The Right’s Electoral Sweep In Italy, Mussolini, And Joe Biden’s Childhood Dreams Of Power

“Do you think it really matters?”, the President asked his wife in bed the other night, just after the results of the Italian conservative, far right electoral victory was announced.

“Not in the least, darling”, Jill replied.  “You know those….”  Here she stopped short of using the ethnic slur common in her neighborhood in the 50s.  Even in bed with her husband she thought it wise to hold her tongue, although tough Irish Joe had heard Italians called nothing but guineas and wops when he was growing up.  

Ethnic stereotypes were, in an age of still-assimilating America, the best way to identify neighbors.  It mattered what nationality you were because it signified who you were. Irish were drunks, Italians were loud and garlicky, and Poles were rural and dumb.  Ethnic epithets – they were not considered slurs in those days – rolled off Joe’s mother’s tongue as easily as Springtime poetry.

“Those Italians”, continued Jill, have never gotten over Mussolini.  Fascists to the core”.

“Yes, that’s exactly what I was thinking”, replied the President.  Joe was a closet admirer of Il Duce when he was a boy in Delaware, a state that most Americans couldn’t name or locate.  He wanted someone to put Delaware on the map, to be a superhero of Newark, Dover, and Newcastle, and he waited for the political Messiah to come.  His mother caught him with a picture of Mussolini, arms at his hips, chin thrust out, and lips downturned in a show of absolute defiance and superiority, tore it up, and said, “Shame on you, Joey.  Mussolini is our enemy”.

So Joe had always had a love-hate relationship with Italians.  He had been schooled in Roman history, Renaissance brilliance, and modern popular culture – who wouldn’t want an all expenses paid trip to Rome? – but his progressive advisors always reminded him of Italy’s less than honorable fascist past.  He was always reminded of the joke making the rounds after Italy’s ignominious defeat in the war (“How many gears in an Italian tank?  Four – one forward and three reverse”). Italians were never to be taken seriously.  After all hadn’t they had 62 governments since 1946? And most of them weak, venal, and silly.

It was the Il Duce episode that was at the heart of Joe Biden’s ambivalence towards Italians.  Take Antonin Scalia, for example, the Emperor of the Supreme Court, as haughty and dismissive of others as Mussolini, a man without a drop of compassion for the poor, yet looking so much like his goomba Sicilian family that he could have been an organ grinder rather than a jurist.  

That was the thing about Italians, you never knew what was up,  and how this neo-fascist could have emerged from the same immigrant roots as those of Mario Cuomo who evolved into a principled liberal was always perplexing.

Yet the President always secretly admired Scalia and wondered about Cuomo.  Antonin Scalia was an enforcer, a claimant to the intellectual crown of America, a powerful, influential man of innate resources.  Of course the more Biden turned left and became the progressive’s progressive, the more he kept his closet door closed.  No one would ever find out about his secret admiration for history’s big men, big macho Nietzschean heroes.

In public the President shared his concern about the Right’s decisive victory in Italy.  A sad day for Italy and for Europe, he pronounced, raising the specter of authoritarian rule, playing the fascism card, conflating the solid conservative policies of new Prime Minister Meloni with National Socialism and the Hitler-Mussolini alliance.

In private, he wondered if an electoral victory in Europe, achieved thanks to conservative policies on religion, family, sexuality, immigration, and political independence, could have repercussions in the United States.  In fact Italy rejected every one of Biden’s policies.  Italians wanted no more howls of racism, no more open door immigration policies, a return to traditional sexual values and religion, and a rejection of internationalism. 

“Thank God those goombas don’t vote here”, the President said to himself.

"Oh, and let's not forget that Meloni is a woman", he added.

It is easy in these days of facile progressivism to ignore anything that does not conform to the Left’s meme of race, gender, and ethnicity.  Italy is deeply racist, wrong, fascist, and ignorant, said the leader of the Progressive Coalition Of Black and Brown Peoples Of America; and the Right’s victory only showed the depth of a worldwide systemic racism.

  “They have deliberately sunk boatloads of refugees from North Africa”, she said, “in acts of overt genocide and ethnic cleansing.  Italy has never wanted colored foreigners and never will.  The new government will do its best to keep Italy lily white, pure, and fascist”.

Of course the election in Italy does in fact mean a lot to Biden, the progressive Left and the Democratic Party in America.  More and more Americans are fed up with the tens of thousands of illegal migrants walking across the Rio Grande.  They are tired of the fiction of sanctuary cities, of the swelling ranks of the dependent and idle.  They are fed up with black this, black that and the weird convolutions of sexual transformation.  They are sick and tired of the assault on organized religion, the sanctity of faith, and the assault on  religious freedom.  They have had it with the hammering denigration of white people as predators, subhuman tyrants.

True, the young Joe Biden had gotten beaten up by guinea punks on the playground, and had watched how these goomba thugs had ruled Delaware cities while his Irish compatriots only governed them. 

You have to hand it to the Mafia, Joe once confided to his wife long before his sojourn in the White House.  Authoritarian, family-oriented, and as ambitious in their pursuit of power and territory as their Roman ancestors, you had to admire them.  And here they now were back in power in Italy, La Cosa Nostra meets Il Duce, and before long Italy will become more xenophobic and nationalistic than Poland, or Iran for that matter.

America was different, reflected the President.  We turned back the ur-fascist Donald Trump, rejected his calls for authoritarian rule, and will continue to fight anti-democratic forces everywhere.  “Democracy matters”, he reiterated to his public, and not coruscating nationalism.  Not only that, God was on the side of progressives, a holy force of goodly transformation, leading to Utopia.  “We will never be turned back”.

It will be this combination of supreme arrogance, self-righteousness, and ignorance of history which will be progressives’ downfall in the midterm elections in November 2022 and beyond.  Joe Biden may choose to see the Italian elections are irrelevant, but no one else does.