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Something that always bothered me about the Motte is that while massive cultural/political events are going on in Europe, one needs to dive deep into the roundup thread to find any discussion of it at all. Meanwhile the latest trans-people-in-school or outrageous-nytimes-oped controversy (which nobody will remember in a week) will have 500 comment threads dedicated to extreme nitpicking.
Anyway sorry for the rant. It looks like the far-right (of the quite openly far-right, even post-fascist variety) has just won the Italian elections and will very likely going to provide the prime minister to a cabinet that will include a 85 year old Berlusconi among others. Italy is the 3rd most populous and wealthy country in the EU. It also acts as a perennial threat to the stability of the Brussels-led order and the euro, since an Italian default or currency exit would almost definitely trigger the collapse of the euro with who knows what consequences. The EU looks determined to fight. Meloni herself does not sound like the type of politician who will accept to be crushed as easily as her predecessors. Here is a French interview with a 19 years old activist Meloni. She still sounds like a true believer to me. To get the gist of just how radical (from the EU-norm) she is willing to be with regard to cultural issues, I recommend this speech from 3 years ago (with English subs).
What are your expectations? Are we coming near a grand showdown? How is this going to interact with the looming threat of grid collapse in Europe? Russia sanctions and the European willingness to keep Ukrainian army in the field? NATO expansions? Is her family and God rhetoric just fluff or do you expect some real moves in this regard? When the ECB will have to start increasing interest rates substantially and Italy has to choose between bankruptcy or euro-exit, how will this go under this government?
P.S. Italy was one of the most anal countries with regard to vaccine oppression and corona measures in Europe. Does anyone know what the position of the Fratelli was back then? And how they talk about these things now?
Whenever I hear the term, "far right," what I hear in my mind is "90's liberal." You may need to clarify what exactly you mean by that, making clear how your definition is distinct from partisan media painting anyone they don't like as fascist.
If you believe that "Family, country, God" is "far right" then you should recognize that is almost half the country. And that also means over 90% of people in the last thousand years have been fascist.
I do unironically agree with this. I believe humans have a natural tendency to organize around political forms similar to feudalism, whose combination with industrial society is more or less what most people call fascism. It is certainly what Mussolini seemed to understand when he was referring to his party's ideology. I also think the unique weirdness of the term fascism (it is really difficult to define in a way most people agree) has a lot to do with this underlying nature. Intellectuals of progressive/enlightenment bent keep recognizing signs of fascism everywhere because human societies keep reproducing elements of it adapted to the changing societal conditions.
You are right at recognizing the political terms of right and left can refer to very different positions on issues at different times. But I believe that is because the specific issues are not that relevant when coming up with these labels. What matters chiefly is the direction and speed of political change (or lack thereof) you want. Today's far right might look more leftist than yesterday's conservatism (case in point, Meloni is an unmarried mother of 1 hardly a Catholic motherhood icon) but it is still far right because it advocates for a fast reversal of the enlightenment project while yesterday's conservatism just wanted to conserve the society as it is.
I'm not convinced. Humans may organize and develop hierarchies automatically, but I don't think it's people on the bottom who espouse the idea of "knowing one's place", and that idea is an important part of fascist thought. At the very least, they would not believe it is moral or right that they remain where they are, even if they have to accept it.
I don't think there's any particular juncture to fascism here, but the Vendee was a poor region in France and fought back hard against the Revolutionaries (though there appears to be a large historiographical debate over the degree to which the Vendeans were ideological as opposed to just pissed about conscription and/or taxes).
A second, different piece of evidence might be taken from the awful reception the Russian narodniki received during the "Going to the People" attempted uplift of peasant and communal livelihood during the late 19th century - the poor peasants reacted very badly to ideas of overturning society, even to their alleged benefit; they also reacted badly to modern agronomy, medicine, religious skepticism, and literacy. Quite invested in "their place in the world," at least to hear the narodniks write about it.
It takes a shocking number of dead peasants before an intellectual will admit his ideas were wrong.
Changing medical and agricultural practices puts the peasants lives on the line. They weren't going to make any big changes without a lot of proof.
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