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JAMES LAWLER DUGGAN / Reuters
Let no one be offended, but there is something really pathetic about the search for Biden that many of our leaders and leaders in these hours are dedicating themselves. Who has known it celebrates it. Who has never seen it, can imagine it. And each one represents it and accommodates it as if it were part of their own biography. Or maybe your own expectations.
There is a trait of infinite provincialism that shows through in the confidences and fantasies of these hours. All ready to count when the American president was touched at a packed cocktail party, at a troop parade, or perhaps just in the comfortable niche of their thoughts. All willing to claim for themselves the role of the Italian version of the new tenant of the White House. “I am Biden” is turning into a choral performance, or more prosaically a gigantic “copy and paste.”
Biden seems to serve the not-too-extreme left to say there is no need to go to extremes. To the elderly politicians to warn in turn of the excesses of the youth. To the professionals of the trade to insist that improvisation has also tired her by now. And for lovers of Italy, first notice that in some Sicilian village a distant trace of a branch of the presidential family can be found.
The United States never seems as “imperial” as after the White House race. And Italy never risks appearing as provincial as when trying to put on the skin of the contenders who have just established themselves in that race.
The chronicles of the world rarely report otherwise. It almost never happens that in other countries a protagonist of Italian politics is taken as a model and evoked as an object of imitation. It did not happen to Berlusconi, who nevertheless excited fantasies of all kinds. Not the last populist generations. Nor, before, to the protagonists of the fifty years of the Christian Democracy. No foreign leader has ever posed to propose himself as the Moro or Craxi or Berlinguer of his parts.
It is our peripheral instinct that makes us dream of being the Italian version of a political direction that is asserted elsewhere. By letting go of the illusion that we too can be a role model for others.
When, in the late 1970s, Zaccagnini traveled to the United States to meet with the president of the time, Jimmy Carter, he gave a speech written to him by an eminent historian of the time. The speech went more or less like this: Italy is a small country, but it is a great political laboratory. They wanted to claim some of our peculiar traits and even some anomalies that could stem from them. It was the proud representation of a political system that aroused many perplexities abroad but still had a lot of consensus in the country.
Perhaps Zaccagnini’s pride in Italy at the time – Christian Democrat and consociational – was excessive. He ended up celebrating an anomaly that we should have gotten rid of in time. But the rush to take on the role of Italian Biden certainly doesn’t push us back down the slope from then until today.
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