In April 1937, five months after Silvio Berlusconi was born in Milan, the Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci died in Rome as a result of 11 years of incarceration and brutality at the hands of the Italian fascist state, Gramsci once observed that his compatriots had a taste for the operatic, which extended to all walks of life. Berlusconi, who died this week at the age of 86, seemed to embody that national preference when he rose to political power in the 1990s. At the time, his personal story – from cruise ship crooner to property magnate, media mogul to football tycoon – seemed a particularly Italian cautionary tale.
Berlusconi proved that a buffoonish, demagogic insider/outsider could take advantage of the hollowing-out of Italy’s desiccated post-cold war political system to create a new sort of “party” fashioned in his own image, named after a football chant (Forza Italia) and propelled to victory courtesy of his own wealth and his monopoly of the TV audience. Out of this he fashioned a political career that included three terms as prime minister and a central role across decades of Italian political deal making. To outsiders it seemed a quintessential opera buffa. As it turned out, the laugh was on us.
Berlusconi understood that there was an untapped public appetite for a figure who was prepared to embody masculine resistance to new codes of political correctness
The potent blend of machismo, shamelessness and corruption which Berlusconi brought to the political stage was not, as it turned out, a culturally specific one-off but a template for all those who would follow him into governments around the world in the 21st century. Looking for a precursor to Donald Trump’s courtroom theatrics this week? Check out Berlusconi’s endless running battles with the Italian legal authorities. Wondering about Boris Johnson’s petulant fury at not being permitted to knight his own father or ennoble his intern? Observe Silvio’s chutzpah as he filled public offices with dubious henchmen and sleazy lackeys.
Before Stormy Daniels there was bunga bunga. Before Partygate there was ... more bunga bunga. The scandals over Berlusconi’s parties, where rich old men were serviced by teenage sex workers, weren’t scandals at all; they were branding exercises, asserting the ageing leader’s continued virility. Berlusconi, like his American and British successors, understood not just that all publicity was good, but that there was an untapped public appetite for a figure who was prepared to embody masculine resistance to new codes of political correctness. Like Trump and Johnson, Berlusconi’s priapic amorality was particularly appealing to those who on other days would wring their hands at the supposed moral decline of the West. You could see that this week in an absurd article by Nicholas Farrell in the UK’s Catholic Herald.
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“Despite bunga bunga and tout ça, Berlusconi was always a committed defender of traditional values,” explained Farrell to the Herald’s readers. “Even the women guests at his elegant soirées which the judges and media called bunga bunga parties were aware of his religious nature.”
The grain of truth in that argument is that, ideologically speaking, Berlusconi was a conventional centre-right politician who moved quickly to fill the gap left by the collapse of the old Christian Democrat party. One commentator this week described him as “a revolutionary who was dedicated to preserving the status quo”, which sounds about right. You can debate the subsequent Italian swing to the hard nationalist right and what part he played in that. But, like Trump’s appeal to evangelicals and Johnson’s decision to back Brexit, his own instincts were shamelessly opportunistic.
What’s still insufficiently appreciated is the example Berlusconi offered of politics as pure style and affect. Creatures of show business, forged in the light entertainment industries of their respective countries, Berlusconi, Trump and Johnson share the same DNA: they are all stand-up comedians.
In his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, Neil Postman predicted that mass media commercial broadcasting would dissolve the traditional boundaries between entertainment and information.. Postman wrote his book before reality TV or social media or on-demand streaming. He didn’t predict a Berlusconi, a Trump or a Johnson, but all three are products of the brave new world he described.
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In an often-quoted passage from his Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci wrote that “the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
Are Berlusconi and his imitators “morbid symptoms” or do they represent the new permanent reality of Postman’s dystopian vision?
“At the end of the day, leadership is not about entertainment,” complained faltering Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis a couple of weeks ago in one of his veiled swipes at Trump. Sorry Ron, it is.
