This book contains some interesting ideas, but in general I feel like rejecting the genealogy of political correctness outlined by Ricolfi. Some points strike me as unquestionably true, in any case.
1.
Ricolfi draws a double distinction between left and right, between communitarianism and liberalism. It is therefore possible to belong to the liberal or communitarian left.
The author asks why in Italy there hasn’t been a leftist proposal that can attract the most vulnerable.
Who are the most vulnerable? Ricolfi talks about three different “societies” which interact in the Italian system: a) the society of guarantees (people who have stable jobs and an extremely low risk of dismissal, such as government employees); b) the society of risk (a rip-off from Beck, it indicates those who have jobs but experience precariousness in some sense); c) the society of the excluded (those who don’t have a job and/or are economically exploited).
The society of guarantees and the society of the excluded have shrunk over time, while the society of risk has expanded.
Studies on the political orientation of members of the different societies suggest that, while the members of the society of guarantees often vote (liberal) left-wing parties, the society of the excluded tends to vote M5S, while the society of risk looks at right-wing parties.
These studies cannot be replicated in other countries – “indeed, in none of the major Western countries are the conditions present that have so deeply divided Italy. Undeclared economy, self-employment, paraslavery infrastructure, rift between developed and backward areas”.
However, something generalized can be said about Europe: “support for the right is highest in the lower classes, whose members have not even earned a high school diploma, and is lowest in the better-equipped classes, who have earned a college degree or an even higher degree”.
Some conditions – such as the student struggles of the 1968 – are responsible for the change in the electoral base of the left; one important event was the Historic Compromise, namely a political agreement signed in 1973 between the Communist Party and the Christian Democrats to form a coalition government (the main objective was the stabilization of the country after years of social and political tension). The Compromise was a failure for the left, since it couldn’t implement most of the reforms they would have liked to.
Ricolfi argues that the left's battles for the past 30 years in Italy have focused on civil rights rather than social rights.
According to Ricolfi, “the working class demands security, protection of the social fabric, brakes on the culture of rights, protection from the failures of globalization”.
The choice nowadays in Italy, for the author and for Marcello Veneziani, is not between left and right, but between radical liberalism and mild communitarianism.
2.
The struggle for freedom of expression in Italy was a prerogative of the left from the postwar period until the mid-1970s (censorship targeted offenses against decency and constituted authorities somewhat across the board: film, theater, publishing, music, television).
In the next thirty years everything changes, because the power of the Church is diminishing: offenses against decency are no longer sufficient to warrant censorship, which is imposed, however, through pressure from the most powerful (usually right-wing) politicians.
Following the Bulgarian edict (2002), outright censorship disappeared; instead, pressure from the economic-cultural establishment due to political correctness prevails. Rather than systematically occupying positions of power, the official left, which has always been naturally attuned to political correctness, is now perceived as organic to the establishment.
In summary, according to Ricolfi it can be said that censorship has progressively become a left-wing affair, while the defense of freedom of expression a right-wing issue.
What is political correctness? On the one hand, it is a set of language reforms aimed at not offending political minorities; on the other, it takes the form of a complex system – equipped with dedicated offices and institutions – that punishes and educates people who are guilty of offending and/or oppressing political minorities.
Since the 1990s – when the working class was hawked and immigration became a central issue in the Italian political landscape – the left has attempted to reconstitute its struggles around new minority categories, namely immigrants and the LGBT community.
According to Ricolfi, “the ancient conditioned reflex, which for so long led leftist culture to judge communism by its (noble) ends, rather than by the (ignoble) means by which it attempted to impose them, has led and leads the current left to judge political correctness by the goals of justice it proclaims, rather than by the illiberal means it adopts”.
Ricolfi also argues that the excesses of political correctness have created a rift (for example) in the feminist movement, where so-called TERFs have opposed measures to include transwomen.
3.
Norberto Bobbio has argued that the left can be equated with the concept of equality and the right with the concept of inequality. But what is meant by the former?
There are at least three different concepts of equality: equality of outcome (the realization of which is accomplished by building a classless society in which income production is governed by centralized planning), correction of the conditions of outcome (through tax redistribution and welfare) and equality of opportunity (the egalitarian ideal is pursued ex ante, by making access to education and further study as independent as possible of families’ economic conditions through a well-designed system of subsidies, exemptions, and scholarships).
While equality of outcome characterizes real socialism until the fall of the Berlin Wall, equality of opportunity is an essentially liberal model.
According to Ricolfi, access to culture plays the crucial role in the third model of equality: “culture is what enables one to overcome the conditioning of origin. […] Culture, in short, is the privileged way to pursue equality in a free society”.
It follows that these three concepts – left, equality and culture – are intrinsically linked and seemingly inseparable; this explains why there are so many left-wing intellectuals and thinkers or why left-wing governments tend to promote cultural projects more than their counterparts.
Ricolfi speaks of a profound change in the relationship between the left and the promotion of culture: if in the 1960s Concetto Marchesi advocated the need to extend the teaching of Latin to all schools, ten years later the left went so far as to consider emancipation through high culture a form of prevarication – “the Iliad, the Aeneid, Foscolo, and even geometry, were ‘things for the rich, invented by the rich to humiliate the poor.’”
In other words, culture for the left is no longer a path to emancipation, an uplifting experience that leads to something other than itself, but a comfortable return to one’s origins.
Bourdieu’s influence in the sociology of pedagogy is also relevant (the culture that educational institutions convey is the culture of the dominant class; the transmission of this specific culture reproduces, through selection, the distribution of cultural capital among the various classes; such distribution of cultural capital reproduces the social structure, that is, the inequalities between classes).
Culture ceases to be conceived, in a Gramscian way, as an irreplaceable tool for the emancipation and elevation of the popular strata, and is, if anything, thought of as the means by which members of the ruling class – through tests and examinations – inhibit the social rise of the subordinate classes.
According to Ricolfi, one of the main consequences of this approach to culture is that schools and universities stop failing students or giving them low grades – “little by little, from reform to reform, high culture has been stripped away, lightened, replaced by acultural arguments, good intentions, and internal and external pseudo-cultural activities, until schools have been transformed into a place of socialization and socio-psychological assistance rather than the transmission of a cultural heritage”.
This transformation of schooling has not benefited the economically weaker groups; rather, it has penalized them, as wealthier students can finance tutoring or more years of study to reach graduation, while the poorest cannot.
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