The rightist cultures

A well known character of today’s rightist culture is the centrality of the media, but Berlusconism is a much deeper phenomenon, capable of influencing large sectors of the middle class: an eclectic ideology merging the traditions of Forza Italia, Alleanza Nazionale and Lega Nord in a mix populism, extreme individualism, historical revisionism and a pragmatic and ethnic approach to religion. During the past two decades, the forces of the Right have occupied the space deserted by the leftist lines in the Eighties under the cultural offensive of Craxian reformism: once in power, they succeeded in building the means of a cultural hegemony of their own, with journals and foundations bearing simple and efficacious messages: freedom intended as a combination of free enterprise and distrust of the State, rejection of cultural relativism, a revisionist re-consideration of the recent past tending to deem Fascism and anti-Fascism equivalent in the name of an alleged "national conciliation". Within this framework, the French revolution is considered the root of all modern evils, the Risorgimento a premeditated attack to Catholicism; while the triad "God, Fatherland, Family" is conjugated for both yesterday and today as the portrait of a country afraid of immigrants and of their cultures. Hence the aggregation of a teo-con line- up apparently so strong as to let us suppose that in today’s Italian society Berlusconism might long survive to Berlusconi himself.

Keywords: Berlusconism, middle class, populism, individualism, historical revisionism, teo-con

Gabriele Turi, Le culture della destra in "ITALIA CONTEMPORANEA" 260/2010, pp 392-403, DOI: 10.3280/IC2010-260002