“Duce! Duce!”
There are, perhaps, a few downsides to PR:
Italy’s new parliament met for the first time today with applause for Rome’s mayor-elect, Gianni Alemanno, a day after followers celebrated his triumph with straight-arm salutes and fascist-era chants.
Alemanno, a former neo-fascist youth leader, took 54% of the vote in a run-off on Sunday and Monday, crushing his rival, Francesco Rutelli, a deputy prime minister in the last, centre-left government.
Silvio Berlusconi, who won a general election earlier this month, welcomed the latest evidence of Italy’s leap to the right by declaring: “We are the new Falange”. Although he took care to wrap his remark in a classical context, his choice of words appeared to be a nod and a wink to his most extreme supporters.
This is the sort of thing which inclines me towards some form of hybrid system. The mess of full PR and Italian politics - whereby neo-fascists get in government on the basis of a dodgy rightist coalition - leaves me cold. Far better, I suspect, to increase the representative power of a body through an element of PR, while providing strong enough majorities that government’s aren’t forced to rely on the far-right for power.
Apologies for the lack of detailed posting; I have a long essay to write, by about 9.00 tomorrow. Although I should have a brief piece up on why Kate Hoey’s support of Boris matters very little later on.
“I don’t know what the left wants [but] we are ready,” he told reporters. “If they want conflicts, I have 300,000 men always on hand.”
Ah, I love the Northern League. They’re like a more unhinged version of Combat 18.
What about dodgy leftist coalitions?
What about them? The more mainstream factions in those are, at least, more likely to be palatable than those in rightist coalitions. I don’t like the idea of either coalition, but I’d prefer one of social democrats and a few eurocommunists, to one of hardline New Rightists and several overt fascists.
If one wishes to see election victories and government majorities in the centre ground, then FPTP or some majoritarian or weighted system is required. If instead one wishes to see fringe parties (such as the Greens) gain power, one is likely to support a system that would deliver coalitions.
My argument is this: to espouse the benefits of Green GLA members having undue influence on the London Mayor’s budget does not correlate with a belief that majoritarian rule is best. No system keeps fringe right-wing parties out whilst allowing fringe leftist parties to yield power in coalitions. Therefore to promote coalitions between mainstream and more radical socialist parties is surely to accept that voters might elect coalitions between moderate and radical right-wing parties. To oppose one but not the other does a great disservice to those individuals who vote for parties moderately either side of the left/right divide, only to find their representatives hopping into bed with the radicals they voted against. You can’t have it both ways.
Far-left groups can do precious little damage as they are either waiting for a revolution or to get their hands on the levers of power. This is why the SWP are a joke instead of a threat.
Far-right groups encourage bigotry and hatred regardless of their position, as internal strife is their oxygen. This is why the BNP are a threat instead of a joke.
It’s perfectly arguable that far left groups, while waiting for revolutions, preach intolerance and hatred. And waiting for a revolution, history tells us, is a threat.
No, history tells us that they’re largely wasting their time. There has been an orthodox Marxist party in every Western European nation, so far as I am aware, which largely spent their time educating people about historical dialectics and so on while awaiting some imminent cataclysm that has not proven forthcoming.
The far-right, meanwhile, encourages actual violence throughout Europe. Where the BNP goes racial violence arises around it and the experiences of blacks in the 1970s with the National Front is another testament to this. You could argue that they preach “Intolerance and hatred” in the same way as the far left but you’d largely be wrong, unless we are discussing groups such as Class War {which is mostly an unintentional joke and only made two public showings, both of which involved a police presence that was easily capable of handling a crowd ten times the size} then we are talking about Marxists, who generally include at least some number of students.
The average student in European history has not been from a working class background and the number of far-leftists who do not in fact belong to the proletariat is considerable. Tony Benn is far from atypical.
So it could hardly be tenable for them to promote active and immediate class warfare, given that this would involve their meetings degenerating into carnage. Which happens anyway, but not for the same reasons. To suggest that they are hateful and intolerant makes as much sense as saying that the BNP lets in blacks. If that were the case matters would become rapidly unsustainable.
Intolerant not, perhaps, to individuals… unless they owned money or power or prestige,
As aforementioned, the doyenne of the left and figurehead which all save the CNWP admire is none other than the man once identifiable as the 2nd Viscount Stangate. I suspect that he may have been less than skint. As for power, well that hardly explains the Stalinists. Or Maoists, for that matter. And I imagine that much of the left deems Lenin as in possession of prestige.
And if we kick it old-school, orthodox Marxist, well that hardly helps your case either. They just saw things as inevitable and although they had to contribute to the process it was a revolution of the masses that was to follow, you didn’t have to agree with whether that was right or not, simply consider it inevitable. They at least liked to consider themselves objective and devoid of emotional involvement, for the most part. You wouldn’t find them promoting the violent end of specific individuals, at most they would agitate against the classes and hold people up as examples of extravagance, perhaps, but not as targets.
And mostly they just read.
Seriously, they shouted down all suggestions of actually doing anything for a very long time in most countries. The expectant passivity of the orthodox Marxites and the consensual paralysis which ensued was one of the main reasons that the NSDP were able to come to power in Germany and in Italy they didn’t even support the revolution when it actually kicked off, leading to it ending quite abruptly and the former socialist and severe revisionist Mussolini coming to power later on.