The second highest office of State under attack for a hot adventure of his son; a public TV show RAI canceled because its author used "inappropriate language"; two opera directors in the storm (and one of them fired) for their opinions on Puccini; a minister challenged at the Salone del Libro so much that she was denied the chance to speak...
These are just some of the reefs against which the keel of the first right-wing government in republican Italy is dangerously grinding. All cases connected by a single common thread: Wokeist ideology, in its many manifestations.
Welcome to the age of Culture War
In America, where these phenomena are reaching maturity, they speak about Culture War. In fact, it had to be realized that there is now no basis for dialogue with those who consider you "literally Hitler" because you disagree with them. You don't think a male athlete with lipstick and a perm can declare himself female and compete (unfairly) with female athletes with double-X chromosomes? You are a transofobe, literally Hitler. Do you think it is normal to have summer temperatures in July? You are a climate denier, literally Hitler. Do you not believe that a woman has the "right" to "withdraw consent" after consummating consensual intercourse? You are a sexist, literally Hitler. And what links this (very incomplete) centon of statements is not the ending ("literally Hitler") but the premise: the negation of a factual and empirically ascertainable reality. If the Party tells you that 2 and 2 makes 5 you must say that it makes 5.
Subjectivism is in fact the basis of wokeism, the backbone of the ideological apparatus of the globalized Western Left. One's perception matters more than facts, and their perception matters more than yours, because they always have more reason to be heard than you, who are a trivial and despicable ordinary person. From this state of fact, the bitter reckoning: there is no longer any possibility of dialogue with those who point their fingers at you and psalm "you are the rapist" in your face just because you were born male and straight. Enough is enough, and you have to dig up the hatchet.
À la guerre comme à la guerre
In the United States, the most fierce part of the Republican Right has realized this and drawn the necessary consequences. Policy choices are thus beginning to be evaluated not just on the basis of the moment, but from the perspective of a long-term strategy at the cultural level. So for example, the sharp observer Tyler Durden calls two of the latest measures of the Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives "culture war" actions: the first is the prohibition on the Defense Department from paying with public money for "abortion trips" by its employees who intend to go at the expense of the federal budget to terminate a pregnancy in a State with permissive legislation; the second is the exclusion from health benefits paid for by the department those for so-called "gender transition." Proponents of these amendments to the budget bill were clear that the goal, far beyond contingency (in fact, they involve a drop in the bucket of the 886.3 billion in Defense spending), is far-reaching: to prevent the politicization in a radical sense of the U.S. military.
Indeed, anti-Wokeist policies are not meant to get a lot of likes on social media or earn a few decimal points in weekly TV ratings polls. They are part of a long-term strategy aimed at undermining, nullifying and finally overturning that "moral superiority" that the leftists have won over the past decades, thanks in part to the short-sightedness of conservatives who have tended to underestimate and dismiss as "rearguard battles" the Wokeist demands, considering them at most contentions granted to the political counterpart on laughable "matters of color" with which to make captatio benevolentiae in the name of "dialogue." But where the dialogue with the Wokeist front goes we have seen at the top of this article... The fuchsia-rainbow Leftists cash the check inadvertently cut by the little-warned Conservatives and immediately return on the offensive, insensitive to any call for dialogue and institutional respect, having placed their pawns on the chessboard and being able to strike the enemy from positions of superiority.
By contrast, the fruits of a well-orchestrated anti-Woke campaign were seen in the U.S. local elections and the national elections in Hungary, with DeSantis and Orban, the two champions of the anti-Woke Front, credited with unprecedented electoral success for Conservatives, plus rising voter turnout. A counter-trend figure, indicative of the fact that the average man in the street, the one who is most tempted today by abstentionism out of distrust and discouragement, will return to vote if he finds a politician who truly represents him, much to the disappointment of the globalist agenda.
Sun Tzu applied to the Culture War
Anti-Woke policies, especially when the Conservative Front is in the control room, serve to consolidate power in the long run, including and especially by cutting the claws off what is effectively the Left's only remaining political weapon. Refusing, for example, to allow liberal indignation to be allowed to hand out patents of legitimacy means showing that this indignation is not representative of the general interest, as it claims to be. It means demonstrating that History is not following a trajectory launched toward an ineluctable destiny, but that so-called "progress" can be reversed and one can turn back by recognizing that some "progress" was actually mistakes. It means restoring the principle of objectivity by removing anyone's personal beliefs from standing as a source of right erga omnes. In terms of strategy, it means drawing the enemy out of its bases, striking at its logistical apparatus, crippling its ability to react and interdicting its easiest battlefields. Just read Sun Tzu and apply it to politics.
Instead, the Conservative Front in Italy is losing opportunities to counterattack one after another. It almost seems as if it has chosen the worm strategy described by Nietzsche, which trampled wriggles and curls in the hope of avoiding being crushed a second time. A hope as vain as ever: the Wokeist Front will never stop until it has the heads of its enemies on its plate, like Salome. It is time for Conservatives in Italy, too, to understand this and get over it: mercy is dead.
Editor of the Machiavelli Study Center's blog "Belfablog," Emanuele Mastrangelo has been editor-in-chief of "Storia in Rete" since 2006. A military-historical cartographer, he is the author of several books (with Enrico Petrucci, Iconoclastia. La pazzia contagiosa della cancel culture che sta distruggendo la nostra storia e Wikipedia. L'enciclopedia libera e l'egemonia dell'informazione).
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