The viral clip of Italy’s soon-to-be prime minister Giorgia Meloni speaking at the World Congress of Families reminded me a great deal of Marion Márechal’s CPAC speech from a few years ago. Both women opposed themselves to commercial surrogacy, a culture-war issue that has been slow to dawn on Americans, although it has asserted itself among conservatives in the traditionally Catholic nations of Italy and France.
Marion Márechal said, “Without nation, and without family, the limits of the common good, natural law, and collective morality disappears, as the reign of egoism continues.”
This is a thought that could come straight out of Simone Weil’s L’Enracinement, “The Need for Roots.”
Both Marechal’s speech and Meloni’s appeal in a special way to Catholic conservatives. When Meloni says that without familial, religious, and national identity, we become “perfect consumer slaves” at the mercy of “financial speculators,” I could sense my Protestant and Jewish friends shuffling uncomfortably in their seats. Protestants: Who or what does she mean by that? Jews: She probably means us.
It’s easy to acknowledge why people feel this way, and have good reason to feel it. But I think in Meloni’s case there is something to it. America’s companies — particularly its tech firms — have started to throw their weight around in other countries and to intervene in their politics. More importantly, when the euro-zone crisis hit a decade ago, the European Commission, working with the European Central Bank and the IMF, effectively re-nationalized debt to countries such as Ireland and imposed austerity on those governments in the deal, saving German state banks from their reckless lending decisions, entirely at the cost of Irish taxpayers. The health of Germany’s finance industry and Germany’s export industries is absolutely tied up in the drama of Italy’s debt, Italy’s inability to inflate it away, and Italy’s chronic unemployment. There is very good reason to believe that the EU will act to privilege the interests of German speculators over Italian citizens. We’ve seen this movie before.