By Simone Bandini
“I believe that it is easier to establish a despotic government among one population, in which conditions are equal (of equality, ed.), than with another and I think that a government of this kind, once it was firmly established would not only oppress men, but would end up robbing them of many of humanity’s main attributes. Despotism seems to me, therefore, particularly fearful in times of democracy “.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, II (1835)
It is said that those who make (or those who make) history – whether it be their personal story or political actions with collective results – are ‘extraordinarily unconscious’. Or rather that they do not properly realize that they are a contingency themselves, the reality that happens, the epiphany of a myth and a golden flower of their civilization. This is because revolutions happen when the change has already nestled and grafted deeply into the personal, social and collective consciousness; they are but the material manifestation of a condition that is already real, changed. An adjustment, a readjustment and never really a romantic and impromptu coup de hand, a coup de théâtre that upsets the political status quo. The great men of history are tout court actors, inspired and transcendent interpreters of the flow of events.
Who knows if such a figure already lives in Italy and in Europe – whether he is a man, an aristocratic or a popular movement – in this dark time that sees the transfiguration of representative democracies into ‘virtual’ ones, of people’s republics supported by the vote in self-legitimated global technocracies, by definition, never contested for weakness, emptiness or daze.
That we were in an advanced stage of decay has been evident for some time. Certain Italian problems, albeit with a global root: social and cultural homologation, the official promotion of fluid and undifferentiated thought, the neo-bureaucratic and centralizing power of statism, the limitations of freedom imposed sub iudice of the fetish leaders of the people, the devaluation of the work ethic, especially entrepreneurial, in favour of patronage welfare policies, the real lack of measures to support the birth rate and the family, the mounting ecological problems resulting from a capitalism collapsed into a merely mercantile and profit logic. A liberalism that has even lost the sectarian ethic of the ‘Pilgrims’ who crossed the ocean on the Mayflower to colonize a flourishing but virtuous land, where the principles of the economy could descend from spiritual, moral concepts, and were not an exclusive and bleak theodicy of profit.
It has always been the economic, ethical and political task of this magazine to want to defend freedom in the sense that this editorial group considers highest, promoting the identity, self-determination and the enterprising spirit of our valleys, of local communities – encouraging culture and proximity economy, in order to tell and testify to the uncorrupted uniqueness of their nature – so that they can continue to exist and defend themselves from the global assault of supranational consortia, whose operational eldorado is today the unconditional purchase of all Eurodollars typical products, brands and national and local assets. But the ‘forces of evil’ will not win; you will hear drumbeats, games of dexterity and love, the ancient melodies will resound in our valleys.
If the rise of equality of conditions, as Alexis de Tocqueville has already pointed out, was a historiographical datum and a certainty already in the nineteenth century, the great ideologies of the twentieth century died out and the second millennium passed in the new digital civilization, the state of equality is today pure globalist undifferentiation. And like any ‘undifferentiated’, it must be assigned to its rightful place: to a ‘general’ landfill.
Let the valleys and local communities rise again. And let the taste for independence and freedom echo again.
Recommended listening: “Always on my mind”, Elvis Presley