Dear comrades, if you don't understand anything about the electorate, it's your fault.

No, comrades, it is not Trump and his circle's fault. It is not to him and your new bêtes noires at home in Washington that you can attribute the origin of the present misfortunes of the left. Without controversy and without harshness, the time has come to tell progressive politicians and intellectuals that they are blatantly mistaken in their analysis.

AfD did not get 20% of the vote in Germany because of Elon Musk: it would have received that much support even without the endorsement of the head of X. Indeed, who knows: paradoxically, given the climate of anti-Musk obsession in which we are immersed, that support from America has caused an additional demonization of Alice Weidel's party in the last twenty days of the German electoral campaign, and perhaps even subtracted a few decimal points, rather than adding something.

So let's turn to another example even closer to us: Giorgia Meloni, in October 2022, won in the midst of the Biden presidency, and when a possible re-election of Trump to the White House (two years later) seemed a vague and adventurous hypothesis. Another significant circumstance? The Brexit referendum (June 2016) occurred before Trump-one (November 2016), and in a political and media context in which the entire European establishment (and the British one too) was betting on the Remain option.

These are three examples far apart in space and time: but they clearly explain how it is wrong to attribute the past-present-future misfortunes of the left to the satanic Trump. If anything – and this is the point – progressives would do well to question their inability to read, much less interpret, the profound trends of our time and the concerns of majority segments of the electorate (including portions of traditional left-wing voters who have been disappointed): with respect to wages (forgotten in the name of “rightism”), with respect to illegal immigration (denied even as a problem by the left), with respect to security (described as a “security obsession” and then in turn scaled down and denied), with respect to an identity issue (from time to time distorted or criminalized as “racist”-“xenophobic”-“sovereignist”).

As you can see, what does Trump have to do with it? It is not his fault if, faced with the underlying pressures and tendencies of the electorate, the left has sensationally turned its head the other way. And again: it is not the Orange Man's fault if, little by little, as it becomes increasingly difficult to obtain consensus around the heart of his politics, the left has chosen a technocratic path disconnected from the direct electoral mandate. Italy and the EU have been laboratories of this approach: devising mechanisms that, while formally respecting constitutional norms, have gradually separated the kratos from the demos, loosening the link between the exercise of power and its supposed democratic delegation. Until the left addresses those issues of substance (wages, immigration, security, taxes, etc.) and the underlying question of method (i.e. the need to reconnect the arrival in government to an explicit choice of the voters), it will be of little use to fire bullets or poisoned arrows against the new Republican Washington.

Let's be clear: let he who is without sin cast the first stone. Even in our private lives, we have all done it at least once, perhaps in a moment of intellectual cowardice: attributing to someone else the faults that were instead all and only ours. It is the well-known mechanism of the scapegoat: identifying in an external reality the presumed cause of our misfortunes, or even - if we know how to sacrifice the goat on the right altar - deluding ourselves into thinking that in this way we can find the possible, magical and instantaneous solution to our problems.

Here: if this defensive and self-absolving mechanism does not work in private life, it will be even less effective in politics and public life. In particular in the relationship between a party and its voters, between a political culture and its citizens, it is truly illusory to think that a crisis, a loss of emotional connection, the structural loss of harmony, derive from the presence of an adversary or from the role played by the rival camp.

Yet the left – Italian and European – seems incapable of carrying out this elementary self-analysis. And on the contrary, it is completely busy organizing its exorcisms against the new satanic presences that it believes have taken possession of the souls of the voters: the perfidious Trump, his vice Vance, and of course the techno-devil Musk. The sooner the comrades stop these demonizing ceremonies, the better it will be for them. Sincere best wishes.