Altrove/Elsewhere – Viva i Foa!
By Daniel Leisawitz*
Politics around the world, from the U.S. to Italy to the Philippines, have taken some troubling turns recently. Much virtual ink has already been spilt in an effort to get at the root of what has led to the current trends and to understand where they are heading. Two incisive analyses of recent events have been offered by Anna Foa and Roberto Stefan Foa. I do not know if these two Foas are related, but the Foa family name has long been associated with prominent members of Piedmontese Jewry. Anna Foa is retired professor of modern history at the University of Rome “La Sapienza” and daughter of one of the founding fathers of the Italian Republic, Vittorio Foa. Roberto Stefan Foa is a young Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Both Foas, separately, have commented upon the recent populist turn in politics in the U.S. and Europe, and their pieces warrant our attention.
In the latest installment of her weekly column “…speranza” (“…Hope”) in Pagine Ebraiche 24 (5 Dec. 2016), Anna Foa expresses her consternation at recent political events in Italy and the United States, even as she sees a glimmer of hope in Austria’s rejection of its extreme-right presidential candidate:
“We are in even greater need of [rebuilding our faith in the world and in the future], since the country that has, until now, to a greater or lesser degree, guaranteed liberty and democracy – the United States – may abdicate this role, seized by fear, racism and the anger of social strata who feel left behind. These are the matrices of every form of Fascism. We Italians are in even greater need [of rebuilding our faith] as we wallow in the populist mud with self-congratulatory irresponsibility, and run the very real risk of consigning Italy to the Salvinis [Northern League] and the Grillos [5-Star Movement]. But looking to Austria, we are left with hope.”
Roberto Stefan Foa has received attention recently as interest has grown in his paper, “The Danger of Deconsolidation”, forthcoming in the January 2017 issue of the Journal of Democracy. In this study, which he coauthored with Yascha Mounk (Harvard University lecturer in Government, and author of Stranger in My Own Country, a memoir about growing up Jewish in Germany in the 1980s and ’90s), Foa raises doubts about political scientists’ long-held assumption that a country in which liberal democracy and relative affluence have taken root will invariably remain democratic. By drawing on surveys gauging citizens’ opinions of the importance and benefits of a democratic system of government, Foa and Mounk have pointed to general trends of increasing skepticism toward liberal democracy and increasing openness toward other political systems, including authoritarianism.
The trend-lines that the two young researchers trace out are worrisome, as they indicate, among other developments, that “younger generations are less committed to the importance of democracy.” This, coupled with the increased apathy of young citizens (as compared with young people of 25 years ago), could provide an opening for populist figures to undermine democratic institutions that, imperfect as they are, have long seemed unassailable. Democratic consolidation, it seems to Mounk and Foa, may not be as stable and irreversible as once thought.
These pieces from two Foas, one toward the end of her academic career, the other at the beginning of his, are emblematic of the ever-present necessity of analyzing and understanding the political realities that surround us: a great Italian tradition stretching back to Machiavelli’s commitment to “andare drieto alla verità effettuale della cosa” (“to getting under the actual truth of the thing”). All I can say is, “Viva i Foa!”
*Daniel Leisawitz is the Director of the Italian Studies Program at Muhlenberg College (Allentown, Pennsylvania, USA). The artwork is by Abraham Cresques a 14th-century Jewish Spanish cartographer.