[This billionaire’s legacy? Two-thirds of all Italians between
the ages of 18 and 34 are now living at home with their parents
because Italy’s “miserable starting salaries mean young Italians
generally cannot afford their own place. ]
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THE END OF THE LINE FOR THE RAUNCHY BILLIONAIRE WHO SET THE STAGE FOR
DONALD TRUMP  
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Sam Pizzigati
June 15, 2023
Inequality.org
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_ This billionaire’s legacy? Two-thirds of all Italians between the
ages of 18 and 34 are now living at home with their parents because
Italy’s “miserable starting salaries mean young Italians generally
cannot afford their own place. _

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The “scandal-ridden
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billionaire Silvio Berlusconi — Italy’s on-and-off prime minister
for an entire generation of Italians — passed on earlier this week
at age 86. Most Americans know precious little about Berlusconi and
his decades of impact on our world’s present and future. But that
cloud of cluelessness may have lifted a bit since Berlusconi’s exit
into the ever after.

Give the credit for that lifting to the obits
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Berlusconi that have been multiplying
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the media landscape. Berlusconi, these obits make
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clear, paved
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political way for Donald Trump.

Born in 1936, a decade before Trump, Berlusconi had a business career
that — like Trump’s — began in “property development.”
Berlusconi would later become celebrated nationally, also like Trump,
via his media exploits. Trump starred in a hit network TV series.
Berlusconi directly owned
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of Italy’s commercial TV.

Berlusconi the billionaire businessman played notoriously fast and
loose with his taxes — and women. Trump followed suit. Berlusconi
made himself a key player in the sports world. Trump followed suit.
Both cavorted at every opportunity. Both became scandalous regulars in
tabloid gossip columns.

More significantly, Berlusconi and then Trump stepped onto their
national political scenes and presented themselves as champions of
average people who would clean up corrupt systems and clear out the
elites and the commies who had turned their nations into dysfunctional
messes.

In 1994, Berlusconi would ride his raunchy private-sector record into
the office of prime minister, then spend most of the next two decades
losing and regaining Italy’s top political slot. Trump would win the
White House in 2016 and now faces indictments at every turn. But he
thinks he can regain his top-dog status. And why not? Berlusconi
wiggled out of serving prison time after his 2013 conviction for tax
fraud, then won election to the European Parliament in 2019 and the
Italian Senate just last year.

Death has now taken out Berlusconi, but his political legacy lives on.
His “disastrous economic policies,” notes
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Italian sociologist Paolo Gerbaudo, undercut unions and working people
and minimized taxes for Italy’s richest. His constant “celebration
of extreme individualism,” meanwhile, set the stage “for Italy’s
current reactionary turn.” His nation’s latest prime minister,
Giorgia Meloni, descends from Italy’s post-fascist Alleanza
Nazionale party.

Trump is doing his best to march the United States down the same
reactionary path. His most likely GOP successor, Florida governor Ron
DeSantis, is now aggressively campaigning to Trump’s political
right.

The Berlusconi years, in sum, enriched the already rich and opened the
door to far-right forces that hold democracy anything but dear. The
Trump legacy may end up proving eerily identical.

So should we blame Italy and Berlusconi for Trump? The reverse,
blaming the United States for Berlusconi, would actually make far more
sense. To understand why, we need to dig into a long-forgotten history
that seldom ever has received — at least in the United States —
much attention.

This history begins in the wake of World War II. Italy’s two leading
left parties, the Italian Communist Party and the Italian Socialist
Party, entered the postwar era with widespread public support. Both
parties had resisted the fascist Benito Mussolini and hastened his
exit. In Italy’s 1946 Constituent Assembly elections, as the late
journalist William Blum related
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book _Killing Hope_, these two parties “together garnered more
votes and more seats” than the centrist Christian Democrats.

But the two left parties each ran candidates on their own 1946 slates
and, Blum notes, ended up splitting the progressive vote. They found
themselves having “to be content with some ministerial posts in a
coalition cabinet under a Christian Democrat premier.” Even so, Blum
adds, the hefty total vote for Italy’s two left parties “spoke
plainly enough to put the fear of Marx into the Truman
administration.”

That fear would turn into frenzy two years later when these same two
parties announced an electoral “Popular Democratic Front” alliance
for the April 1948 parliamentary elections and then, in February 1948,
went on to win a key municipal election — with a vote 10 percentage
points higher than their combined 1946 tally.

The Truman administration, in an unprecedented and monumental
response, would quickly pull out all the stops to prevent a left
victory in Italy’s upcoming April balloting. The National Security
Council, notes
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researcher Thomas Boghardt in a 2017 Wilson Center analysis, called on
the CIA, the State Department, and U.S. military to use “all
feasible means” to “minimize” the prospects of a left victory.

U.S. agencies promptly did just that. Some of those means — most
notably, financial support to the Popular Democratic Front’s
opposition — would be covert. The U.S. military even engaged in
secret planning for helping out “the anti-Communist Italian
underground” should the Front emerge victorious.

But the vast bulk of the U.S. interference in the 1948 Italian
parliamentary elections would be openly obvious. By Election Day, most
every Italian voter understood that the United States fervently
opposed the Popular Democratic Front and would not take kindly to any
victory for the left’s electoral alliance.

That message came most forcefully from an enormous letter-writing
campaign that U.S. officialdom organized in the Italian-American
community. Most Italian-Americans had emigrated from Italy’s
desperately poor South in the two decades before World War I. They
knew little about the struggles of working people in Italy’s more
industrial north, even less about the anti-fascist struggles Italy’s
left had led against Mussolini.

The U.S. campaign against the Front capitalized on that lack of
awareness. One part of that effort, a “Committee to Aid Democracy in
Italy,” had mailed into Italy some 500,000 picture postcards
illustrating the horrors ahead should Italians give the nod to foreign
Soviet “dictatorship.”

American newspapers, radio stations, and wealthy individuals would
bankroll, in all, some 10 million pieces of mail into Italy before the
election. The messages in this postal and cablegram avalanche would
seldom be subtle. As one typical campaign message threatened: “If
the forces of true democracy should lose in the Italian election, the
American Government will not send any more money to Italy and we
won’t send any more money to you, our relatives.”

“For an Italian peasant a telegram from anywhere is a wondrous
thing,” the U.S. journalist Howard K. Smith reported, “and a cable
from the terrestrial paradise of America is not lightly to be
disregarded.”

“Vote or he will be your boss”: A sample of the U.S.-driven
campaign against the left electoral alliance in Italy’s pivotal 1948
election.

The U.S. State Department would back up the themes in those letters
and cables with daily short-wave broadcasts. In one, the famed William
Donovan, the head of the war-time precursor to the CIA, warned that a
left victory in the 1948 elections would end in a “communist
dictatorship” that would have Italy’s industrial plants
“dismantled and shipped to Russia” and millions of Italian workers
“deported to Russia for forced labor.”

Even Frank Sinatra got into the act, joining with a host of other
show-biz stars in a series of radio programs, William Blum writes,
“designed to win friends and influence the vote in Italy.”

The Soviets, Blum adds, made “a few feeble gestures for a while”
to aid the Italian left — releasing, for instance, some Italian war
prisoners — but Soviet officials had by 1948 actually become
“apprehensive of what the American and British reaction to a
Communist victory at the polls might be.”

The end result of the public relations blitz against Italy’s Popular
Front? A stunning victory for the Christian Democrats. The party took
nearly half the total vote, 48 percent, to the left’s meager 31
percent and would go on to dominate the Italian political agenda for
over a generation, finally collapsing early in 1994 amid a massive
kickback scandal that involved over half of Italy’s parliament.

On hand to pick up the political pieces: a man who positioned himself
as obviously much too rich to be bribed, Italy’s self-proclaimed
savior, Silvio Berlusconi. He would become, observes
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European historian Philipp Ther, “the first right-wing populist to
govern a developed western industrial country.”

This billionaire’s legacy? Two-thirds of all Italians between the
ages of 18 and 34 are now living
[[link removed]] at
home with their parents because Italy’s “miserable starting
salaries,” explains Ther, “mean that young Italians generally
cannot afford their own place.” No single stat may better
demonstrate “how the first right-wing populist to govern a large
western industrialized nation drove his country into the ground.”

_SAM PIZZIGATI CO-EDITS INEQUALITY.ORG. HIS LATEST BOOKS INCLUDE THE
CASE FOR A MAXIMUM WAGE
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RICH DON’T ALWAYS WIN: THE FORGOTTEN TRIUMPH OVER PLUTOCRACY THAT
CREATED THE AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS, 1900-1970
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TWITTER: @TOO_MUCH_ONLINE._

_Inequality.org has been tracking inequality-related news and views
for nearly two decades. A project of the Institute for Policy Studies
since 2011, our site aims to provide information and insights for
readers ranging from educators and journalists to activists and policy
makers.  _

_If you would like to support and help expand our work, please
consider making a donation. Thank you!  DONATE
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* Italy
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* Right Wing Politics
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* Billionaires
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* Fascism
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* democracy
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