the poster 11/09/2010
start with the beginning of a sacred text of traditional liberal, democratic, anarchist, "Civil Disobedience" by Henry David Thoreau: "With all my heart do the statement: 'The best government is the one that governs least, 'and I would like to see put into practice as quickly and systematically. " We have always read this as a poster utopia anti-authoritarian, anarchist, but another law tradition rather the proclamation of these words as an extreme liberalism and an anti-authoritarianism e antistatualismo individualista di destra.No0n a caso, “libertario” è una parola di sinistra in Italia e di destra negli Stati Uniti. Dopo tutto, il gesto rivoluzionario di Thoreau – il rifiuto di pagare le tasse – risuona precisamente con gli argomenti di tutte le destre degli ultimi quarant’anni, compresa la retorica antistatuale del Tea Party.
Lo slogan della rivoluzione americana, quello per cui i rivoluzionari di Boston buttarono a mare le casse di tè inglese piuttosto che pagarci l’imposta, era “No taxation without rapresentation”: no semplicemente “niente tasse”, ma niente tasse senza rappresentanza (pochi ricordano, fra laltro, che i coloni americani pagavano allora lower taxes for citizens of the motherland - but they were represented in parliament, and they do not). Now, among the degradation of politics and globalization, what is left in crisis is just the representation on which they held the very idea of \u200b\u200bdemocracy and the legitimacy of taxation. Hence the perception (fueled and sustained by the "left") that taxes are not paid to an institution that represents us to be used for the common good, but there are stolen to be wasted or used for purposes that do not know and do not control, that the money paid does not come back at all. Perhaps the answer to the leftist rhetoric of woodworm right should not be to compete on the same but plan to try to restore to citizens the feeling that the state we are not the "Politicians" as they call them in America, or "caste" as they call it here.
Add to this, too, that by Thatcher and Reagan on the idea that there is a "common good" does not enjoy great popularity. There is no society, there are individuals, "said Margaret Thatcher. And the revolutionary act of Thoreau is also this: the individual rebellion, which originated in the experience of the lonely cabin in the woods in which experiments can be socialized out of space in the city - ecological utopia for us, but the metaphor of the border if we look other eyes - of an individual who opposes their individual conscience to the law of a state where you do not recognize and do not like.
There is all the difference in the world, of course, between that Thoreau refused to pay taxes because they do not want to take up arms and a Tea Party refusing to pay because he was afraid that the weapons carried it off. But also at the heart of the revolt of the right is also the concern that this was alien claims to interfere with his conscience, with its moral and religious values. It 's a concern that does not belong only to the right. Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement opposed to the segregation laws not only the political principles of equality among citizens ma soprattutto quelli morali della “beloved community”, una comunità retta dal valore religioso della carità e dell’amore. Uno slogan del movimento delle donne negli Stati Uniti è “fuori lo stato dalle mie mutande”: lo stato si ferma al confine della nostra coscienza e del nostro corpo – sia per noi, sia per una destra che si mobilità attorno a suoi principi di religione, famiglia, comunità, sessualità.
Persino l’apparentemente inspiegabile ostilità alla riforma sanitaria ha a che fare con questo. Per noi, che consideriamo la salute un diritto, significa pretendere che lo stato usi i nostri soldi per darci i mezzi per vivere sani, per prevenire e curare le sofferenze del corpo and psyche. But a tradition that limits the definition of the rights of the individual bones of formal rights, health care reform may be submitted as a claim of the state to get their hands on their bodies and their minds. We
the most ridiculous and extreme example: the legend fueled by Tea Party that health care reform provided for the establishment of "committees of death", which would decide in closed rooms secret government such as the elderly should live and which should be deleted ( about: the percentage of elderly voters jumped from 16% in 2008 to 23% in the midterm elections of 2010). There is no doubt that this is paranoia. But
. Saturday, November 6, in a television Rai 3, struggled in the technological possibility of diverting the course of hurricanes. At one point, tentatively, the conductor asked: Who decides where to send them? Massimo Cacciari, a philosopher and exponent of the modern left, he said: you can turn into a hurricane as it hits New Orleans and kill thousands of people but must be in a more sparsely populated area and kill ten only, but is something that is not may decide on a democratic or a dictator can do good and holy, or a committee of scientists and technicians .. Cacciari spoke so dejected and hypothetical - but clearly the act of imagining a future where we can such a decision authoritarian and / or bureaucratic restrictions on who can live and who can die perhaps does not belong to the same paradigm of the legend of "Boards of death"? And if I were one of ten peasants condemned to death?
Paranoia, of course - but Delmore Schwartz said that even paranoids have real enemies, and the idea that our life has a power that we do not control and do not know is not the monopoly of this right. A New Orleans after Katrina, a number of African Americans in the slums was (and remains) convinced that the levees were blown up in order to send the full in their districts and save New Orleans and rich tourist. It will be paranoia, but African Americans historically have had good reasons to think that the state does not belong and that would really be able to do something like this: in the flood of 1927, that in an infinite number of blues singing, maybe really happened, and after all, it was not sent just the blacks and Latins to be killed on the front line in Vietnam? Who decides who lives and who dies? and who decides who decides? If they did to blacks and Puerto Ricans, because they could not do the hillbilly peasants who voted for Paul Rand? Meanwhile, in this election, voters are African American and Hispanic decreased (13 to 10 and from 9 to 8 per cent) and increased rural ones.
Therefore, in its way, the Tea Party comes to us. In the best page of his book The Audacity of Hope. Barack Obama wrote that the reason why the U.S. Constitution has worked its origin in the form of negotiation, dialogue and compromise, but acknowledged that there are times when they express the meaning of things instead of the idealists and extremists, like the anti-slavery at the time of civil war. He added, in his unwavering faith bipartisan, that this also applies to extremists of the other party, so you have to be careful what you say, however, not to do it but just to read the signals.
If we try to read the signs of the new wave of right, we can not console with the finding that many of the more absurd candidates were not elected: the fears that have fueled this movement (along with a disproportionate amount of money) is shared by a much wider range of Republican voters (and others). And arise from the radicalization of questions we ask ourselves: what to do with representation, democracy, the relationship between citizen and state, between law and conscience, in the age of globalization? The responses of the American Republicans are retrograde, disturbing and counterproductive. But if we do not imagine different answers, if the left does not find its mission to become involved in decisions that affect us all, then we suffer a future in which the collapse and emptying of the representation and participation, the growing separation fra il potere e la maggioranza dell’umanità, si risponderà solo con la delega fideistica (al dittatore buono e santo o alla commissione di tecnici – Berlusconi e Bertolaso, o loro controfigure?) o con la rabbia paranoica, o con tutte e due le cose insieme.
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