Berlusconi Goes to Heaven

While Trump Goes to Court

A week can be a long time in 21st century politics, and a trip to the Spanish and French Pyrenees meant that I haven’t been able to respond, among other things, to Silvio Berlusconi’s long-overdue departure from our world. Luckily for me, many other people have had the time. Giorgia Meloni has given Il Cavaliere a state funeral. Matteo Salvini wept, or says he did. Their grief is probably justified - they owe Berlusconi a lot.

Elsewhere Tony Blair has described his former holiday host as ‘a larger than life figure’ who was ‘shrewd, capable and true to his word.’ Vladimir Putin - no surprises here - called him a ‘dear friend’ and a ‘true patriot’

Many obituaries called Berlusconi ‘colourful’ and ‘not politically correct’ - the usual dreadful euphemisms bestowed on politicians whose essential crassness and vileness is eclipsed by a certain level of fame and legendary status. There’s no doubt Berlusconi achieved that, which is why so many people have taken the dictum of never speak ill of the dead to such ridiculous extremes in his case, because there is a lot of ill that can be said, and deserves to be said, about Silvio Berlusconi.

One of the recurring themes in our new era of rightwing populist demagoguery is that such and such a politician is ‘unfit for office’. What Berlusconi showed, long before anyone else, was that unfitness for office was no obstacle to achieving the highest office in the land, as long as you had enough money to pay for it and no moral or political scruples regarding what you did with it. In the early 90s, in the aftermath of the ‘tangentopoli’ - ‘Bribesville’ - scandal, and the collapse of Italy’s post-war political order, Berlusconi used his money and his media empire to sweep up the scrapings of Italy’s disgraced political class into a winning combination.

With the help of the racist Northern League and Mussolini’s fascist descendants, Berlusconi built coalition governments that changed the face of Italian politics, without, to paraphrase Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s famous observation about Sicily, really changing that much at all.

Though Berlusconi’s own political views leaned heavily towards the right, his involvement in politics was not dictated primarily by ideological reasons, but by the desire to save himself from criminal charges, which would have cost him a lot of money and might even have landed him in prison.

He did this not once, but on various occasions, with a shameless verve that appealed to millions of Italian voters, for whom his real or alleged crimes were always secondary to his entertainment value. Bribery, tax evasion, alleged Mafia association, involvement in prostitution, sex with minors, racism, sexism, homophobia - all this mattered as little to a certain kind of voter as it did to many world leaders, like Blair, who found Berlusconi ‘colourful’ and endlessly amusing, rather than repugnant.

Now he has finally gone, botoxed to the eyeballs, his face stretched into a kind of grotesque death mask long before rigor mortis set in. Those who believe in the afterlife better pray that Saint Peter is not as easily won over when Berlusconi shows up at the pearly gates with his freakish rictus grin and his cheque book out, and that he is finally subject to the justice that he never received on earth.

For those of us who don’t believe in such things however, it’s clear that this was a politician who got away with everything he wanted to get away with, and with bells on. He lived a corrupt life, dedicated entirely to his own gratification, and neither Italy’s political or judicial institutions were ever able to lay a finger on him.

It took death to do what the Italian electorate should have done decades before, but could not be bothered to do, because too many voters enjoyed the spectacle of shamelessness that he paraded before them, and perhaps because too many of them wanted to live their lives the way he did.

The Pioneer

Berlusconi has been described, ad infinitum, as a politician who paved the way for Trump, Bolsonaro, and the other monsters who have wrought havoc on our contemporary ‘post-truth’ democratic dystopias. It’s interesting - however coincidental - that Berlusconi died in the same week when a kind of justice came closer to two of the politicians who have most closely adhered to the charlatan/demagogue prototype that he introduced into the post-Cold War world.

First, there was Boris Johnson’s ridiculous resignation as an MP, in response to the ‘kangaroo court’, as he described the parliamentary Privileges Committee, that appears posed to find him guilty of misleading parliament. Johnson did this to avoid a suspension that at most, might have triggered a by-election in his constituency, and at the very least would have constituted a humiliating precedent in British politics.

Cowardly and bombastic to the last, Johnson is ducking, diving, lying and conspiring to avoid this ignominious outcome. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Donald Trump appeared in court, charged with an astonishing 37 federal crimes, relating to his ludicrous possession of unclassified documents.

On the face of it then, it has been a bad week for bastards: One dead, one facing humiliation, and another facing jailtime.

But any such triumphalism should be tempered. It should not have taken the Grim Reaper to wipe the frozen grin off Berlusconi’s face. Johnson was not beaten politically; he was beaten by himself, unravelled by the moral incontinence and pampered sense of entitlement that should have been spotted long before he got into Downing Street. Trump is still a contender for the US presidency, and the only reason he has been charged is because he was dim and arrogant enough to conceal classified documents and boast about it in front of visitors to his Mar-a-Lago house of gilded horrors.

Naturally, none of this is their fault. Where Berlusconi claimed that he was being persecuted by ‘communist’ judges, both Johnson and Trump are trying to portray themselves as victims of sinister anti-democratic conspiracies and witch-hunts. Both of them are lying, as they have always done, and it remains to be seen whether they get away with it, as Berlusconi did.

Like Berlusconi, both of them have devoted followers who are lying with them, or willing to be lied to, or simply want to continue to be amused by the clown-politicians in whom they see nothing more than entertainment. In the UK, Johnson’s Tory supporters are now trying to destroy their own government and party in order to save the tarnished oaf on whom they were vicious or stupid enough to project their depraved hopes.

In the US, Republican politicians are now openly threatening armed insurrection to save their criminal former president from justice and ensure that he becomes president once again.

No one should be complacent enough to write off these possibilities. We can but hope that a disgraced Johnson never returns to public life, just as we can hope that Trump goes to jail. But it should not have taken their personal failings to bring us to this point. The failings were always obvious. Too many people refused to look, or could not be bothered.

Both men, like Berlusconi, are symptomatic of a deep democratic malaise and of wider collective moral failings that are not limited to them, and which will continue to ensure that other politicians like them - or even worse - take their place in the coming years. Vox in the Spanish government, an AfD coalition in Germany, the return of Bolsonaro - these are only some of the possibilities lurking round the corner.

There is no easy or obvious antidote to this toxicity, but it must involve a genuine democratic renewal, in which morality returns to politics and the notion of the common good becomes the central concern of democratic politics and good government.

Johnson and Trump, like Berlusconi, invited voters to be the worst that they could be, or at least to accept the lowest common denominator as a viable political choice. We need electorates that will refuse that invitation. We need voters who will ask their politicians to be the best that they can be; who should expect - and demand - governments that try to change society for the better instead of merely amusing us or humiliating our real and imaginary enemies.

We need to learn - relearn - to value honesty and integrity, vision and commitment more than entertainment, so liars and crooks are not forgiven just because they amuse us for a few minutes, or allowed to die without ever having been held accountable for their crimes.

In other words, we need to be better than we have been, in order to get the politicians we deserve. And if we can’t do that, then the likes of Berlusconi, Johnson, and Trump will continue to win, and we will all continue to lose.