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Italy, Giorgia Meloni, and the Future of the West
The eyes of the world are focused on Rome right now because of the death of the pope, but they should also be directed at Italy’s increasingly influential prime minister, Giorgia Meloni.
Last week, the Italian prime minister was in Washington, D.C., meeting with the president of the United States. There, Prime Minister Meloni delivered a subtle yet profound message to Donald Trump and his administration: The future of the American project is bound up with the future of Western civilization.
“When I speak about the West, I don’t speak about the geographical space,” said Prime Minister Meloni during last week’s White House meeting. “I speak about the civilization. And I want to make that civilization stronger.” (RELATED: How the Sons of St. Patrick Preserved the West)
Better than any other European leader, Giorgia Meloni understands what lies at the core of the cultural legacy of the West — and of the American political order. In accepting the 2024 Global Citizen Award from the Atlantic Council, she implored her American audience to stand up for Western political ideals now under assault. “The West is a system of values in which the person is central, men and women are equal and free, and therefore the systems are democratic, life is sacred, the state is secular, and based on the rule of law,” she said. “Are these values we should be ashamed of?”
Meloni’s description of Western values, of course, is a description of American values.
Thanks to the degraded condition of primary and secondary education, however, most Americans never learn about the remarkable achievements of Western civilization in elevating the dignity and freedom of the individual. They never learn that our civilization is the product of the centuries-long interaction of Greek and Roman culture, adopted and transformed by the Jewish and Christian traditions, and transformed again by the scientific, democratic, and intellectual revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe and the United States. (RELATED: The Future Left the Group: Education, Culture, and Values)
What we call “the Western tradition” is really a story of tragedy and triumph: of oppression, exploitation, inquisitions, slavery, racism, and war — as well as a story of liberation, discovery, creativity, justice, freedom, and peace.
Surely it is no accident that Meloni — an Italian — is standing up for this cultural inheritance. For it is difficult to overstate Italy’s decisive role in the formation of Western civilization. In politics, philosophy, science, literature, art, music, religion — and food — the Italians reached heights of human achievement that laid the foundation for the most dynamic and consequential civilization in human history. (RELATED: The Republic of Venice Offers a Model for a Fractured America)
Behind many of these achievements was the Christian faith. And as a believing Catholic, Meloni is unafraid to say so.
“Above all, we need to recover awareness of who we are,” Meloni explained. She said that we are the heirs of a “synthesis born out of the meeting of Greek philosophy, Roman law, and Christian humanism.”
In other words, take away Moses, Jesus, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and Locke, and Western civilization disappears from the history books.
In this, Italy’s first female prime minister shares the outlook of the first female prime minister of Great Britain: Margaret Thatcher.
In 1988, in her first trip to communist Poland as prime minister, Thatcher challenged her hosts to reform their political system and rejoin the European democratic community. “We want to see the barriers which have divided Europe for the last 40 years dismantled,” she said, “so that Poland and other Eastern European countries can once again share fully in Europe’s culture, Europe’s freedom and Europe’s justice—treasures which sprang from Christendom, which were developed through a rule of law and found their expression in democracy.” (RELATED: Remembering Margaret Thatcher, the Iron Magnolia)
Thus, Meloni has been called the Margaret Thatcher of today’s Europe: a relentless advocate for the political and religious concepts that brought liberal democracy into existence. Like Thatcher, she is the leading political voice against authoritarian rule. Like Thatcher, she is the most articulate defender of European civilization, which she describes as “a civilization built over the centuries with the genius and sacrifices of many.”
The great “existential” threat to human freedom — coming from within the West — is progressivism. Meloni understands that. The cancel culture “tries to upset and remove every single beautiful, honorable and human thing that our civilization has developed,” she writes in her autobiography. “It is a nihilistic wind of unprecedented ugliness.” Meloni made it clear during her political campaign that “I am Giorgia, I am a woman, I am Italian, I am Christian. You can’t take this away from me!”
She has no patience for modern identity politics.
All of this sends the radical left into apoplexy. Meloni’s tough stance on illegal immigration is called xenophobic. Her defense of the traditional family and rejection of the transgender movement is denounced as a revival of fascism. Shortly before Meloni’s election as prime minister, Jason Horowitz, Rome bureau chief for the New York Times, wrote ominously of Meloni’s youthful attraction to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. According to Horowitz, Meloni fraternized with “a fellowship of militants” who view Tolkien’s story as “a fertile shire for nationalists.”
In fact, Meloni’s ongoing attachment to Tolkien’s mythology reveals a moral seriousness that is wholly absent from her infantile detractors.
Two themes stand out: First, as Tolkien himself once described his book’s central message, The Lord of the Rings is “about power, exerted for domination.” Meloni has said explicitly that her view of power and its capacity to ruin the human soul was “closely tied” to Tolkien’s view. “I consider power very dangerous,” she says. “I consider it an enemy and not a friend.”
No fascist in the history of fascism would ever say or think such a thing.
Second, there is the Tolkienian emphasis on every person’s obligation, regardless of her strength or circumstances, to battle the malignant forces in our world. For Meloni, brave but ordinary people — not abstract global institutions — will determine the direction of Western civilization. As she told her New York audience: “The time we live in requires us to choose what we want to be and what path we want to take.”
As in Tolkien’s story, so in our actual lives. Resignation in the face of difficulty, evasion of individual responsibility, cowardice when moral courage is demanded — herein lies the road to perdition.
“We can continue to fuel the idea of the decline of the West, we can surrender to the idea that our civilization has nothing more to say, no more routes to chart,” said Meloni. “Or we can remember who we are, learn also from our mistakes, add our own piece of the story to this remarkable walk, and govern what happens around us, to leave our children a better world. Which is exactly my choice.”
Whether or not other democratic leaders — including those in the United States — will make the same resolute choice is a decidedly open question. In the meantime, Viva Italia!
READ MORE from Joseph Loconte:
The Republic of Venice Offers a Model for a Fractured America
A Frail President in a Hostile World
Joseph Loconte is a presidential scholar at New College of Florida and author of the forthcoming book, The War for Middle-earth: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933-1945. His documentary film series, The Gift of the Italians: A Traveler’s Guide to Western Civilization from Cicero to Sophia Loren, can be viewed here.
The post Italy, Giorgia Meloni, and the Future of the West appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.
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