In the interview given last Sunday to the Manifesto, the secretary of the Pd Enrico Letta, after announcing urbi et orbi that the centre-left, in case of victory in the elections, would cancel the Job Act strongly desired by his archenemy Matteo Renzi, he also found a way to inform us that the reformist left of which Tony Blair it was the emblem and the greatest inspirer - of which Renzi himself was a follower - it's over, it has had its day and now it must be scrapped. To his criticisms of the Job Act have already answered Giuliano Cazzola on FIRSTonline and Pietro Ichino sul Foglio. In short: Letta, perhaps because he lived in Paris at the time, when he talks about the Job Act he gives the impression of not knowing what he's talking about. He speaks badly of it to please the post-communists who are in the Democratic Party (Orlando and Provenzano) and to wink at the 5Stelle and Fratoianni but, as for the contents of that reform, he simply ignores them.
The "bad conscience" of the left: removing problems instead of finding solutions
On the other hand, the case of the criticisms that Letta addresses to Blair is different and to which no one in the Democratic Party, not even the reformist component to which Blair has also provided many ideas, has felt the duty to reply. Letta's, rather than an invitation to critical review of Blair's thought, seems to be a "damnatio memoriae". The same that was reserved for action Craxi's policy and that many (and among these there is also Letta) would like to reserve today also for Matteo Renzi. A "damnatio memoriae" that has only one goal: to erase the very memory of the ideas and political action of those to whom it is reserved. This is yet another manifestation of that "bad conscience", so typical of the left, which leads it to remove problems rather than come to terms with its own history.
Blair's mistake: unconditional support for the US war in Iraq
It is quite clear that Tony Blair has made mistakes and that one of these was particularly serious and fraught with negative consequences for him. We are referring to the unconditional support that England has given to the American war in Iraq, although it was not the only country to do so. But Blair was certainly the most determined, not out of convenience but out of deep conviction. Blair saw Iraq as a just war: a war for democracy against Islamic absolutism, for the liberation of Arab countries from Jaidist barbarism, for the emancipation of women from the Burka and the world from terrorism. He was wrong but there were many who made a mistake with him: States, men of culture, major newspapers such as the Economist which still apologizes today. Blair made a mistake and, as happens in democratic countries, he paid for it. But Blair was not only the man of the war in Iraq. He was also and above all the Labor leader who knew how to radically renew his party, who emancipated it from subordination to the Trade Unions, who freed it from the legacy of corporatism and who, thanks to the reforms made by its governments, put it back in touch with English society, leading it to victory for three consecutive elections. If the English left has come out of the corner into which its leaders had forced it and the Mark Thatcher, the merit is solely and exclusively of Tony Blair, and this is really no small matter.
Blair corrected Thatcher's reforms but was careful not to dismantle everything
Blair first of all had the intelligence not to propose to dismantle the reforms implemented by Thatcher (some of which are sacrosanct) but rather to correct their roughness and distortions. Secondly, he had the courage to make the 'open society' choice irreversible for the Labor Party. This idea is historically the heritage of English liberalism but which Blair has been able to make his own by combining it with that of inclusion and social justice which are typical of socialism. From this union between liberalism and socialism, Blair's Third Way was born. However you judge it, it is thanks to this choice that England has returned to growth. Blair-led Labor governments have leveraged the globalization, on the opening of markets and on innovation, notoriously the three bete noires of the radical left. But Blair himself, with his government action, has demonstrated that, if used well, none of these levers is the enemy of workers and that together they can ensure growth and progress for all. Naturally, mistakes have been made here too, the most evident of which (however due more to Clinton than to Blair) was the way in which the deregulation of the financial markets was achieved. But on the whole, England and the world have benefited greatly from globalization and the social policies that in many, though not all, countries have accompanied it.
Blair's politics: an intelligent "compromise" between liberalism and socialism
What Enrico Letta would like to consign to the "damnatio memoriae" of history seems to be precisely this search, which was the basis of Blair's policy, of a "historical compromise" between the liberalism and socialism. And yet, it is precisely at this compromise or, if you prefer, at this synthesis, that, pace Letta, not only the Labor Party and the European Social Democrats but also many liberals have worked in the past and are still working today. In his admirable history of liberalism the English historian Edmund Fawcett remember that when liberalism, son of the English and Scottish Enlightenment, found itself having to deal first with democracy (one person one vote) and then with socialism (the social question) it was able to compromise with these theories and it is from this contamination (Historical compromises, Fawcett calls them) that derive the modern parliamentary democracy and the welfare state whose creator, moreover, was not a Labor but a liberal, William Beveridge.
Letta's desire resembles a loss of identity for the Democratic Party
Tony Blair moved along this path and so did the Labor Party until Corbyn diverted it to other terrain where it then dramatically swamped. Does Enrico Letta think that Blair was the one who made a mistake? Does he think that his search for a synthesis between the great ideas of liberalism and those of democratic socialism has been useless and it is better to abandon it? It is legitimate to believe this also because there are many in the Democratic Party who think this way and not only among the post-communists. There is, in fact, in that party a component that originates from Catholic left (by Dossetti, for example) which is neither reformist nor liberal and which is not alien to these positions. But if this is what many in the Democratic Party think, then it would really be desirable that these different opinions and cultural orientations confront each other in an open way in the Party. Unfortunately today in the Democratic Party as in the other parties there is no internal cultural comparison comparable with what was in the PCI, in the DC or in the Psi. There is actually no comparison. Foundations like Open, European Italians and others could meet this need if they weren't targeted by a narrow-minded judiciary, unaware of politics, incompetent and backward that cannot distinguish cultural confrontation from daily political activity. All that remains then is to resort to the most democratic instrument available to a party, that of the congress in which the different theses are freely compared. If Letta really wants to give a gift to politics and also to her party, this is what she should do.
