Perhaps
like others within digital earshot, I spent part of my holiday reading
Alexander Stille’s valuable book on the career of Italian businessman/politician
Silvio Berlusconi, The Sack of Rome. If you can’t read the entire book, I recommend
that you borrow a copy from your local library and read from page 255 to the
end. Here Stille analyzes why Italians were
willing to vote a businessman into power who was not politically experienced and
had no detailed views on policy. Stille then
develops some parallels between what went on in Italy in the 1990s and the
circumstances (circa 2006) in the US, anticipating the Trump phenomenon in a
number of respects.
Some
similarities between Berlusconi and Trump are fairly evident. There are the offensive remarks explained
away as “jokes,” for example. Both men
operated what amounted to family businesses, while posing as experienced
corporate CEOs. We’ll see what happens
with respect to Trump’s many potential conflicts of interest, but Berlusconi
probably exceeded Trump on that score by many times, coming eventually to
dominate the entire Italian economy, at least according to Stille. Neither Berlusconi nor (probably) Trump liked
to hold press conferences or understood the role of an independent press. Stille makes the interesting comment that
Berlusconi treated government like a show or performance and did not engage
much on policy details. Berlusconi was
supported by some because he was perceived as pro-business but they “’didn’t
realize he was only pro his own business.’”
From
Stille’s book we can construct an explanation as to why Trump has not faced
more blowback with respect to refusing to disclose his tax returns or other aspects
of his business. Berlusconi did much the
same, but benefited from a generalized suspicion of government and the lack of
a habit, on the part of some Italians, of paying their taxes regularly. This should inspire us to ask what was the
attitude of Republican voters toward the IRS pre-Trump? I think we know the answer to that one –
perhaps their attitude was never great to begin with, but to Republicans, the
IRS was mired in a massive scandal which had to do with the heavy-handed use of
government power against conservative groups.
Why hold Trump to account when the IRS had not been put to rights?
The
key explanation Stille advances that is so clearly relevant to our situation in
the US today was that Berlusconi took advantage not only of a lack of trust in
government generally, but a situation in which parties of the left and right
were perceived as having failed the Italian people, both-party failure as it
were. This meant that when Berlusconi
was criticized, he could always respond by running against politicians (this should
sound familiar) and politics as usual.
The ultimate consequence as Stille describes it was rule by plebiscite
rather than the rule of law, something that should sound familiar to scholars who
have analyzed Nixon’s presidency.