For over four years, Giovanna Pancheri has also been reporting, for Sky TG24, the profound, degraded America that feels abandoned and from which, to the surprise of those who do not want to see reality, the presidency of the alien Trump arose. The book was born out of that experience American Renaissance (Società Editrice Milanese) recently in bookstores, which is essential for understanding what has happened in the belly of American society, what are the impulses that Biden's victory has certainly not quenched, and what the future of democracy in the USA and of consequence in the rest of the Western world.
Giovanna Pancheri honors journalism, the real one, that of the great envoys who told the facts with curiosity and honesty, leaving the political evaluations to the readers. The press must not be militant, it must not be a political subject, otherwise its credibility is lost. Journalistic intermediation professionals must be truffle dogs who dig, who look for weak signals, those details that help to understand the whole of what is happening. Some political phenomena that then upset the lives of millions of people were born in the basement, in the dark recesses of semi-clandestinity. Ignoring them is a serious thing defect of ruling classes who have lost touch with reality. Contrasting them with ideological opinions is useless if not harmful. First of all, we need to know them, understand them, elaborate a different answer from the easy but fallacious one of populists and sovereignists.
The book guides the reader in the search forForgotten America where fears and resentments congeal, where a mixture of poverty, of falling hope for a better future, of identity disorientation that generates racism and protectionist closures both commercial and towards immigrants has been boiling for some time.
Giovanna Pancheri's journalism is done in the field, wearing out the soles of her shoes - as the old chief reporters used to say - and not sitting comfortably in the living room translating the local newspapers. And it is in this way, in fact, that you manage to highlight things that in Italy, but I believe also in the rest of Europe, are known little and badly. From this inattention, and even ignorance, derives the poor understanding of American political dynamics, the surprise at the election of Trump, the inability of the EU to formulate a strategy to discuss on an equal footing with the United States.
In his book there is no triumphant America of the big multinationals, of the banks of New York, of Silicon Valley or of Hollywood cinema: there are the suburbs of the cities, the endless countryside where the globalization of the economy and the technological advance they have swept away established certainties, where depression leads to drug addiction, or turns towards racial and political extremism in the hope of erecting barriers against external dangers. Hence the adhesion of many to Trump's proposal to impose tariffs on imports from countries that "steal" American jobs, or the need to build walls against the different, against the immigrants who are satisfied with lower wages and crowd the already not very efficient US welfare.
From Pancheri's pages emerges a crisis that is not only economic, it does not depend only on the enormous inequalities existing in American society and which have grown considerably in the last two decades. We are now in a real identity crisis in which the adventurous soul, but positive towards the future, of the traditional American frontier disappears. The country of opportunities seems to have disappeared, however bring out instead the darkest part of American individualism, the one that distrusts the government, that considers Washington an immoral and corrupt center, and that, finally, thinks that voting is useless and that democracy is just an empty formalism.
And after all, Trump had said it clearly in his inaugural speech in 2016. With him, the "people" finally arrived in the palaces of power, driving out those who had settled there until then to do only their own interests. With these premises, one cannot be surprised if, four years later, that same "people" were induced to attack the Capitol, convinced that they had to drive out the usurpers.
The book is not a political essay that illustrates the various recipes for getting out of this deep crisis. For now, America has reacted to Trump's demagogic excesses and lies by electing Biden. However, it should not be forgotten that the former president obtained 74 million votes, and the Democratic votes for the House were less than those for the president, demonstrating that many Americans did not want Trump but that, all in all, they do not trust too much of the democrats, especially the socialist wing of Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders. It will therefore not be easy navigation for Biden. And even Europe will not be able to lull itself into the illusion that everything will go back to the way it was before. Having overcome Trump's openly anti-EU policy, the time has come for Brussels to take on more responsibility.
