channel 57 on digital terrestrial television – is shut down, a channel that few people watched and many did not even know existed; yet when it is replaced with a series on Italian villages (but why not the old Rai interval, the sheep, the postcards, Handel’s music?), it suddenly becomes essential to the development of democratic life: ‘An attack on science, culture and civil society,’ I happened to read. The issue merits a full page in La Repubblica, with contributors interviewed, petitions launched, protests organised and rallies held – and suddenly it becomes the ‘Rai Scuola Brigade’, sponsored by the ANPI.

At the time of the referendum on the justice system, a school newspaper contacted me asking me to explain, in simple terms, the reasons for voting ‘Yes’. I was to answer some questions; the answers would be published in a side-by-side table, alongside the reasons for voting ‘No’, provided by a Rome City Councillor from the PD. I agreed. The final question was which films I would recommend to young people to help them form an opinion on the subject. I replied with the most obvious choices: "In the Name of the Italian People", "Prisoner Awaiting Trial", and the series about Enzo Tortora that was airing at the time. Trite and didactic, I know. However, do you know what my opponent—the champion of the ‘No’ vote—had chosen? C’è ancora domani and a documentary on Pinochet’s coup: democratic emergency, patriarchy, colonels, fascism and a coup d’état. You can see for yourselves: it’s not a contest you can win. My opponent is playing on a different field. I had a reform of the justice system in mind; he was stirring people’s consciences: either you stand with the anti-fascist Constitution or with the coup plotters Nordio and Meloni. Not to mention that little statistical miracle whereby, in the aforementioned referendum, not a single artist, not a single writer, not a single actor found themselves on the side – I won’t say of the ‘Yes’ vote, but of the ‘Neither’ vote. The film world was a monochrome landscape of overwhelming majorities, without a hint of friction: not a single director of photography, prop master or sound technician appeared to be touched by a shadow of doubt. Yet even there—and I know quite a few—there are those in favour of the separation of careers, those convinced that some form of judicial reform is needed: but they were careful not to end up on the wrong side. Anyone who has frequented such circles – universities foremost among them – knows this: there, progressivism is not just one stance among others; it is the stance of the sensitive, well-informed person, of those who have read and therefore understand. Any scepticism whatsoever – on gender or wealth tax – is not seen as a differing opinion, but as a flaw, a shortcoming, a problem. Because this, in the end, is the true Italian ‘woke’ – not pronouns, asterisks or misgendering. Italian ‘woke’ is all about the ‘anti-fascist licence’, a sublime load of rubbish, as you will recall, but perfectly in line with the heights of intolerance on American campuses, albeit set against the backdrop of Italian history and national customs. The mystique of anti-fascism still hands out rewards, the limelight, badges, credibility and approval. Anti-fascism functions like a poorly calibrated burglar alarm: it never goes off when thieves break in (never with Putin, never with the ayatollahs), but it sounds at the slightest shift in the status quo. The issue is not new. Yet it is getting worse and worse. Twenty-five years of social media have reset everything: discussions about fascism have now regressed to a state prior to Renzo De Felice’s studies, reduced to the dichotomy of ‘he did some good things too’ versus ‘Absolute Evil’ – an emotional category, utter nonsense perfect for Instagram squabbles. Yet if I do not write ‘antifa’ in my bio, or conclude every sentence with ‘anti-fascist’, it may simply indicate that I have had enough of all this: of anti-fascism used as a weapon, of heroes from the journalistic and cultural world who see themselves as moving targets, constantly censored, in exile in a perpetual Ventotene, hunted down by the OVRA (“‘you want to send me to Cairo to meet the same fate as Regeni’, says the former leader of Report, now in his Lungotevere incarnation as Sigfrido Ranucci, a martyr for freedom), whilst the only things hunting him down are festivals, newspapers, television programmes, other engagements, opinion polls and open spaces. This is the fundamental law of Italian-style ‘woke’: every change is a fascist threat, even when there isn’t the slightest hint of change (you may not remember, but during the last election campaign Chiara Ferragni swore that, under Giorgia, it would no longer be possible to have an abortion in the Marche region).

But this, of course, is a labour of generations, a long-term endeavour – one that will outlive us all. In the meantime, we could set ourselves more concrete objectives. At the top of the list for a cultural counter-hegemony, I would place not identity, borders or the Western canon, but rather a bit of financial education in schools, which is certainly more useful than ‘sentimental’ education. Those two or three basic skills that not even our most distinguished intellectuals have mastered (we rank last among OECD countries). Then we should train young Italians to find their way through the jungle of acronyms that awaits them when they grow up – IRPEF, IRES, IRAP, IMU, TARI, F24, ISEE, DURC, SPID, PEC – forget about ‘woke’ pronouns! Preparing them to survive in one of the world’s most convoluted tax systems, where getting one’s affairs in order takes something like two hundred and forty hours a year – a whole month spent dealing with the state. Teaching them to read a payslip, to distinguish gross from net, not to use ‘profit’ as an insult nor ‘extra profit’ as a blockbuster version of that insult. Above all, explain to them, as soon as possible, that a domestic worker on a national collective agreement has more protection than an editor-in-chief registered as a self-employed VAT payer – even if, needless to say, at a dinner party it’s cooler to say “I write for Idea Critica” than “I clean for Mrs Maria”, as you can imagine. At the very least, alert them well in advance, before they reach adulthood and then drown us in childish complaints about Italy failing to recognise talent, the misunderstood genius with three degrees and twelve master’s degrees forced to flee abroad or stay but end up folding jumpers at Zara – all because of neoliberalism, of course.

After Tolkien for epic poetry and Michael Jackson for English, Roger Scruton is the name that frequently crops up in Giorgia’s speeches. He was cited during the vote of confidence in the Chamber of Deputies, recalled at the UN in connection with his oikophobia – a hatred of one’s own home – or whilst accepting a ‘Margaret Thatcher’ award, or in the pages of The Spectator, where Meloni said she felt more indebted ‘to the late British conservative philosopher than to the revolutionary socialist Mussolini’ (and thank goodness for that). A symbol of Old Britain, with his stone house in Albany, a lover of fox hunting, founder of the Salisbury Review – a man who, when asked ‘why are you a conservative?’, would reply ‘because I am a pessimist’ – Roger Scruton is the go-to philosopher, the guiding light, even if Tolkien, understandably, immediately captures the popular imagination. In his memoir, Scruton recalls the euphoria that swept through London’s universities the day after Margaret Thatcher’s victory in 1979. Years of lacklustre socialist consensus were coming to an end – years in which, in order to find an enemy, one had to scour the corners in search of some shabby fascist worth taking a stand against. At last, someone had arrived whom one could truly hate. A real demon. And it was the best thing that could have happened to artists, intellectuals – in short, to the world of culture. Roused from the torpor of Labour’s welfare handouts, London once again became the capital of music, fashion and youth culture. The place to be in the 1980s. Maggie was the unwitting muse of post-punk and The Clash, of Vivienne Westwood’s fashion shows, of Derek Jarman’s films, and of a whole generation of songs wishing her every ill. Everyone hated Margaret Thatcher; she simply let them get on with it. Meanwhile, she revolutionised the economy, pulled the country out of a long period of stagnation, and brought into the mainstream a series of liberal and market-oriented theories that until then had remained confined to the ghetto of a few isolated institutions (Nozick’s ‘minimal state’, the theories of Hayek and Mises, Oakeshott’s liberalism, Ayn Rand’s ethical individualism). The cultural establishment and much of public opinion were against her, adding to this a touch of distaste for someone from a middle-class background (the daughter of a butcher, and a woman to boot – something she would never be forgiven for, especially by the left). Yet in just a few years, Margaret Thatcher turned around a country in deep crisis, weighed down by benefits, statism, inefficient services, pointless bureaucracy and ‘soft socialism’ policies – ‘anyone who doubts that Thatcherism improved the quality of life in Britain forgets how badly we dressed and ate in ’79’, wrote Niall Ferguson. Whether one applauds her or condemns her, Margaret Thatcher achieved all this without ever once uttering the word ‘culture’, let alone ‘hegemony’. She did not organise conferences on Hayek, she did not place a platoon of ultra-liberals at the BBC to put Friedman on prime-time television, nor did she set about rewriting history curricula. She was no secular saint of pluralism, but she did not try to lay claim to culture or colonise it. She left it exactly where it was: free to detest her. The greatest British post-war theorist of cultural hegemony, Stuart Hall – the man who coined the term ‘Thatcherism’ and who re-read Gramsci specifically to understand her – wrote his finest pages in opposition to her. Ian McEwan said that Margaret Thatcher had spurred them on to write better novels. To be clear, we are not here hoping for a Thatcherite project – unthinkable today, and always unthinkable in Italy – the minimal state, the market as the measure of all things, the ode to the individual: these are all things for which we will never be equipped. But Thatcherism reminds us that decisive battles are not won on the cultural front. One can govern well, one can govern for a long time, and set one record after another, whilst having all the artists, intellectuals, big names and prime-time programmes against one. Indeed: perhaps that is precisely the secret.

Cultural hegemony is not a good thing that has fallen into the wrong hands. It is a flawed idea in itself. It belongs to the vast and not-so-admirable family of totalitarian ideas: it presupposes a mass to be educated and a vanguard that knows where to lead it. In Gramsci there is no Popper, no Mill, no pluralism as a value – there is class struggle by other means: novels instead of rifles; school and university lecturers instead of barricades. Giovanni Malagodi, whom hardly anyone remembers today, used to say, ‘A politics of culture is practised by totalitarian parties, parties that wish to impose content on culture’. A liberal culture, quite simply, has no use for hegemony. If anything, it should dissolve it. The aim should be to dissolve the very notion into the sea of open society, leaving culture to its inherent chaos—dispersion, noise, seemingly useless material—books, films, and songs without explicit purpose, message, or commitment, and which, thankfully, do not serve to ‘carry forward’ any particular battle.