gracchusdixit

Consumed as Americans have been by the ongoing tumult emanating from the Trump White House, few have paid much attention to recent events on the other side of the Atlantic that are, in some ways, more significant.  Two months ago, the citizens of Italy went to the polls in a national election, voting out their country’s “centrist” government.  Not only that, but a large majority voted for populist and explicitly anti-establishment parties.

To most Americans, this may seem trivial, even quaint, since the chaotic nature of Italian politics has long been something of a cliché bordering on a joke, either sad or funny, depending upon one’s point of view.  The results of this election, however, are neither trivial nor quaint, and they certainly don’t qualify as funny.

After last year’s French and Dutch elections, in which right-wing parties and their demagogic leaders were solidly trounced, many Europeans breathed a collective sigh of relief loud enough to be heard on both sides of the Atlantic.  The hope was that a tidal wave of populist anger, culminating in Britain’s decision to withdraw from the European Union and the shocking election of Donald Trump in the United States, had spent itself.  

Thanks to the Italian election, we now know that this hope, however comforting it may have been at the time, was a pipe dream.  The big winners were Cinque Stelle (the “Five Star Movement”) and Lega Nord (the “Northern League”).  Both are relative newcomers to the Italian political scene, and their philosophies are too eclectic to be readily pigeonholed.  But they have one thing in common:  a profound skepticism of the European Union, neoliberal economics, and global capitalism.  

In voting for these parties, Italians proclaimed, in effect, that they have had enough of the current system—a system that prioritizes banks and bondholders over human beings; a system designed to benefit corporations rather than citizens; a system that, under the rubrics of “free trade” and “open borders,” allows cheap labor to migrate effortlessly from one country to another and capital to move wherever it chooses in pursuit of profit. 

Italy’s president, a card-carrying member of Europe’s political and economic elite, has refused to confirm the formation of a new coalition government, judging the views of the proposed finance minister in that government to be “anti-European”.   The panjandrums of the European Union are hoping this temporary reprieve will give Italians time “to come to their senses” before another election is held.  They are deceiving themselves.  It is all but certain that this blatantly undemocratic sleight of hand will produce the opposite result.

Something similar happened in Greece in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis.  Facing bankruptcy, the Greeks voted in an avowedly left-wing government that asked the EU for relief.  The poor Greeks got exactly nowhere, because their country and their economy were simply too small to matter.  In the end, the all-powerful “troika” that runs Europe—the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund—bullied the Greeks into submission.

Italy is a different kettle of fish.  Its economy is the third largest in the EU, ten times larger than that of Greece and larger than Russia’s.  As a practical matter, the EU cannot ignore the Italians, as it so contemptuously ignored the hat-in-hand Greeks.  To do so would run the risk of fueling a political and economic firestorm that is spreading throughout Southern and Eastern Europe, and even to France, where Emanuel Macron’s embrace of the EU’s neoliberal theology is facing massive resistance from the trade unions and ordinary French voters.

All this is happening for two reasons.

First, it is no longer possible to explain away the reality that global capitalism has betrayed countless millions, destroying jobs, uprooting communities, and upending traditional ways of life.  The billionaires, oligarchs, and financial institutions that have gained the most from this system have spent decades trying to obscure these inconvenient facts, by conflating the “free market” with personal and political freedom.  This rhetorical house of cards is collapsing.  

Those who have borne the brunt of the system’s failures feel lied to and left behind, exploited and hopeless.  Whatever one may think of the often blinkered prejudices of such people—their animosity toward immigrants, their racism, and their embrace of demagogues and would-be dictators—it is impossible to deny the profound social and human disruption they are suffering.  It is not in the least surprising that they are turning their backs on traditional politicians and political parties, which persist in defending an increasingly unsustainable status quo.  

Second, the neoliberal political and economic establishment that, for the moment at least, governs the world, appears to be tone-deaf and utterly clueless.  Either its members are delusional, or they lack the imagination to conceive of any alternative to the system that enriches them but fails so many others.  Like the prisoners in Plato’s allegory of the cave, they appear to be unable to distinguish between shadows and the glaring light of reality.  

This shouldn’t surprise us.  The first wave of global capitalism, ignited by the Industrial Revolution in 19th century Britain, produced a string of global economic depressions, spanning generations and leading directly to the rise of fascism and two catastrophic world wars.  All along the way, the beneficiaries of the system tut-tutted, wagged their fingers at the improvidence of the “lower classes,” and assured themselves that all would be right in the end, because their privileged vision of the world was both inevitable and just.  Like the elites of today, like Plato’s prisoners, they failed to see Armageddon coming. 

If we are to survive the awfulness embodied by demagogues and would-be fascists like Donald Trump, if western democracy itself hopes to survive, we have to wake up.  We must  shed the shadows and shake off the myths of a social and economic system that no longer works.  The “free market” is incapable of saving us, and pretending otherwise is suicidal.  We need another answer.