It is all so much worse than imagined. There has been a complete collapse of our political culture. It was like this in Italy during the days of the P2, the endless changes in administration from 'Socialist' to 'Christian Democrat', the penetration of government and the political classes by criminality and mafia to the highest levels, the mulcting of taxes and their diversion to private consumption and the maintenance of faction. It was blamed on the manipulation of Italian politics by a United States that wanted the bases and was determined to keep the Communists from power: the prevention of the compromesso storico where power would be shared. Moro was murdered and Berlinguer was struck down.
A more convincing or at least a full explanation requires recognition of the abandonment of any acquiescence to constitutional form, the collapse of the rule of law, the power elite deals between union bosses and corrupted political office holders, the greying, often blackening of the economy, the removal of contact between citizens and state as every individual and family hid their lives in all sociopolitical aspects from government. The dead littered the streets morning after morning in frightening drug and tax-farming wars so that it was an achievement simply to live in any enclave of social peace, protected by arrangements between local power brokers that complete civil breakdown would be confined mostly to the South and major urban centres.
In the end the terrible murder of the Prime Minister and his escort, the hunting down and murder of the Prefect of Palermo and his wife through the streets of a deserted city, the blowing up of Bologna's railway station, the uncovering of Gladio - and other, though less infamous, uncoverings of evil by courageous investigative magistrates who were gunned down in their dozens, literally dozens, backed by a media that died for its efforts too, brought the country to its senses. Sandro Pertini's Presidency with his determined championing of the institutions of the democratic state re-established political decency and state independence.
Italy is no democratic paradise but it is most certainly back on the democratic rails. The permanent and uncomfortable sensation of hidden agendas and secret decision taking in private and factional interest no longer blights its citizens. It is in England that such a world is being recreated.
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The nature of Italian democracy is well summarized in the titles of two recent books on the subject: "Il Sultanato" by Giovanni Sartori, and "Democrazia Senza Democrazia" by Massimo L. Salvadori, (see Gustavo Zagrebelsky’s review in today's Repubblica, "La Finzione Democratica - Quando comandano le oligarchie".)
For Sartori, in Italy we cannot talk of tyranny or dictatorship: what is happening is a strategy of steady, unobtrusive elimination – from within – of guarantee structures: the separation of powers, political and juridical controls. Nobody claims to be a dictator; everybody pretends to be democratic, but they are not, because the erosion of constitution as guarantee allows the concentrated and unlimited exercise of power. There is an "unconstitutional constitution".
For Salvadori – who dedicates his book to Sartori – false democracies are governments characterized by “popular passive legitimation”. The ultimate root of such systems is the conflict of interests, the political dominance of a large concentration of economic power. Italy is only a modest – though grotesque – example of the global crisis of democracies. The triumphalism, indeed the idolatry of democracy is accompany by its vanification by oligarchies that operate without limits or controls on a global scale. This is the iron law of oligarchies: the organizations of large numbers, such as democracies are, produce small numbers of organized persons.
A democratic oligarchy is an oxymoron. In the prehistory of democracy it was a matter of party functionaries, political bosses, more or less secret societies, national and supernational. Today it is a matter of borderless economic oligarchies, aggregating, disgretating and fighting outside the forms provided by democracy within nation states. For these potentates, states and state powers are pawns of their struggle for supremacy.
For Salvadori, the only sign of hope comes from Barak Obama’s election.
I am awed by the courage of those you mention, who took on gangsters and political conspirators, knowing the risks.
David Kelly was as brave S. And paid the price.
Hasn't our new unelected ruler Mandelson, already said that we are in a post-democratic era?
Quote Mr. HG: "what is happening is a strategy of steady, unobtrusive elimination – from within – of guarantee structures: the separation of powers, political and juridical controls."
Remind you of anything?
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