When Giorgia Meloni and her coalition partners won the Italian election last week, a clip of her talking about what she stood for went viral. In it, she made clear that she stood for certain identities – identities that are under attack from Italy and Europe’s progressive movements:
Everything that defines us is now an enemy for those who would like us to no longer have an identity and to simply be perfect consumer slaves. And so, they attack national identity, they attack religious identity, they attack gender identity, they attack family identity. I can’t define myself as Italian, Christian, woman, mother. No. I must be citizen x, gender x, parent 1, parent 2. I must be a number. Because when I am only a number, when I no longer have an identity or roots, then I will be the perfect slave at the mercy of financial speculators. The perfect consumer. . . . We will defend God, family, and country.
Meloni’s speech confirmed that the primary issue in politics, the issue which decides the difference between Right and Left, what is termed the aligning issue, is now (in Europe at least) identity. The aligning issue was for many decades economic – the measure of redistribution and the power of the state. Yet since the emergence of the True Finns and other nationalist parties, there has been a rapid swing away from economics as the central question in European politics and towards identity. The new divide initially pitted nationalists (or “somewheres,” as David Goodhart put it) against transnationalists (the “anywheres.”) This divide fueled Brexit.
Yet as Meloni makes clear, that simple divide has accreted many other questions to it, which is what makes it the aligning issue. If you’re against traditional gender identities, you’re on one side. If you’re for traditional religion, you’re on the other. These are all questions of identity one way or the other. So if you’re an anywhere, a member of the laptop class as we might put it, you are in favor of Covid lockdowns, green new deals, and public-private partnerships. If you’re a somewhere, you are worried about your children’s education conflicting with your values, for protectionism and industrial policy, and against welfare cuts.
So much is already well-known, but what Meloni’s statement makes clear is that the somewheres are now deeply distrustful of market liberalism. Where once the principle of consumer sovereignty was seen as strengthening the power of the individual against economic forces far larger than him or her, consumers are now viewed as little more than a puppet of those forces, compelled to give their meager incomes to megacorporations that have no local roots. (Indeed, a shift of focus from consumer to producer — in opposition to what Adam Smith taught us — is increasingly characteristic of conservative economics.)
Of course, there is a history of such suspicion in continental Europe, which sadly often manifested itself in antisemitism. It is a short journey from “financial speculators” to “rootless cosmopolitans” and other code words with dangerous consequences.
Meanwhile, on the other side, there is much more of an embrace of markets, but as tools towards an end rather than discovery devices (a Blairite view of markets, in other words.) Thus, the liberal Free Democrats are welcome coalition partners in Germany with the Social Democrats and the Greens. Indeed, Emmanuel Macron, of all people, might be seen as the champion of European market liberalism. God help us.
This takeover of market economics by the Left, of course, comes at a heavy price. Central insights like the seen and the unseen or that of Economics in One Lesson are forgotten. Everything becomes technocratic. Regulation is not a dirty word. And so on. This move helps explain the reaction of “markets” to Liz Truss’ “mini-budget” in the UK (I’ll have more to say on that at Capital Matters soon.)
So, despite Meloni’s admirable opposition to the wokification of Europe, we need to keep an eye on her economic policies. By all accounts, she may be persuaded that markets are not the enemy (Alberto Mingardi calls her economic policies “vague but not insensible.”) For the moment, the question is on which side of the aligning divide market economics will fall. For the sake of our children, and for the sake of our heritage of liberty, we cannot allow it to fall on the wrong side here.