Trumpism Is Not Populism — It’s Just The New Right Of Global Politics

–OpEd–

ROME — At this point, we should stop calling it populism. This word seems to refer to a violent and ephemeral political pathology: a jacquerie, a rambunctious and passing revolt of peasants, useful for venting the anger of the insurgents by giving them a few days of carnival — but destined eventually to be reabsorbed without a trace.

As much as contingencies have certainly played a role in the U.S. presidential election — from inflation to the poor replacement of the Democratic candidate — Donald Trump’s re-election seems to signal rather, as so many have written, a structural settling: the coagulation of a new prevailing social coalition oriented toward Republicans.

As if the tycoon’s victory in 2016 was just the beginning of a construction effort that, eight years later, comes to fruition. But construction of what, then?

The short answer: it is the construction of a new right wing adapted to our times.

Once upon a time in Italy

In this respect, events in the United States — albeit with the obvious, macroscopic differences — were in some ways anticipated by Italy.

Thirty years ago, in our country, Silvio Berlusconi built a center-right coalition capable of garnering the consent of about half of the electorate. The coalition was hegemonized by the party that Berlusconi himself had founded, Forza Italia. The party that was a child of the Zeitgeist of the 1990s, nurtured by individualism, optimism, belief in globalization, and the conviction that the West had triumphed and the whole world was necessarily destined to imitate its model.

At the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century — in a very different, gloomy, pessimistic and challenged historical climate — the sovereign debt crisis destroyed the Berlusconi hegemony and dispersed its electorate.

In Italy, the alliance’s center of gravity has visibly shifted to the right.

In the 2013 elections, those of the resounding success of the populist 5 Star Movement, the center-right parties all together did not reach 30% of the vote. It took them six years to return to their “historic” share, close to 50%. But when they finally succeeded, in the 2019 European elections, it was no longer Berlusconi leading the coalition from a liberal center-right position, but Matteo Salvini from a sovereignist center-right one.

The rest of the story is still fresh. The 2022 elections completed the reconstruction of the coalition and its electorate. But the rise of Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s current prime minister, in Salvini’s place has not changed the underlying fact: compared to the Berlusconi days, the alliance’s center of gravity has visibly shifted to the right.

In other words, it has adapted to its own era, to an increasingly harsh climate, to distrust of globalization, and to the crisis of Western hegemony.

Mistaking the finger for the moon

This process of adaptation has filled the public space with phenomena that we usually attribute to populism: demagogic cries, impractical promises, verbal radicalism, alternative facts, assorted vulgarities and absurdities, and gratuitous provocations.

Outraged, the political and intellectual establishment vehemently condemned them — and in some cases they interpreted them as a beginning of fascism.

Yet, one can perhaps begin to wonder if these were in fact nothing more than epiphenomena, or secondary symptoms: tools that the bearers of new political instances used to attract attention, make themselves heard and garner consensus within a political order that was obtusely self-concentrated, arrogantly convinced of its own motives, quick to delegitimize anyone who dared to question its goodness and ability to ensure progress.

Focusing on the outward forms of populism, in short, we may have lost precious years in mistaking the finger (the epiphenomena) for the moon: the overbearing emergence of social demands that found no representation with traditional political forces, and the slow adjustment of political systems, on the right rather than the left, to this changing historical climate.

Italy and the U.S.

Comparing the United States and Italy is always a reckless exercise, as the two countries are so different.

It does not seem impossible to me, however, perhaps at the cost of some simplification, to draw a trajectory for the American right not dissimilar to that covered by the Italian right.

There is no doubt that the 1990s Forza Italia — the optimistic, globalist and Westernized party of the liberal revolution — explicitly drew inspiration from the process of ideological repositioning of the U.S. Republican Party that had come to maturity with Ronald Reagan‘s entry into the White House in 1981.

An increasingly violent movement of rebellion has been mounting in U.S. public opinion, as well as in Italy.

And even after the historical trauma of 9/11, George W. Bush still continued to move largely within the utopian-liberal parameters that had been defined in the previous two decades. “We believe that liberty is the design of nature; we believe that liberty is the direction of history,” he said, for example, in November 2003. And he added that the processes of trade liberalization and economic integration of the planet would necessarily lead to the establishment of rights and democracy on a global scale, starting with China.

Beneath the often vehement rhetorical conflicts, by the way, the Republicans largely converged on these criteria with the Democrats — with the result of depriving voters of the possibility of choosing between policy options that were really different from each other.

The failure of liberalism

We are still trying to understand what happened between the end of the first decade of the 21st century and the beginning of the second. My working hypothesis is that the utopian-liberal order failed to deliver on its promises, and that its failure made its consistent traits of inhumanity, its reliance on a nonexistent abstract, disembodied, decontextualized, perfectly moral and perfectly rational human being, emerge ever more clearly.

This is no small paradox for a liberalism that wants to be — and in so many ways really is — the most humane of ideologies. It is quite evident, however, how in the years of Barack Obama’s presidency, an increasingly violent movement of rebellion has been mounting in U.S. public opinion, as well as in Italy and in virtually all Western democracies.

A motion that traditional political forces have been unable to understand, address, and reabsorb, and which has given rise to a plethora of disparate movements, such as the Tea Party in the United States.

What has become increasingly urgent is a rethinking of progressivism.

The “Trumpization” of the Republican Party, then, Trump’s shift from an eccentric and marginal position to a central and hegemonic one, can be read as the way in which the U.S. political right adapted to the new historical climate, tuned in to the insurgents, gathered them into an electorate, and finally brought them into the institutions.

What about the left? The left has lined up to defend the utopian-liberal order, hoping its crisis was only temporary and the protest the result of a fleeting moment of weakness.

But it is less and less likely that this gamble will turn out to be a winning one.

In the meantime the years pass, and what has become increasingly urgent is a rethinking of progressivism that is again in harmony with our age — all the more so because the left has a no small handicap compared to the right.

The right has been able to make its case for the nation — which, although much weaker than in the 19th and 20th centuries, nevertheless remains a daily presence in the lives of billions of human beings. Yet the left does not have an alternative and equally strong collective identity on which it can lean.