Pasolini Explains Trump

It was September 17, 1974, when, speaking at a debate during the L'Unità festival, Pier Paolo Pasolini explained two of the fundamental reasons for Donald Trump 's victory 50 years and two months later. That night, Pasolini spoke about a very important topic, genocide, but one without bloodshed, without deaths.

What he spoke of was cultural genocide: "Today, Italy is experiencing this phenomenon dramatically for the first time: large sectors, which had remained, so to speak, outside of history-the history of bourgeois domination and the bourgeois revolution -have suffered this genocide, that is, this assimilation to the way and quality of life of the bourgeoisie. How does this substitution of values occur? I maintain that today it occurs clandestinely, through a kind of hidden persuasion." The three examples he gives shortly afterwards are surprising, dramatic, and evident.

"For example, there is the model that governs a certain interclass hedonism, which imposes on young people who unconsciously imitate it, the obligation to conform in behavior, dress, shoes, hairstyle, smile, actions, or gestures to what they see in the advertising of major industrial products: advertising that refers, almost in a racist way, to the petit-bourgeois lifestyle. The results are evidently painful, because a poor young person from Rome is not yet capable of realizing these models, and this creates anxieties and frustrations in them that lead them to the brink of neurosis."

Or there is the model of false tolerance, of permissiveness. In the large cities and rural areas of the south-central region, a certain type of popular morality still prevailed, quite free, of course, but with taboos that were their own and not those of the bourgeoisie-not hypocrisy, for example, but simply a kind of code to which all the people paid attention. At a certain point, the power needed a different kind of subject, one who was first and foremost a consumer, and he was not a perfect consumer if he was not granted a certain permissiveness in the sexual field. But the young man of underdeveloped Italy also tries to adapt to this model in an awkward, desperate, and always neurotic way. Or, finally, a third model, the one I call aphasia, the loss of linguistic capacity.

All of central and southern Italy had its own regional or local traditions, a living language, a dialect that was regenerated by continuous inventions, and within that dialect, rich slang -almost poetic inventions: to which everyone contributed, day after day, every night a new joke, a witty remark, an unexpected word would emerge; there was a marvelous linguistic vitality.

The model now imposed there by the ruling class has linguistically blocked them: in Rome, for example, one is no longer capable of invention, one has fallen into a kind of aphasic neurosis; either one speaks a false language, which knows no difficulties or resistances, as if everything were easily speakable expressing oneself as in printed books or one even reaches true aphasia in the clinical sense of the word; you are incapable of inventing metaphors and real linguistic movements, you almost mumble, or push, or laugh without knowing how to say anything else."

Reading this, it seems we finally understand what has been happening around us for years, but which not everyone, at least not me and perhaps some others, had understood so completely. At this point, we should quote what Pasolini wrote fifty years ago about the division between progress and development. 

Kamala Harris 's so-called "woke problem," in a sense, is here, and we find it perfectly in these words:

"As I said, a substitution of values and models is underway in our country, heavily influenced by the mass media, and primarily television. This does not mean I am suggesting that these media are inherently negative: I even agree that they could be a powerful instrument of cultural progress; but so far, in the way they have been used, they have been a means of terrible regression, of development without progress, of cultural genocide for at least two-thirds of Italians. Seen in this light, the results of May 12th also contain an element of ambiguity."

In my opinion, television also contributed powerfully to the "no"s, because, for example, in these twenty years, it has clearly devalued any religious content: oh yes, we often saw the Pope give blessings, cardinals inaugurate ceremonies, we saw processions and funerals, but these were counterproductive to the purposes of religious conscience. In fact, instead, at least at an unconscious level, a profound process of secularization was occurring, which delivered the masses of the south-central region to the power of the media and, through them, to the real ideology of power: to the hedonism of consumerist power.

It is striking to read about a referendum that almost everyone considers an acquired value being questioned, certainly in a biased way, regarding a type of consumerist acquisition. And so it continues: "That is why I happened to say perhaps in a violent and overly excited manner that in the 'no' there is a double soul: on one hand, real and conscious progress; on the other, false progress, by which the Italian accepts divorce due to the secularizing demands of bourgeois power: for whoever accepts divorce is a good consumer. That is why, out of love for Truth and a painfully critical sense, I can even arrive at an apocalyptic prediction, which is this: if the party that held power prevails in the mass of 'no' votes, it will be the end of our society."

The point, in my view, is the disappearance of the cultures in which we recognized ourselves-bourgeois culture, working-class culture, and peasant culture-and the single culture in which we recognize ourselves today, consumer culture. In another text, from the following year, interviewed by Furio Colombo, Pasolini returned to the theme of cultures: "The culture of a nation is the sum of all these class cultures: it is their average."

It would therefore be abstract if it were not recognizable or, to put it better, visible - in lived experience and existence, and if it did not consequently have a practical dimension. For many centuries in Italy, these cultures were distinguishable, even if historically unified. Today almost suddenly, in a kind of Advent - historical distinction and unification have given way to a homogenization that almost miraculously fulfills the interclassist dream of the old Power.

What is the reason for this homogenization? Evidently, a new Power. I know, because I see and experience it, some characteristics of this new, still faceless Power: for example, its rejection of the old sanfedismo and the old clericalism, its decision to abandon the Church, its (successfully) determination to transform peasants and sub-proletarians into petty bourgeois, and, above all, its almost cosmic eagerness to achieve "Development" to the very end: to produce and consume.

In my opinion, television also contributed powerfully to the "no's, because, for example, in these twenty years, it has clearly devalued any religious content: oh yes, we often saw the Pope give blessings, cardinals inaugurate ceremonies, we saw processions and funerals, but these were counterproductive to the purposes of religious conscience. In fact, instead, at least at an unconscious level, a profound process of secularization was occurring, which delivered the masses of the south-central region to the power of the media and, through them, to the real ideology of power: to the hedonism of consumerist power.

It is striking to read about a referendum that almost everyone considers an acquired value being questioned, certainly in a biased way, regarding a type of consumerist acquisition. And so it continues: "That is why I happened to say - perhaps in a violent and overly excited manner that in the 'no' there is a double soul: on one hand, real and conscious progress; on the other, false progress, by which the Italian accepts divorce due to the secularizing demands of bourgeois power: for whoever accepts divorce is a good consumer. That is why, out of love for Truth and a painfully critical sense, I can even arrive at an apocalyptic prediction, which is this: if the party that held power prevails in the mass of 'no' votes, it will be the end of our society."

The point, in my view, is the disappearance of the cultures in which we recognized ourselves-bourgeois culture, working-class culture, and peasant culture-and the single culture in which we recognize ourselves today, consumer culture. In another text, from the following year, interviewed by Furio Colombo, Pasolini returned to the theme of cultures: "The culture of a nation is the sum of all these class cultures: it is their average."

It would therefore be abstract if it were not recognizable or, to put it better, visible - in lived experience and existence, and if it did not consequently have a practical dimension. For many centuries in Italy, these cultures were distinguishable, even if historically unified. Today -almost suddenly, in a kind of Advent - historical distinction and unification have given way to a homogenization that almost miraculously fulfills the interclassist dream of the old Power.

What is the reason for this homogenization? Evidently, a new Power. I know, because I see and experience it, some characteristics of this new, still faceless Power: for example, its rejection of the old sanfedismo and the old clericalism, its decision to abandon the Church, its (successfully) determination to transform peasants and sub-proletarians into petty bourgeois, and, above all, its almost cosmic eagerness to achieve "Development" to the very end: to produce and consume.

Shortly after, the speech leads us to something that seems to fit the supposed American dilemma:

"The portrait of this still-white face of the new Power vaguely attributes to it 'moderate' traits, due to tolerance and a perfectly self-sufficient hedonistic ideology; but also fierce and substantially repressive traits: tolerance is, in fact, false, for in reality no man has ever had to be as normal and conformist as the consumer; and as for hedonism, it evidently hides a decision to pre-order everything with a cruelty that history has never known." The conclusion is this: "Its end is the brutally totalitarian reorganization and homogenization of the world."

Perhaps it's worth reflecting on this.

The article is by Riccardo Cristiano, an Italian journalist, published by Settimana News, November 10, 2024.