There is a sage, recently released, built largely on events of distant years, which however is also useful for orienting oneself in the face of dramatically open issues today. Is titled "When we were liberals and socialists” (Rubbettino editore) and wrote it Guido Compagna, journalist for more than 30 years at "Il Sole 24 Ore", after working for "La Voce Repubblicana" and collaborating with other newspapers.
In the first part of the volume, the protagonist is a certain Naples: his hometown, revived with the eyes of a smart boy who, already at the age of eight, questions his father Francesco about parties and elections. He receives answers that have sown an interest (and a passion) that he then cultivates forever.
That Naples was immersed in the evils and conflicts that mark its history, but it was also endowed with a world, intellectuality and professions, to which the Compagna family belonged. A world that had much diminished authority and ability to influence today, where the imprint of Benedetto Croce's cultural legacy was still strong and in which an acute and ironic scholar like Gino Doria found a hearing when he targeted the folklore of bad quality that vulgarized the customs and traditions of the place.
Naples was poorer then compared to today's, but strongly present in the national public debate: politics or, even more, the confrontation between political cultures was, for that world, daily bread on which it was therefore natural that the young Compagna soon began to feed on it, like his brother Luigi.
As? Guido tells it in pages of “family chronicles”, not always calm, which are among the happiest and most emotionally intense of the volume. It captures the depth of the author's relationship with his father, Francesco Compagna, an authoritative southerner and university professor with an innovative spirit. For a long time afterwards, he was a deputy for the PRI and several times a minister.
Father partner in 1954 he founded the monthly “North and South”, which he directed until his death, which occurred prematurely in 1982. The magazine was a point of reference for the liberal-progressive world in Naples and beyond. Compagna, animated by a profound civil passion, strongly supported his ideas: a decided opponent of the communists he was, just as resolutely, of the conservative right. For years Compagna led a fight without quarter against Achille Lauro without being intimidated by the vast electoral consensus that the royalist shipowner received in Naples and in the South.
It must not have been easy for the son, compared to a figure of such importance, to choose to take a different path.
Guido succeeds because he has a spirit that knows how to be both critical and self-critical, as ironic as self-deprecating; moreover, his convictions push him towards an area, that of autonomist socialism by Pietro Nenni, which, although different from the liberal-progressive and later republican one of his father, had a large share of values with it.
The years of the most direct commitment of Guido fra the young socialists, moreover, are precisely those who prepare and then accompany the center-left season, marked by limits and contradictions but also by significant achievements in many fields: from civil rights to labor rights, from compulsory education to the birth of Enel.
However, the enthusiasm of that season was soon overwhelmed by disappointments. The strongest, for Guido, is the failure of the Psi-Psdi unification.
Hence the choice of leave party militancy and devote himself to journalism. His training was carried out in the editing of his father's magazine; but he does not lose interest in the politics of which he becomes, instead, a professional observer.
Thus follows the tortuous evolution of the Italian political system, the great labor conflicts, the tragic years of lead and the stormy ones of tangentopoli, up to the growth, in years closer to us, of electoral abstention and anti-parliamentary moods. All events that, from a chronicle lived daily, become, in Compagna's essay, matter for a balanced and, at times, painful reflection.
It hurts the author to notice the absence, in today's Italy, of "solid and well-branched" parties although they had long acted as an intermediary between the expectations of citizens and the responses of the institutions. A more than well-founded concern, at the basis of which, however, it can be observed, are errors and delays for which the parties themselves or, better, most of them, are responsible. And these are very ancient evils.
Precisely from the pages of "North and South" - Guido was still a high school student - Vittorio De Caprariis denounced the excessive power of the party apparatuses, their intrusiveness in society and bad electoral laws: a toxic tangle which, the great historian predicted, would have corroded the foundations of our parliamentary democracy and led the political forces, discredited, in front of the "wailing wall".
De Caprariis' alarm was underestimated. The proposals to avert those dangers, put forward by him and other scholars, entered a "waiting list" that remains largely unanswered after 60 years. Institutional reforms and electoral law they periodically reappear in the political debate but, so far, without success. The theme has animated long-standing debates or has become a bargaining chip for short-sighted calculations: ultimately many missed opportunities.
The Chambers, notes the political scientist Mauro Calise, "during the health emergency have become soundless" and the distance between citizens and Parliament is growing. It is not surprising that, in such a scenario, hucksters and populists of various kinds find space. Meanwhile the "ugly right", which alarms Compagna (and others), can count on widespread electoral support. How far will this drift go? It's hard to predict.
However, it would be beneficial a left more capable of making synthesis and more resolute in rejecting meaningless utopianisms. In the century we are living in, this area still hesitates between reforming action, to be pursued concretely given the epochal crisis that is affecting Italy and Europe, and the call for old myths (return to the welfare state and entrepreneur, hostility to business, " golden power” rain) perhaps generators of consensus but unsuitable to untie the knots that hold back the recovery of the country. Stopping in front of a crossroads like this fatally generates disorientation.
The cartoonist Zerocalcare, very successful especially among young people, interviewed by "Republic" (May 29) strongly affirms that he feels part "of a movement for social justice and solidarity among peoples". When asked "how does this feeling translate in front of the ballot paper?", But he replies: "Dunno".
This is also why it's good to read a book like Guido's: the story of an Italian boy who grew up through his choices, supporting, if necessary, the price to make them. And that he never said: "Dunno".
