by Nevio Gambula
"In the autumn the social and economic situation will be dramatic with dangers to the social order. To stay afloat, the government will have to cover itself behind the danger of the pandemic and hold the reins somehow. A democratic dictatorship will be inevitable."
(Massimo Cacciari, guest of Bianca Berlinguer at Carta Bianca, 14 July 2020)
Cacciari's statement is very serious, but it has the merit of revealing the thoughts of a good part of the intellectual class. I am also convinced that it reflects a large portion of the population, perhaps frightened by the possibility of a Leghist government; and that it could be seen as a forcing of democratic rules to ensure that the government in office can continue its action.
The discursive elements of the declaration are easily discernible.
The first sentence explains the context, implying the worsening economic and social situation following the pandemic. We can imagine that Cacciari prefigures a "hot autumn" scenario, with a series of categories, those who suffer most from the repercussions of the crisis (workers, unemployed, small VAT numbers, etc.), pushed into the streets to claim what the crisis itself has taken away or greater social equity.
For Cacciari, this eventuality is such as to jeopardize the maintenance of the social order and therefore must be avoided.
From the second sentence, instead, we derive that for Cacciari, the government must "hold the reins" of the social order and not hesitate to use the argument of the health emergency to do so. It is undeniable that the pandemic state of emergency has produced a strong limitation of freedoms, both personal and social (movement, work, meeting, etc.). We can say that the principle of freedom was limited "by decree" in the short time of the lockdown.
Cacciari's statement suggests the need to make those limitations no longer emergency, but "normal", prolonging them in the medium-long time of history. With the motivation of the pandemic, and with the objective of continuing with the action of the government and thus saving the established order, the "social distancing" becomes the predominant form of human relations.
Cacciari, in fact, and perhaps unintentionally, confirms the core of Agamben's thought: the use of the pandemic as an opportunity to declare a state of emergency.
The continuation of the declaration, the third sentence, the one containing the terrible final oxymoron, is gruesome.
The logic is very simple: in order to avert the crisis of the social order, the government needs to resort to a "democratic dictatorship", that is to say a form of relations that suspends certain constitutional rights and freedoms, but does so in the name of democracy. We could say that, for Cacciari, dictatorship is a process that serves to make democracy firm.
Come to think of it, Cacciari's statement says nothing different from what Mussolini said in the sentence: "Fascism is a method, not an end; an autocracy on the road to democracy".
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