When Italians went to the polls on Sept. 25, most votes were won by a right-wing coalition led by Giorgia Meloni of the neo-Fascist Brothers of Italy party, with roots in the post-World War II fascist Italian Social Movement. Conservative party coalition members include Matteo Salvini’s League and Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party, which together won more than 45 percent of the vote, enough to control both houses of Parliament. If, as expected, Meloni is elected prime minister in mid- or late October, she’ll become Italy’s first prime minister from a neo-Fascist party since the end of World War II.
Meloni, who defines herself as “pro-traditional family,” condemns abortion, LGBTQ rights and gay adoption. She also promotes the so-called great replacement theory, which denounces the danger of “ethnic substitution” by immigrants, a position embraced by a growing number of conservatives and Republicans in the U.S.
Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Jason Stanley, Jacob Urowsky professor of philosophy at Yale University and author of “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them.” Here, Stanley examines Italy’s election of Giorgia Meloni, as well as her ideological connection with the U.S. Republican party.
JASON STANLEY: Giorgia Meloni is a neo-fascist political leader who has all sorts of connections, who is further to the right even than the other Italian far-right Matteo Salvini, who sort of made his career calling for turning boats of immigrants away so that they could face peril in the Mediterranean, sort of sailing around demagogically.
And Meloni takes all that much further. Her rhetoric overlaps with Putin. Both Putin and her rail against the West, against the threat to national identity, the threat to gender roles. They talk about how globalists are threatening all of tradition. So both Putin and Meloni said roughly the same thing “Oh, in the West they will call you Parent One and Parent Two. They are eliminating the terms for parents, you know.”
So this incredibly harsh anti-LGBT rhetoric. This existential culture war, which is reminiscent of Goebbels. If you want to see the kind of vocabulary here, I suggest “Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister.” Meloni ticks of every fascist rhetorical box. She always talks about Great Replacement Theory — the threat of immigrants replacing traditional Italians. She poses them as an existential threat to the Italian nation.
She poses LGBT as an existential threat to Italian tradition. She has a background of quite explicit pro-fascism, but moderated as she was running and getting more and more powerful. She sort of had to moderate. But it’s looking like from the ministers that she’s picking from the Senate president to others, she’s picking people who are fascists, who are the most extreme on the Italian right.
And the international press has done a terrible job here. They’ve fallen hook, line and sinker. I mean, what happens is “People say these aren’t fascists, they’re just ordinary conservatives.” Giorgia Meloni is no ordinary conservative. You just watch one of her speech responses to, you know, rhetorically in terms of her background, in terms of many of the policies that she’s pushed for. You know, Great Replacement theory is not an ordinary conservative view.
She said she didn’t want to take Italy out of the EU, but her supporters want her to take Italy out of the EU. You know, the people voting for her, they know she’s just, you know, putting up a front. So there’s been a number of just frankly — from my Italian sources — idiotic articles in the international press about how she’s just an ordinary conservative.
But we know by now fascists moderate and present themselves as just slightly more extreme than ordinary conservatives in elections. And the international press falls for it time and again.
SCOTT HARRIS: Professor Stanley, neo-fascist Giorgia Meloni, now leader of the Italian state, is seen as a friend and ally of the U.S. Republican party. She spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February of this year and she shares many of the views of Republicans here in this country, one being the belief in the so-called Great Replacement Theory that you mentioned a moment ago. Tell our listeners a little bit about the danger of the Great Replacement Theory, now a line of thinking that’s shared across borders, of course.
JASON STANLEY: Great Replacement Theory is a rhetorical trope that is central to fascist and indeed genocidal movements throughout the 20th century. There was Madison Grants’ “The Passing of the Great Race,” he was a white supremacist. He’s saying that the great race — white people in the 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race that Hitler read and the people affected by — he was saying, “We have to stop immigration. We have this great race that is the greatest race in history. And we’re going to be outnumbered by these by these immigrants.”
And, you know, Mein Kampf is filled with this. So Great Replacement Theory is associated not just with Ku Klux Klan-fascist thinking, but also mass killers like (Norweigan mass killer) Anders Breivik.
The Buffalo shooter (Payton Gendron) had a whole section on Great Replacement Theory. The motivation for going into a supermarket in a black neighborhood and killing ten black shoppers was Great Replacement Theory. It’s right there, a whole section. And then suddenly it becomes this thing that, you know, Tucker Carlson starts talking about all the time and it becomes normalized and structurally, Great Replacement Theory is a kind of genocidal speech because it represents immigrants as existential threats to the nation.
And so when you represent something as an existential threat, well, you know, you can do anything to them. That’s what Hitler did to the Jews, who are at the heart of Hitler’s version of Great Replacement Theory. Unfortunately, in the United States, Tucker Carlson, is completely just goes on and on and on about it. It’s very disturbing to see because it’s just regularly been the justification for mass violence, both stochastic terrorism and large political genocidal movements, as in Nazism.
But here we are.
Visit Jason Stanley’s website at jason-stanley.com.
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Jason Stanley (29:13) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the Related Links section of this page.
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