Italy and the United States have a lot in common — both young countries (although Italy is almost 100 years younger), regions with strong local identities united by antipathy towards the national government, endemic corruption and dysfunction.
In this kind of environment, it’s easy for the voices of social justice to get lost amidst the chaos.
Marco Pannella, the founder of Italy’s “Radical Party” and a long-time progressive champion in both Italian and European politics, rose above the disorder and self-interestedness to really create a career that was something special.
A dogged impresario of civil disobedience and political stagecraft, he championed the rights of women, inmates, gay people and conscientious objectors. He lobbied against the death penalty and the proliferation of weapons, from nuclear arms to guns used by weekend sportsmen to shoot migratory birds.
In 1970, he waged a hunger strike — subsisting for 78 days on 3 cups of coffee and vitamins daily, and losing 60 pounds — that triggered a parliamentary debate over divorce. Four years later, he invoked the same Gandhian strategy to persuade Parliament to debate abortion legislation and a proposal to grant time on state television for controversial causes.
“We are not claiming that anyone must agree with us,” Mr. Pannella said at the time. “We are merely asking for the chance to present our case.”
His party was ultimately instrumental in gaining support, to the consternation of the Vatican, for referendums and legislation that legalized divorce and abortion and eliminated or loosened other constraints opposed by libertarians.
Much like Bernie Sanders is not really a “socialist,” but instead a kind of maverick progressive, Marco also spoke out against oppressive communist governments across the Iron Curtain from Italy.
He also denounced Communist governments in Eastern Europe for abridging civil rights, mobilized what amounted to a fledging environmental movement, campaigned to lower the voting age to 18 and crusaded for the creation of a European Union.
How, though, did such a self-described “radical” gain political power in a country as — some might use the term “backwards”— conservative and traditional as Italy? He nimbly leveraged the tools available to him in a parliamentary democracy to advance his progressive — cough, cough: radical — agenda.
Many saw the Radical Party as providing a useful safety valve over several decades of political upheaval.
“In a country with almost no public interest groups for social causes,” Frederic Spotts and Theodor Wieser wrote in 1986 in “Italy: A Difficult Democracy: A Survey of Italian Politics,”“the party has given tens of thousands of Italians a sense of participation in the political process and offered unorthodox youth the possibility of legitimate political activity — at a time when the alternative for some might have been terrorism.”
Sound familiar? “A country with almost no public interest groups for social causes.”
While the United States has lots of civil society organizations, it’s fair to say that most of them — like the Center for American Progress taking money from Walmart and Big Insurance— are either hardwired to incrementalism by virtue of their budget or, alternatively, financially-pure but without any real political power.
Right now, we have a movement — the Bernie Sanders campaign — with many supporters not preparing bombs in dark basements, but ready and willing to “blow up” the Democratic Party.
I’m quite sympathetic to this point of view, because since the early 1990s the Democrats have really done little, outside of the incremental gains of the Affordable Care Act, to advance the agenda of the bottom 80 percent of Americans. That said, unlike Italy (and the rest of Europe and the Commonwealth countries), we don’t have parliamentary democracy, where new parties and movements can rapidly access the levers of political power in a governing coalition. So, for American progressives, it’s really fixing the Democratic Party or bust. We can’t achieve what Marco achieved by abandoning the Democratic Party. And I don’t want to see the Democratic Party destroyed, but I do want to see it remade.
Would what follows be possible in the U.S. given our institutions? Absolutely not.
Mr. Pannella was an unconventional gadfly who dominated the quixotic, cultlike Radical Party he co-founded in 1955 and who managed to gain a disproportionate amount of political influence in Italy — far greater than the party’s rank-and-file representation in Parliament would seem to warrant.
In 1979, the party, whose emblem was a fist clutching a red rose, won 18 of 630 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, the larger of the Parliament’s two houses, and 3.4 percent of the total popular vote.
Given the institutional constraints of the two-party system our cursed presidential system has bequeathed us, Bernie supporters need to consider how they can “be Marco” within the space of the Democratic Party.
I’m a Bernie Sanders supporter, but I’m not a Donald J. Trump supporter. My dislike of Hillary does not mean I’m willing to see Trump win the White House, and the incredible power associated with an increasingly activist Executive Branch.
Nevertheless, given that in American politics, progressives can’t construct a Radical Party “safety valve,” as was possible in Italy’s parliamentary system, I believe we need to use the end of this Democratic Primary to intelligently and constructively leverage our collective power — whether we will support Hillary in the general election — to extract real concessions from the Democratic Party. In short, we need to create a Marco-style “Radical Party” space within the Democratic Party. This won’t be easy. But what are the alternatives?
One alternative is Trump winning — absolutely unacceptable. The second alternative is Hillary winning and triangulating to win far-right Republicans without offering similar concessions to the far-left on America’s admittedly distorted political spectrum (i.e. I don’t really consider Bernie supporters as “far-left” in global context, but that is the reality of U.S. politics — Overton window, blah blah blah, you get the idea!) — absolutely unacceptable.
So, how do we construct that “Marco Pannella” space in the Democratic Party?
To be frank, we have to demand real concessions from elite Democrats by, collectively, threatening to “sit-out” the upcoming general election. We must generate sufficient fear within the Team Clinton/Podesta/Schultz machine that failure to, say, commit to a robust public option for health care and adopt a genuinely even-handed position on Palestine, will lead to a Trump win — or, worse, continued chaos in the Democratic Party. We don’t do this with violence — or death threats to restaurant owners. We do it with steady resolve: a kind of Marco-style hunger strike where our votes are the nutrition — forcing the Democratic Party to evolve and once again embrace workers and universal social welfare policy — the Democratic Party needs to beat Republicans, and keep Trump out of the White House, or fail.
In short, we must do what Marco Pannella did in Italy: create a space in the political system for so-called “radical” ideas (and, in America, I guess universal health care is “radical”) to gain political traction. And, because we lack a parliamentary system, we must do this in the Democratic Party — with the consequences of our exclusion from that party clearly articulated for those who control the gates.
I wish progressive Democrats didn’t have to play this hard. I wish we could create our own party and let the Democratic Establishment choose to embrace us within a parliamentary coalition. But, well, I’m a “progressive who likes to get things done” and I recognize the institutional constraints of our deeply-flawed presidential system.
Will the Democratic Party evolve and find space for the increasingly-vocal American Marcos?
Democrats, it seems, have arrived at A Time For Choosing.