Neo No More

The force that supplanted Christian Democracy in Italy is no more. After the time-honoured manner of the British Conservative Party, it was the vehicle whereby the local machines of traditionalist, religious, agrarian and related politics were taken over by committed Liberals and their voters told that they had nowhere else to go. Those Liberals were of the fiercely secular, "free"-marketeering type normal on the Continent and exemplified in Britain by Nick Clegg, and were therefore, as the heirs to the unification of Italy, closely allied to the overtly Fascist National Alliance, Berlusconi's coalition partner. Extreme nationalism as interwoven with extreme secular liberalism has of course been routine from nineteenth-century Germany and Italy, though the era of the great dictators, to Geert Wilders and to the present Israeli Cabinet.

National co-ordination was in the hands of Sandro Bondi, a former Communist Party stalwart. Thus was the Berlusconi movement located firmly within the international phenomenon of a Marxism which had merely changed its ending so that the bourgeoisie won, but which had retained intact its Marxist dialectical materialism, its Leninist vanguard elitism and identification of religious or other interests as "Useful Idiots", its Trotskyist entryism and belief in the permanent revolution, and yet also its Stalinist belief that the dictatorship of the victorious class should be built in a superstate and exported, including by force of arms, throughout the world while vanguard elites owe allegiance to that superstate rather than to their own countries. Berlusconi and his court comprised one such vanguard elite.

Others included the Partido Popular, the Irish Progressive Democrats, ACT New Zealand, and the Australian Liberal Party as reconceived by John Howard, to name but a few. At the centre was the faction that made George Bush its brainless Manchurian Candidate within the Republican Party while paying feudal tribute to the Clintons within the Democratic Party. Remind me, how are they all doing these days? Even the takeover of Gaullism by Sarkozy and of German Christian Democracy by Merkel would now seem to be in serious trouble.

Nevertheless, the archetype of bourgeois secular-capitalist insurgency in all its nastiness, Likud, is not only going strong, but in a classic coalition with the secular "free" marketeers who want to strip both an ethnic and a religious minority of their citizenship.

The present Irish Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister has never left Official Sinn Féin, nor has it ever left him, instead simply following and then leading it as it renamed itself the Workers' Party, which renamed itself Democratic Left, and which then took over the central organisation and ideology of the Irish Labour Party, all the while with no confirmed decommissioning of arms until 8th February 2010, within the last 24 hours of the existence of the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning. The ailing Fine Gael, humiliated at the recent Presidential Election, is clearly now in the sights of these Leninist gangsters. They have already succeeded in turning into what was once called "the Bishops' Party" into a vehicle for the most militant anti-Catholicism, even preparing to break by force of law the Seal of the Confessional, as only the regimes most violently hostile to the Faith have ever done.

And the present President of the European Commission was just such a figure when he was Prime Minister of Portugal: a rabidly "free"-marketeering supporter of Bush foreign policy who had previously been a Maoist. Yes, a Maoist. Indeed, he is still just such a figure today, busily staging coups in Italy, Greece, and others yet to come.

But will any such coup be necessary in Britain? Our vanguard elite was comprised of all three of New Labour, the Notting Hill set, and the Orange Book Tendency. If David Cameron had secured an overall majority, or if David Miliband had won the Labour Leadership, then all three of those would now be in government. As it is, two of them are in government while the third spends its time undermining and destabilising the Opposition in the Government interest. Should that present Opposition become the Government, then action against that ascendancy of anti-euro Keynesians might very well be forthcoming.

Not that that ascendancy need be without allies and friends, notably among those whom this whole process had previously dispossessed. Most of the Italian Left has been subsumed into the Democratic Party, which has elected as its President Rosy Bindi, late of Azione Cattolica and Democrazia Cristiana. Her election, together with that of her preferred candidate for Leader, is an immensely positive sign, and she herself deserves much credit for having reached out in this way, when we consider that she lost at least one close friend to the Red Brigades. Their erstwhile supporters exist on the fringes of her major new party. But its internal electoral results leave no doubt as to where its centre of gravity lies, as to what is its mainstream.

The Italian Democrats sit with the British Labour Party in the European Parliament, in a Group which has changed its name in order to accommodate, especially, those Democrats with Christian Democratic backgrounds. Let us hope that this fraternity will have a significant impact on the party famously "owing more to Methodism than to Marx", the historic British vehicle of Social Catholicism, and still the preferred electoral choice of the clear majority of British Catholics.

Many post-War Italian Christian Democrats identified strongly with the Attlee Government's domestic programme, although they also wished to see an Italy outside both NATO and the Soviet Bloc, a bridge between East and West. Domestically and internationally, and complete with the strong admiration for British Labour at home, such was also Jacob Kaiser's post-War vision for a reunited Germany. A vision, sadly, never realised. Not yet, anyway.