American Liberals Can’t Help Themselves in Talking about Giorgia Meloni

Newly elected Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni will be the first woman to lead Italy, a fact that is producing far less than the usual “girl power” cheers. That relative quiet is undoubtedly due to the fact that Italy now joins Great Britain (Margaret Thatcher, Theresa May, Liz Truss) and Germany (Angela Merkel) in having chosen female heads of the elected government only from parties of the center-Right or Right. Meloni is undeniably a figure of the social Right.

Is she a conservative? Is she a fascist or fascist-adjacent? It is always tricky to try to put the European Right on the American political spectrum, because the free-market Right in Europe — to the extent it exists, which in some countries it barely does — tends to be socially moderate or liberal, and the social-issue Right in Europe is often socialist-leaning on economic issues, or at least much more big-government, pro-welfare-state, and anti-business than the American Right. A Buckley/Reagan-style fusionism is thin on the ground in Europe, especially on the Continent. American conservatives may rationally note that, say, Viktor Orbán is closer to our way of seeing the world than are his domestic political opponents, but that does not mean that Orbán is one of us or a model for American politicians to emulate. My initial impression of Meloni is tempered by the same cautions: Conservatives can greet her as an ally on some things without blindly embracing everything that comes with the notoriously dysfunctional heritage of Italian politics. Italy is, after all, not just the country where fascism was invented in the 1920s; it was also the European democracy with the largest home-grown Marxist terror group in the post-war era, the Red Brigades of the 1960s and 1970s. There are reasons why Italy has for so long been proverbial for the instability of its governments, many of them quarrelsome and ideologically incoherent coalitions. And it is an uncomfortable truth of political coalitions everywhere that successful leaders do not expend a lot of their political capital denouncing the past sins of their own side of the political spectrum within their own country.

For her part, Meloni said recently that Italy had “handed fascism over to history for decades now” and “unambiguously condemns the suppression of democracy and the ignominious anti-Jewish laws” of the 1940s, and she told the international media that her party, Brothers of Italy, now resembles more “the British Tories, the US Republicans and the Israeli Likud.” She is a devotee of J. R. R. Tolkien and, in a fiery 2019 speech at the World Congress of Families that strikes a lot of conservative-populist notes familiar to Americans, she quoted G. K. Chesterton:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdfNSF-U6zc

These are all good signs — few mid-20th-century writers were as profoundly un-fascist in their worldview as Tolkien and Chesterton — but, of course, politicians say things all the time (including when catering to an international audience) that don’t fully reflect their political thinking. When Fidel Castro visited the United States in 1959, he toured the Lincoln Memorial and paid tribute to the first Republican president.

All that being said, American and European liberals and progressives can’t help themselves not only in calling Meloni a fascist, but in explaining why they think she is. As Michael notes, there is a reflexive horror of anyone who is skeptical of the European Union and hostile to mass immigration, and Meloni’s popularity in Italy has much to do as well with the failures of the incumbent government. The Guardian says that Meloni must be a fascist owing to her “hardline views on immigration and homosexuality.”

France24, in discussing her love of Tolkien, quotes an anthropologist who says that “far-right movements around the world ‘have always been fascinated by the images of manly Nordic heroes found in Tolkien’s work,'” which of course ignores the fact that those heroes constantly lose. They invariably are crushed by their failure to work cooperatively with other races, are destroyed by their own hubris and corruption, or are — in the end — rescued either by deus ex machina appeals for divine intervention or by the stolid, humble, and quasi-libertarian hobbits, who act as a stand-in for simple English farmers and gardeners. Meloni used to dress up as a hobbit and attend “Hobbit Camp,” from which you can draw your own conclusions. The France24 article is reduced to arguing that “the Hobbits’ sentimental attachment to their unspoiled Shire has been described as a rallying call for xenophobia and the rejection of modernity,” adding that, “according to such interpretations, Tolkien’s oeuvre provides metaphorical inspiration for Meloni’s obsessive defence of ‘Christian civilisation,’ traditional family values and national borders, which she sees as being menaced by globalisation, societal changes and immigration.” Christian civilization? Families? Borders? The horror!

Then we get NYU professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat in the Atlantic, laboring to connect a few old Meloni quotes from her youth with guilt by association to her party’s (undeniably bad) history. Which may be a can of worms that Democrats such as Joe Biden here in the U.S. would not want to open. Still, this might be a thoughtful effort if Ben-Ghiat could help herself from repeatedly injecting this sort of thing:

• “Meloni is comparable to [French rightist Marine] Le Pen in other ways. Both are examples of what political scientists call ‘genderwashing,’ when female politicians adopt a nonthreatening image to blunt the force of their extremism.”
• “The natalist obsession of Il Duce’s 20-year rule, with its ‘Battle for Births,’ has survived in the Brothers of Italy’s present-day concern about boosting the birth rate, its proposal to link social-welfare assistance to mothers and those engaged in child care, and its attempts to limit reproductive rights.”
• “Hillary Clinton also remarked on how right-wing parties can sometimes appear better at promoting women. Women like Meloni ‘are protected by patriarchy,’ she said, ‘because they are often the first to support the fundamental pillars of male power and privilege.’ Meloni’s party slogan—’God, Fatherland, Family’—celebrates those very pillars of power.”

Female leaders are misusing their gender if they don’t have left-leaning politics and stand for faith, family, and the nation? Anyone who wants social-welfare assistance to mothers is like Mussolini? This is what you’re running with? As with Biden’s efforts to define “ultra-MAGA” to include everyone from pro-lifers to supporters of Paul Ryan’s budget frameworks, this kind of thing tells us that American liberals and progressives just can’t help themselves in redefining “fascism” as anything any conservative anywhere believes in — or, indeed, that they think anybody who likes Christianity, the family, or patriotism should be treated as if they are a fascist.