The concentric attacks on the conductor, guilty of esteeming Meloni, reveal the tic of the left: aren’t you one of us? Then you have no cultural dignity. The usual vice which, however, will force it to always remain a minority in the country
On the case of Beatrice Venezi, which exploded in recent days after her appointment as director of the La Fenice theater in Venice, the old, bitter contrasts between right and left returned for a moment. The musician cannot be forgiven for not belonging to the left-wing cultural world and having indeed repeatedly declared her preference for right-wing values.
And his closeness to Giorgia Meloni is not forgiven. Starting from this prejudice, all his competence, his curriculum and his credibility in the musical field are destroyed. I will not repeat the things that many have said and written about this appointment, about the campaign of lynching and denigration that has taken place and I will not even make comparisons with other positions, other events. Instead, I take the opportunity of this new hunt for the enemy to be defeated to trace the ideological residues on which it is based and understand how much they weigh today and in what way.
Right and left are two political cultures historically centered on conflict. Especially in Italy where they were burdened with the historical, militant and ideological legacy of fascism and communism, they were conceived in the name of radical opposition. There was, of course, no shortage of crossings, intersections and confluences, but their opposition has always been nourished by a spirit of denial which is a permanent form of civil conflict, even cold and not directly violent. Right and left were the continuation of the war by other means. And the very abuse of the obsolete label of “fascists” confirms this.
Of those two ideal and ideological categories, as we know, very little remains in our present, because political identities are scarce and faded. However, an imprint has remained, or perhaps an imprinting, of that original animosity, and it dates back every time they accuse each other of preaching and practicing hatred, contempt and intolerance. Even in their more fluid and less militant version, as for example in the magmatic social world, that hostile and drastically negative representation that accompanies the denigration of the “enemy” remains. A specific form of hostility typical of the right and a specific form of hostility typical of the left have remained as a legacy and in circulation. On the right, as we know, there is frequent denunciation of left-wing cultural hegemony, attacks and sometimes insults towards opponents, perhaps still defined as communists; and, together with this baggage of hostility, victimization is frequent but not unjustified on the right (it does not arise from nothing). The combative right fights the left with the aim of defeating it, unseating it, denouncing its abuses. The left, on the other hand, does not want to defeat the opponent, but to eliminate him. The fixed afterthought is that the enemy has no right to exist and speak out; he doesn’t have the qualifications, he should be disqualified a priori, he shouldn’t even be listened to and refuted but he should be canceled from the start. There is not the idea of a clash between two opposing parties, but the claim that one party is judging and the other judged, permanently; the verdict is written a priori, the enemy is horrible and arouses indignation, not dissent. It should be suppressed, not criticized. Therefore, if eliminating the enemy is the final verb of this way of thinking and acting, the substitutes in a regime of peace, freedom and democracy are censoring, impeding, chasing away, boycotting, silencing. Which almost never happens with the roles reversed. And, finally, pretend that the adversary does not exist, condemn him to civil death, never take into consideration what he says, writes, does, thinks.
All this is extremely powerful when the reference context is the cultural world, understood in the broadest and most all-encompassing sense, of entertainment, publishing, art and thought, music, school and university. That world is considered by innate and undisputed privilege to be of exclusive relevance to them, except that they indignantly and sarcastically reject the accusation of exercising a hegemony over culture; and therefore anyone who emerges into that world, anyone who is promoted, especially by a right-wing government, to a role in those fields is by definition an intruder, a dupe, unfit, incapable, ignorant. To be expelled like a foreign body. The difference between the right and the left in relations with the adversary is essentially this: the right has a thousand defects and inconsistencies, is generally less attentive and sensitive to cultural issues, often cruder and in some cases vulgar. But he fights his opponent, he wants to beat him, he doesn’t want to eliminate him a priori.
On the left there is always a form of viral indignation, like a buzz that rises and acquires the strength of self-persuasion by growing in tone and voices; no critical and self-critical sense, no rebellion against these word of mouth messages; sometimes all it takes is a trade union acronym, an association, a party and the conventio ad excludendum arises which in many cases takes on the appearance of a para-mafia organisation. All this condemns the left to remain a faction and never be able to speak to the rest of the country. That claim to superiority is his condemnation to political-electoral inferiority and the propensity to defeat. The right, so full of defects, ultimately becomes preferable to the livid, acidic, intolerant sectarianism of the opposing camp. And after shouting make way for young people, space for women, in front of a young woman who grew up in the world of music and not politics, the only thing they can say is: kick her out, she’s not worthy. A shame, yes, a misery, but theirs.
