Tag Archives: Giorgia Meloni

The womb of the 20th century conceived a monstrous form of government called “liberal democracy”—called so inaccurately, for it is neither liberal nor democratic. It is a soft totalitarianism that, because it advances beneath the tattered banner of progress, claims the moral authority to declare all alternative political arrangements illegitimate. In the liberal democratic world system, every nation has the right to self-determination only so long as it is determined to become a liberal democracy. In this maximalist war footing against its ideological competitors, it is not unlike Bolshevism.

“Communism and liberal democracy proved to be all-unifying entities compelling their followers how to think, what to do, how to evaluate events, what to dream, and what language to use,” the Polish philosopher Ryszard Legutko wrote in his 2016 book The Demon in Democracy. Like communism, liberal democracy assumed for itself the mantle of universalism and thus became decidedly illiberal in that it ceased to acknowledge the possibility of different political systems. All movements since then have been a rush toward the universal homogenous state.

It is for this reason that liberal democracies across the West unified this weekend in denouncing the democratic will of the Italian people, who have just propelled Giorgia Meloni and her right-wing Italian nationalist party to electoral victory. Man is a symbolic animal, and Meloni’s victory is seen as a symbolic rejection of Western liberalism. Whether she lives up to that potential is yet to be seen. But the electricity of the moment is palpable: the Italians have voted against the times.