Yesterday's men

The latest from Italy is that Prodi's government has survived a vote of confidence in the Senate. Which is good, as Prodi would have had to resign if he'd lost. The result was never in much doubt - the Unione majority in the Senate is small, but it's still a majority - but the seven independent senators-for-life could have made trouble for Prodi if they'd wanted to. Of course, they didn't want to - these are the 'seven wise men' (or rather, six and one woman), veterans of decades of machine politics with a combined age of nearly 600. When the youngest of the seven (Francesco Cossiga) was born Mussolini was in power; when the oldest, Rita Levi Montalcini, was born, Mussolini was still a socialist. If you've got that much political survival behind you and the choice is between voting for a quiet life and voting for a constitutional crisis, it's not hard to guess which way you'll go.

Berlusconi's reaction to the final (God willing) extinction of his dream of reversing the election result was typically gracious: "What they've done is immoral." Berlusconi's allies backed this up by shouting and jeering at the life senators as they crossed the floor of the Senate. This treatment wasn't reserved for longstanding political enemies of the Right such as Oscar Luigi Scalfaro; old friends like Cossiga and Giulio Andreotti got it too, not to mention the outgoing President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi - who was treated by the Right as the next best thing to the Pope, for as long as it looked as if they might be able to get something out of him. The 97-year-old Montalcini was spared, but only thanks to a pre-emptive ticking-off from the leader of the Senate.

It's depressing stuff, but what really got me down was the reaction of Piero Fassino of the Left Democrats. Not so much his denunciation of the Right's behaviour, which was on target, but his conclusion: Non hanno il senso dello stato. Well, no, Piero my ex-Communist old mate, they don't have the sense of the state. But do you know what? They never did.

Let's go back to 1978 and Leonardo Sciascia's book on the Aldo Moro kidnap. The Communist Party at that time held to a hard line on negotiating with the Red Brigades - harder than either the Socialists or a fair part of the Christian Democrats, notably including Moro himself (who was, after all, President of the party). The senso dello stato got repeated outings back then, generally in the context of criticisms of people whose willingness to negotiate with terrorists demonstrated that they lacked it. But this was very much a Communist Party theme, which didn't find much resonance on the Right, let alone the rest of the Left. Sciascia:

Neither Moro nor the party he presided over had ever had a ‘sense of the State’. The idea of the State, as it had first been menacingly bandied about by some representatives of the Italian Communist Party the previous May [1977] — an idea which seemed to derive ... from Hegel, and the Right rather than the Left of Hegel — had probably only crossed Aldo Moro’s mind in his youth [i.e. under Fascism] ... what has attracted and continues to attract at least a third of the Italian electorate to the party of Christian Democracy is precisely the absence in that party — an attractive and reassuring absence — of an idea of the State

Let the Communists talk about the noble duties of the Italian state and the glorious aims of the Constitution (and they did, they did). The Christian Democrats were out for what they could get, and if you were out for what you could get they were the party for you.

Twenty-eight years on, the alliances have changed - to see Andreotti and Cossiga lining up with the ex-Communists brings that line from the The Leopard forcibly to mind - but the themes remain the same. On the Right, Berlusconi is that attractive and reassuring absence made flesh; on the Left, the old Communists are still in thrall to their sense of the state - and they're still more comfortable with the right than the left of Hegel.