False Equations
As an American who has lived for almost two decades in Italy it has been interesting for me to observe the love/hate relationship that Italians have with Americans and the distortions that derive from it.
There is an innocent vice among many who love to write to find similitudes in things that for others are perhaps less evident. I, too, admit to finding a certain pleasure in elaborating such parallelisms. One that comes to mind today is the juxtaposition of two argumentations that I believe to be false, but that, with the amount of attention and repetition that they have received, are now becoming accepted as norms.
The first regards the analogies that are being made with insistence between the American Democratic Party and the PDS in Italy. (The PDS stands for the Democratic Party of the Left and is the former Communist party.) The Italian vice prime minister, Walter Veltroni, is the major promoter of this line of thought. I find a certain incongruity in this sudden embracing of things that are American among those who only recently called themselves Communists. In all the years I have been in Italy, I have never heard mention of the role that Americans played in the Liberation of that country after WWII which is celebrated every year on April 25th. The few times that I have read L’Unita, the Communist party newspaper which Mr. Veltroni was once the editor of, never was an occasion lost for criticizing the ways, means, and customs of my compatriots, the American government, and all that our country represents.
Perhaps I should no longer be astounded by the way everything seems to be easily capsized in Italy as if it were normal to be one way today and completely the opposite tomorrow. Still, I couldn’t help being dumbfounded on the night of the victory of the elections in April of 1996, which brought the present government into power, when Massimo D’Alema, leader of the PDS, leaned over to grab their flag and pointing to the old Communist symbol in the bottom corner, proclaimed that it was time to eliminate both the hammer and the sickle! I couldn’t help but wonder how his constituents would react, those who had just voted him into power proudly carrying that very flag with those very symbols.
I also find it difficult to comprehend why Mr. Veltroni insists on finding similarities between his party and the party which is now in the White House in the U.S. The American Democratic Party didn’t change its name the day before yesterday. Nor has it ever received funding from the former Soviet Union in order to support its subsistence. Its heroes are Thomas Jefferson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I don’t know what mental contortions I would have to force upon myself to find a relationship between them and Italian Communist figures like Gramsci and Togliatti.
The second sophism which has been popular as of late is the one which would have Clinton as the major exponent of Reagan’s economic policy. The promoter of this theory is Dinesh D’Souza, author of an article published by Forbes magazine in which he maintains that Clinton has no economic policy because he doesn’t need one, having inherited the benefits of those of Reagan and Bush.
It’s clear that every time there is a change of power in a healthy alternating democracy the newcomers do not start from scratch. They create a new beginning from what is left of the successes and failures of those who occupied the office before them. It’s obvious that the seeds of the present situation in the U.S. were planted during the eighties along with, however, a budget deficit without historical precedence. Nevertheless, is also true that the present rosy situation with the stock market reaching for the stars and low unemployment and inflation figures was not quite so perfumed when Clinton arrived at the White House.
Italian journalist Paolo Guzzanti has been falsely accused of being the spokesman of the same doctrine proposed by D’Souza. However, although Guzzanti recognizes the merits of Reagan, he does not belittle those of Clinton. He offers a vision that is, if anything, balanced. And even though he doesn’t limit his observations of this sort of inheritance as an exclusively American phenomenon, he certainly doesn’t make the error of seeing paragons where they don’t exist between the Italian government and the American one. He chooses another which is much more on target, and that is, between Bill Clinton’s America and Tony Blair’s Great Britain. Recognizing that both leaders had the luxury of finding themselves with "the indispensable work of bringing the economic system back to the principles of reality" already accomplished, he never underestimates the merits of the two leaders in knowing how to build on what they had found, calling Blair "the ‘reordinator’ of what was done by the Thatcherian right" and Clinton "the distributor and corrector of Reaganian development." Nor does he make D’Souza’s error which would have Clinton, in regards to the economic sector, as the sleeping conductor of a locomotive that moves along by itself because the automatic pilot system was switched on by Reagan! On the contrary, he even admits that Clinton owes something of his electoral victory to the fact that he knew how to embrace some of the identify and policies of his adversaries, just as "Reagan, the great communicator, was able to win a smashing victory with the votes of the Reagan Democrats."
If we accept the absurd logic of those who would have us see consonances where they truly don’t exist, as Veltroni and D’Souza would have us do, if we embrace the two dissertations and decide to sum the two together, the resulting syllogism would be rather amusing: If the PDS is equal to the Democratic Party, and the Clinton’s Democratic Party in terms of economic policy is equal to the Republican Party, it follows that the PDS is equal to the Republican Party.
Two wrongs don’t make a right, as the saying goes, and neither does the sum of two illogical reasonings make a logical one. However, if Veltroni were willing to accept and embrace the above equation, I might be willing to keep my mouth shut.
May 1998
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