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      The Ins and Outs of America’s Shrug at the Threat to Democracy

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      With voters distracted by other issues and election denial flourishing, the country has what academics call a legitimacy problem.One way to read the striking results of the New York Times/Siena College poll released this week is that democracy is not shaping up to be the driver of votes that many on the left hoped it would be.The obvious reason is that inflation is a far more immediate issue on the minds of most voters, who are watching their savings evaporate or struggling to pay their bills. That’s Abraham Maslow 101: Physiological needs of food and shelter will always take priority over abstractions.But another way to interpret the survey is as yet more confirmation that American democracy is indeed in trouble.In a Twitter Spaces conversation today with Ruth Igielnik, a staff editor for news surveys who worked on this week’s poll, and Nick Corasaniti, a national correspondent on the politics team, we unpacked why, even though 71 percent of voters agreed that democracy was at risk, only 7 percent said that democracy’s fragile state was the most important problem facing the country. You can listen to our discussion here.Ruth noted that voters’ responses to the question “What one or two words do you think summarize the current threat to democracy?” were all over the map.Some said “election deniers” or “Donald Trump,” while others said “Joe Biden,” “inflation and taxes” or “the one percent, a.k.a. Wall Street and hedge funds.” Another person said “our division” — that is, political polarization itself.Nick, who recently returned from a reporting trip in Michigan, added some texture from tagging along during voter canvassing in Detroit and its suburbs, as well as in Saginaw, a city of about 50,000 people in the center of the state. Biden carried Saginaw County by just a few hundred votes in 2020.“We encountered a ton of voters, and not a single one of them brought up any issues of democracy,” Nick said.He added that the organizers, as they prepared the canvassers for what they should expect to encounter, told them: “You’re going to hear about issues like, why are our wages so low when we’re a predominantly union town? Why are prescription drug prices so persistently high? Why are there potholes in the road? Why can’t I get a garbage can?”Lonna Atkeson, who studies political psychology at Florida State University, said voters were just thinking rationally. When it comes to protecting democracy, she noted, each side sees the other as the problem.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsBoth parties are making their final pitches ahead of the Nov. 8 election.Where the Election Stands: As Republicans appear to be gaining an edge with swing voters in the final weeks of the contest for control of Congress, here’s a look at the state of the races for the House and Senate.Biden’s Low Profile: President Biden’s decision not to attend big campaign rallies reflects a low approval rating that makes him unwelcome in some congressional districts and states.What Young Voters Think: Twelve Americans under 30, all living in swing states, told The Times about their political priorities, ranging from the highly personal to the universal.In Minnesota: The race for attorney general in the light-blue state offers a pure test of which issue is likely to be more politically decisive: abortion rights or crime.“So there’s not really much to go on there other than to vote for your own party,” Atkeson said, “whereas the economy is a clear signal. It’s on your doorstep. You feel it every day. Maybe there’s something that can be done about that.”A legitimacy problemMost serious experts on democracy — academics who study governments around the world, and why they fall apart — would say that election deniers are the real danger.And the new Times/Siena poll shows that millions of them are out there, despite zero evidence that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. As Nick wrote in an article explaining the poll results, “Twenty-eight percent of all voters, including 41 percent of Republicans, said they had little to no faith in the accuracy of this year’s midterm elections.”There’s an academic term for that: a legitimacy problem.Seymour Martin Lipset, a sociologist and political scientist who did seminal work on what makes democracies successful, published an influential paper in 1959 called “Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy.”At the time, he was trying to understand two main questions: why Europe veered toward extremist ideologies like fascism and communism after World War I, and whether the nascent democracies forged by fire and blood in World War II were sustainable.Lipset defined democracy this way: “a political system which supplies regular constitutional opportunities for changing the governing officials.”The United States still meets that pretty basic requirement. Despite Trump’s bellowing about a stolen election, and his efforts to whip up the mob that assaulted the Capitol, Biden duly assumed office in 2021 after a near-disastrous handover of power. The system held, albeit tenuously.But Lipset’s framework should alarm us today because, as the Times poll suggests, nearly half the country still doesn’t consider Biden the legitimate president.Many of Donald Trump’s supporters deny the legitimacy of the last presidential election.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesPretend the U.S. is a foreign country; how would we explain what is happening? Two years on, the fever that powered an attempt to interrupt the peaceful transfer of power has not broken, and it’s still being stoked every day by the loser of the previous election.As Lipset wrote, “If a political system is not characterized by a value system allowing the peaceful ‘play’ of power — the adherence by the ‘outs’ to decisions made by ‘ins’ and the recognition by ‘ins’ of the rights of the ‘outs’ — there can be no stable democracy.”Lipset also defined a stable democracy as the absence “of a major political movement opposed to the democratic ‘rules of the game’” — which required, he thought, that “no totalitarian movement, either Fascist or Communist, received 20 percent of the vote.”The one silver lining in the poll? Only 17 percent of the voters who saw democracy as threatened said there was a need to go “outside the law” to fix the problem. And of those voters, just 11 percent said the answer would be to “take up arms/violence/civil war.”Then again, maybe that’s no silver lining at all: By my math, that would still be over a million people. Buckle up.What to read on democracyA South Florida man became the first of 20 defendants ensnared in Gov. Ron DeSantis’s voter fraud dragnet to have charges dropped, ABC News reports.The midterm legal battles have already begun: The Democratic National Committee has filed a court motion to try to stop Republicans in Pennsylvania who want to disqualify mail-in ballots without handwritten dates on them.Tens of thousands of transgender people could be disenfranchised in the November elections because of strict voter ID laws and other rules in their states, according to Rolling Stone.Nonwhite voters were 30 percent more likely to have their vote-by-mail application or ballot rejected compared with white voters in Texas, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, which analyzed data from the March primary.Election offices large and small across the country are contending with internal threats that could undermine the integrity of the midterms: election deniers holding positions of power in them, CNN reports.The head of a major federal union warned this week that demonization of the Internal Revenue Service by some Republicans could put the agency’s employees in danger.Doug Mastriano, the Republican nominee for governor in Pennsylvania, is stepping up his courtship of right-wing fringe figures, including adherents of the QAnon conspiracy theory, The Philadelphia Inquirer reports.viewfinderSupporters of Stacey Abrams at a campaign event in Athens, Ga.Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesOn the trail in GeorgiaA couple of hundred people had gathered to wait for a glimpse of Stacey Abrams by the time her purple bus pulled up in College Square in Athens, Ga. Abrams’s supporters have often spoken to me about how inspiring it is for them to see her running for office when for so long Black women have organized politically behind the scenes.I crept to the center of the crowd for a photo of Abrams as she spoke. At one point, I turned around and captured this image of a group of racially diverse and multigenerational women. To me, it represented a key group of her supporters and their feelings about her candidacy and the future.Thank you for reading On Politics, and for being a subscriber to The New York Times. — BlakeRead past editions of the newsletter here.If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.Have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      There Is a Way to Make America Safe for Democracy

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      Many Americans believe there’s something not quite right about majority rule — something threatening, something dangerous. It just feels wrong.We might be comfortable with decision-making by majorities at our P.T.A. meetings or when deciding on the theme for the next vacation Bible school, but we’re uneasy with the prospect when it comes to our politics. And our political lexicon is stocked with phrases and aphorisms that highlight the danger of majoritarian systems and even rebuke the concept outright.There are the usual warnings about the “tyranny of the majority”; there is the quip, commonly misattributed to Benjamin Franklin, that democracy is “two wolves and a lamb, voting on what to have for lunch”; and there is the oft-heard assertion — and I’ll admit a personal bête noire — that the United States is a “republic, not a democracy” and that democracy would be the ruin of American liberty. We are taught to imagine ourselves as potentially being at the awful mercy of most of our fellow citizens.Our collective suspicion of majority rule rests on the legitimate observation that a majority can be as tyrannical as any despot. As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “When I see the right and the ability to do everything granted to any power whatsoever, whether it is called people or king, democracy or aristocracy, where it is exercised in a monarchy or in a republic, I say: there is the seed of tyranny, and I seek to go live under other laws.”Americans take for granted the idea that our counter-majoritarian Constitution — deliberately written to constrain majorities and keep them from acting outright — has, in fact, preserved the rights and liberties of the people against the tyranny of majority rule, and that any greater majoritarianism would threaten that freedom.Well, what if that’s not true? Yes, majorities acting through our representative institutions have been overbearing and yes, the Supreme Court has occasionally protected the rights of vulnerable minorities, as well as those of the people at large. But there have been just as many, if not more, examples of the reverse: of majorities safeguarding the rights of vulnerable minorities and of our counter-majoritarian institutions freeing assorted bullies and bosses to violate them.I’ve written about some of these episodes before (and I’m hardly the only person to have drawn attention to them): how the court gutted both the Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution and the laws written to secure the lives of Black Americans, free and freed, from discrimination, violence and exploitation.If allowed to stand in full, the Civil Rights Act of 1875 — passed by only the third U.S. Congress to have Black members, who were elected in some of the first truly free elections in the South — would have outlawed discrimination in public accommodations like railroads, steamboats, hotels and theaters and prohibited jury exclusion on the basis of race. But the court, in an 1883 opinion, decided that neither the 13th nor the 14th Amendment gave Congress the power to outlaw racial discrimination by private individuals.The advent of Jim Crow, similarly, had less to do in the beginning with a nefarious majority of voters rushing to the polls to subjugate their Black neighbors than with a long campaign of violence meant to neutralize Black voters and intimidate their white allies. The men who pioneered Jim Crow in Mississippi, for example, were by no means a majority, nor did they represent one in a state where a large part of the public was Black. As the historian C. Vann Woodward summarized it in “The Strange Career of Jim Crow,” “In spite of the ultimate success of disfranchisement, the movement met with stout resistance and succeeded in some states by narrow margins or the use of fraud.”There was, however, a majority vote to protect the rights of voters in the South. But that vote — the vote to pass the 1890 Federal Elections Bill, which would have empowered the national government to supervise elections in the former Confederate states — failed to overcome a Senate filibuster.We cannot know how American history would have unfolded in the absence of our counter-majoritarian institutions. But the example of Reconstruction and its aftermath suggests that if majorities had been able to act, unimpeded, to protect the rights of Black Americans, it might have been a little less tragic than what we experienced instead.It is an insight we can apply to the present. It’s not the national majority that threatens the right to vote or the right to bodily autonomy or that wants to strip transgender Americans of their right to exist in civil society (on that last point, 64 percent of Americans, according to the Pew Research Center, support laws or policies that would “protect transgender people from discrimination in jobs, housing and public spaces”). If it were up to majorities of Americans — and if, more important, the American political system more easily allowed majorities to express their will — then Congress would have already strengthened the Voting Rights Act, codified abortion rights into law and protected the civil rights of L.G.B.T.Q. Americans. Even the legislative victories most Americans rightfully admire — like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — were possible only with a supermajority of lawmakers assembled in the wake of a presidential assassination.If it were up to the national majority, American democracy would most likely be in a stronger place, not the least because Donald Trump might not have become president. Our folk beliefs about American government notwithstanding, the much-vaunted guardrails and endlessly invoked norms of our political system have not secured our democracy as much as they’ve facilitated the efforts of those who would degrade and undermine it.Majority rule is not perfect but rule by a narrow, reactionary minority — what we face in the absence of serious political reform — is far worse. And much of our fear of majorities, the legacy of a founding generation that sought to restrain the power of ordinary people, is unfounded. It is not just that rule of the majority is, as Abraham Lincoln said, “the only true sovereign of a free people”; it is also the only sovereign that has reliably worked to protect those people from the deprivations of hierarchy and exploitation.If majoritarian democracy, even at its most shackled, is a better safeguard against tyranny and abuse than our minoritarian institutions, then imagine how we might fare if we let majoritarian democracy actually take root in this country. The liberty of would-be masters might suffer. The liberty of ordinary people, on the other hand, might flourish.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      The Battle Between Pocketbooks and Principles

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      You are never in the voting booth alone.You bring with you your hopes and fears, your expectations and your disappointments. Your choice is made through a maze of considerations, but it hinges primarily on how the candidates — their principles and their party — line up with your worldview. Would they, if elected, represent and promote the kind of community and country you want to live in? Are they on your side, fighting for you and people like you?Often, the things that are top of mind as you consider those questions are urgent and imminent, rather than ambient and situational. Issues like the economy, for instance, will almost always take top billing, since they affect the most people most directly.Anger over abortion can also be potent, and in some races, it may determine the outcome, but it is a narrower issue. First, no person assigned male at birth will ever have to personally wrestle with a choice to receive an abortion or deal with health complications from a pregnancy that might necessitate an abortion. So, for half the electorate, the issue is a matter of principle rather than one of their own bodily autonomy.Furthermore, at the moment, abortion is still legal in most states. Yes, clinics have disappeared completely in 13 of the 50 states, according to the latest data from the Guttmacher Institute, but for millions of American women living in blue states, abortion access hasn’t changed since the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Dobbs.That is not to diminish the outrage people do and should feel about this right being taken away from them. It doesn’t diminish my personal outrage, nor does it assume that abortion rights are safe in the states that have yet to outlaw the practice.But I mention it as a way to understand something I’ve seen over and over in the electorate: Incandescent rage, however brightly it burns at the start, has a tendency to dim. People can’t maintain anger for extended periods. It tends to wear on the mind and the body, as everyday issues like gas and rent and inflation push to get back into primary consideration.I have seen repeatedly how people abandon their principles — whether they be voting rights, transgender issues, gun control, police reform, civil rights, climate change or the protection of our democracy itself — when their pocketbooks suffer. There is a core group of people who will feel singularly passionate about each of these problems, but the rest of the public adjusts itself to the outrage and the trauma, shuffling each issue back into the deck. They still care about these problems as issues in the world, but they don’t necessarily see them as urgent or imminent.In a New York Times/Siena College poll released this week, voters were asked “What do you think is the MOST important problem facing the country today?”A plurality, 26 percent, said the economy, and 18 percent said inflation or the cost of living. Just seven percent said the state of democracy, and four percent said abortion.After the Supreme Court struck down Roe, Democrats saw a measurable shift in their direction, as voters began to say that they were leaning toward the Democrats in the midterm elections. The anger among many voters was palpable; the offense was fresh. But now, that momentum has stalled, and some see a swing back toward Republicans as we get further out from the ruling and worrisome economic news retakes the headlines.I still believe that anger over abortion will be felt in the midterms. I believe that taking away such a fundamental right feels like a betrayal that must be avenged. I believe that many parents of daughters are incensed at the idea of those girls inheriting an America where they will have less say over their bodies than their mothers had.But I also know that energy attrition in the electorate is real. I know that historical trends are on the side of Republicans going into the midterms, and even a minor stalling of momentum and erosion of energy could make the already slim chance that Democrats would hold the House of Representatives an impossibly long shot.In the closing days of this campaign cycle, Republicans are driving home perennial issues: the economy and crime. Democrats are arguing big issues of policy: abortion and protecting democracy. In this battle of pocketbooks and principles, which will win out?For those with any sense of political vision and history, the policy side must take precedence. Economic issues are cyclical. They’ll always present themselves. But grand issues like bodily autonomy can define generations. And protecting democracy can define empires.What is the point of a cheaper tank of gas, if it must be had in a failed democracy that polices people’s most intimate choices about their own bodies?The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. More

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      Italia articula su próximo gobierno en torno a un rostro conocido: Silvio Berlusconi

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      El apoyo del magnate de los medios de comunicación definirá la posición de Giorgia Meloni como posible primera ministra del país. La salud de la democracia italiana también está en juego.ROMA — Durante el último mitin de campaña de la coalición de derecha italiana antes de su victoria en las elecciones del mes pasado, el magnate multimillonario Silvio Berlusconi, con una sonrisa congelada en su rostro de cera, estaba en el centro del escenario, apuntalado, literalmente, por sus aliados de la ultraderecha, Giorgia Meloni y Matteo Salvini, que agitaron la mano de Berlusconi por encima de su cabeza.El cuadro pudo haber evocado una versión italiana de Weekend at Bernie’s más que un triunvirato moderno. Pero los tres formarán ahora el gobierno italiano más derechista desde Mussolini. Berlusconi, con 86 años y cada vez menos popularidad, es su frágil eje.Hace casi 30 años, Berlusconi fue quien incorporó a los partidos de sus aliados, antes pequeños y marginales, a uno de sus gobiernos y a la política italiana establecida. Pero ahora es Meloni, líder de los Hermanos de Italia, un partido que desciende de los restos del experimento italiano con el fascismo del siglo pasado, quien casi con seguridad será la próxima primera ministra cuando se forme un gobierno, quizás esta misma semana.La cuestión ahora, sin embargo, es si el envejecido líder de centroderecha puede cumplir su promesa de fungir como una fuerza moderadora y proeuropea en el próximo gobierno de Italia, o si ha perdido el control de la política que puso en marcha y que ha convertido a Italia, la cuna del fascismo, otra vez en un campo de pruebas para el avance de la extrema derecha en Europa. El lunes, Suecia instaló su propio gobierno de derecha, respaldado por un partido de raíces neonazis.“Europa espera mucho de nosotros”, escribió la semana pasada en Twitter Berlusconi, que declinó una solicitud de entrevista. “Y nos consideramos el garante del próximo gobierno”.Incluso antes de que se forme el gobierno, las tensiones ya son evidentes. La semana pasada, cuando Berlusconi ocupaba su nuevo escaño en el Senado, un órgano que hace casi una década lo vetó temporalmente tras una condena por fraude fiscal, los fotógrafos hicieron un acercamiento sobre sus apuntes, quizá colocados a propósito para que fueran visibles, en los que describía a Meloni como “prepotente, arrogante, ofensiva”. Cuando los periodistas le preguntaron al respecto, Meloni espetó que había olvidado algo: “No chantajeable”.Los dos parecieron hacer las paces durante un encuentro el lunes por la noche en Roma; publicaron una foto sonriendo juntos, y Berlusconi los llamó “unidos”.La idea de Berlusconi como protector de la democracia italiana es para muchos algo profundamente preocupante.Simpatizantes del partido de extrema derecha Hermanos de Italia el mes pasado en Cagliari, Cerdeña. Es casi seguro que Meloni, la líder del partido, será la próxima primera ministra cuando se forme un gobierno.Gianni Cipriano para The New York TimesSus numerosos críticos recuerdan los abusos del poder gubernamental para proteger sus intereses empresariales, sus escapadas libertinas con mujeres jóvenes y las llamadas fiestas Bunga Bunga realizadas cuando ocupaba el cargo, su humillación a las mujeres y la cultura italianas con su humor, y sus canales de televisión, a menudo burdos, que, junto con sus periódicos y revistas, aprovechó para realizar propaganda política.Para ellos, es el villano que degradó la democracia italiana, cuyos conflictos de intereses, asociaciones dudosas y aparente ilegalidad desencadenaron un movimiento de oposición de furiosos populistas antisistema y llevaron a la izquierda a una crisis nerviosa de la que aún no se ha recuperado.En la escena internacional, es un viejo amigo del presidente ruso Vladimir Putin, al que defendió el mes pasado, lo que supuso un dolor de cabeza para Meloni, que apoya firmemente a Ucrania en la guerra con Rusia.Berlusconi también provocó un motín entre los centristas de su propio partido en julio, cuando hundió al gobierno del primer ministro Mario Draghi, al que admiraba públicamente, en su afán por volver a probar el poder.“Es muy importante entender inmediatamente que Berlusconi no es amigo de la democracia”, dijo antes de morir Paul Ginsborg, biógrafo de Berlusconi, en una conversación reciente.Pero dada la composición del nuevo gobierno, algunos analistas creen que Berlusconi puede ser el mejor amigo que tienen los defensores de una Italia proeuropea, centrista y democrática.“La parte responsable de la centroderecha la encarna el líder que durante mucho tiempo ha sido considerado el más irresponsable del mundo”, dijo Claudio Cerasa, autor de un nuevo libro, Le catene della destra (Las cadenas de la derecha), sobre la aceptación de las teorías de conspiración por parte de nacionalistas y populistas.“Europa espera mucho de nosotros”, escribió Berlusconi la semana pasada en Twitter. “Y nos consideramos el garante del próximo gobierno”.Gianni Cipriano para The New York TimesCerasa, que también es director de Il Foglio, un periódico fundado por la familia de Berlusconi pero que ahora es independiente, señaló que solo Berlusconi en la derecha italiana había rechazado el trumpismo, el populismo antielitista y el nacionalismo euroescéptico. También sirvió de contrapeso a la desconfianza que Meloni y Salvini expresaron ante las vacunas, y gobernó en coaliciones con la centroizquierda.Muchos en la clase política creen que Berlusconi evitará que Meloni ponga en peligro la unidad europea al gravitar de nuevo hacia sus viejos aliados, entre ellos el primer ministro euroescéptico y de extrema derecha Viktor Orbán de Hungría y Marine Le Pen en Francia. “Él es como una brújula”, dijo Cerasa.No está claro que Meloni lo siga. Este mes, ella participó en un mitin del partido español de extrema derecha Vox, junto con el expresidente Donald Trump y Orbán. “No somos monstruos”, dijo en un mensaje de video. “El pueblo lo entiende”.Meloni, consciente de las preocupaciones que genera su pasado ideológico, desea calmar a los mercados internacionales al nombrar a tecnócratas reconocidos para los ministerios económicos clave. Pero estos siguen rechazándola.Algunos sostienen que el legado más duradero de Berlusconi en la política italiana —más que el debate que forzó sobre los impuestos onerosos o la extralimitación judicial— puede ser su creación de una coalición europea moderna de derecha, formada por partidos antes marginados cuyas versiones actuales lideran Meloni y Salvini.De este modo, Berlusconi eliminó la noción, según John Foot, un historiador del fascismo, de que “un fascista no debería hablar, no debería existir, no debería tener un lugar en la sociedad italiana”.En 2019 Berlusconi dijo durante un mitin político que, en lo que respecta al partido de la Liga de Salvini y a los “fascistas”, “los dejamos entrar en el 94 y los legitimamos”. Insistió, sin embargo, en que “somos el cerebro, el corazón, la columna vertebral”.“Sin nosotros”, dijo, “la centroderecha no existiría ni existirá nunca”.Meloni el mes pasado en Roma. Algunos sostienen que el legado más duradero de Berlusconi en la política italiana puede ser su creación de una moderna coalición de derecha europea.Gianni Cipriano para The New York TimesAlgunos de los antiguos partidarios de Berlusconi consideran que esa alianza fue un golpe maestro democrático, por obligar a la franja a normalizarse y comprometerse con la realidad transaccional de la capital.“Transformó estos dos movimientos que eran, digamos, balas perdidas, o variables fuera de control, y los llevó al puerto constitucional”, dijo Renato Brunetta, que ayudó a fundar el partido Forza Italia de Berlusconi. “Esto fue un elemento estabilizador”.Pero después de que Forza Italia ayudó a desencadenar nuevas elecciones, Brunetta, que fue ministro en el gobierno de Draghi, abandonó el partido y dijo que Meloni era “realmente regresiva en lo que respecta a la cultura de la derecha en Italia”.Meloni, por su parte, agradeció la obra de Berlusconi. En una reciente entrevista, reconoció que “hizo algo inesperado” cuando en 1993 apoyó la candidatura a la alcaldía del entonces líder de su partido Alianza Nacional, que luego fue Ministro de Relaciones Exteriores de Berlusconi.“Eso seguramente hizo que muchos que quizás no tenían el valor de decirlo, y lo creían de corazón, salieran a la luz”, dijo Meloni. “En este sentido, es el tema de la legitimación”.Pero, añadió Meloni, “creo que el momento de la derecha había llegado”.Ahora claramente llegó. El partido de Meloni obtuvo el 26 por ciento de los votos, más que ningún otro. Insistió en que no se limitaba a andar con Berlusconi porque necesitara el pequeño porcentaje de su partido para gobernar, como él necesitó en su día al partido de ella.“No necesitamos llevarlo con nosotros”, dijo Meloni. Y añadió: “Puede que sea la persona que más se ha impuesto en la historia italiana, en la historia republicana italiana, más que cualquier otro en los últimos 20 años”.De hecho, a pesar de su paso cansino y de los jóvenes con banderas que lo protegen de la vista del público al salir del escenario, las cosas parecen ir a favor de Berlusconi.La semana pasada, con el pelo lacado, fue el centro de atención en la sesión de apertura del Senado recién elegido.Berlusconi, en el centro, el jueves en la primera sesión del recién elegido Senado en Roma.Antonio Masiello/Getty ImagesTodas las contradicciones de la historia y la política actual de Italia estaban a la vista. También las tensiones entre los aliados de la derecha.La sesión la abrió un sobreviviente del Holocausto y senador vitalicio que recordó que el fascismo de Mussolini tomó el poder hace 100 años. Los senadores eligieron como presidente a Ignazio La Russa, líder del partido de Meloni, que lleva el segundo nombre de Benito y guarda en su casa recuerdos de Mussolini.Berlusconi, que recibió apretones de manos y peticiones de selfis por parte de los senadores, tiró el bolígrafo y maldijo furiosamente a La Russa, cuya presidencia intentó bloquear como represalia por la negativa de Meloni a nombrar ministra a su propia lugarteniente, Licia Ronzulli, una antigua enfermera que se sienta a su lado y solía ayudar a organizar sus veladas nocturnas con mujeres jóvenes.La novia de Berlusconi, Marta Fascina, de 32 años, obtuvo un escaño en el Parlamento en representación de una ciudad siciliana en la que nunca hizo campaña. El 29 de septiembre, el día del cumpleaños de Berlusconi, hizo que un globo aerostático soltara miles de globos con forma de corazones rojos sobre el jardín de su villa.Al día siguiente, Berlusconi publicó un video de su cena de cumpleaños en el que meseros con guantes blancos sacaban un pastel de varios pisos: uno por su equipo de fútbol, otro por su partido político y otro por su imperio mediático.Encima de todo estaba la imagen de un Berlusconi mucho más joven y con su traje característico, sonriendo junto a una tierra comestible.Jason Horowitz es el jefe del buró en Roma; cubre Italia, Grecia y otros sitios del sur de Europa. Cubrió la campaña presidencial de 2016 en Estados Unidos, el gobierno de Obama y al congreso con un énfasis en perfiles políticos y especiales. @jasondhorowitz More

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      Italy’s Next Government Hinges on a Familiar Face: Silvio Berlusconi

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      Giorgia Meloni’s likely turn as prime minister will depend on support from the billionaire media mogul. So may the health of Italian democracy.ROME — During the final campaign rally for Italy’s right-wing coalition before it emerged victorious in Italy’s elections last month, the billionaire mogul Silvio Berlusconi, a smile frozen on his waxen face, stood center stage, propped up, quite literally, by his hard-right partners, Giorgia Meloni and Matteo Salvini, who waved Mr. Berlusconi’s hand above his head.The tableau may have evoked an Italian remake of “Weekend at Bernie’s” more than a modern-day triumvirate. But the three will now make up the most right-wing Italian government since Mussolini, with Mr. Berlusconi, 86 and decreasingly popular, as its fragile linchpin.It was nearly 30 years ago that Mr. Berlusconi brought his partners’ once small, marginalized parties into one of his governments and Italy’s political mainstream. But today it is Ms. Meloni, the leader of the Brothers of Italy, a party descended from the wreckage of Italy’s experiment with Fascism last century, who is almost certain to be the next prime minister when a government is formed, perhaps as soon as this week.The question now, though, is whether the aging center-right leader can fulfill his promise to act as a moderating, pro-European force on Italy’s next government, or whether he has lost control of the politics he set in motion that have made Italy, the birthplace of Fascism, once again a testing ground for the far right’s advance in Europe. On Monday, Sweden installed its own right-wing government, backed by a party with neo-Nazi roots.“Europe expects much from us,” Mr. Berlusconi, who declined a request for an interview, wrote last week on Twitter. “And we consider ourselves the guarantor of the next government.”Even before the government begins, the tensions are already evident. Last week, as Mr. Berlusconi took his new seat in the Senate, a body that almost a decade ago temporarily barred him after a conviction for tax fraud, photographers zoomed in on his notes, perhaps purposefully left visible, describing Ms. Meloni as “overbearing, arrogant, offensive.” Asked about it by reporters, Ms. Meloni snapped that he forgot something: “Not blackmailable.”The two seemed to make peace during a meeting on Monday evening in Rome; they released a photo of themselves smiling together, and Mr. Berlusconi called them “united.”The notion of Mr. Berlusconi as a protector of Italian democracy is for many a deeply troubling one.Supporters of the hard-right Brothers of Italy party last month in Cagliari, Sardinia. Ms. Meloni, the party leader, is almost certain to be the next prime minister when a government is formed.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesHis legions of critics recall his abuses of government power to protect his business interests, his libertine escapades with young women and so-called Bunga Bunga parties while in office, his degrading of Italian women and culture with his humor, and his often crude television channels, which, along with his newspapers and magazines, he exploited for political propaganda.For them, he is the villain who debased Italian democracy, whose conflicts of interest, questionable associations and apparent illegality set off an opposition movement of angry anti-establishment populists and drove the left into a nervous breakdown from which it has still not recovered.On the international stage, he is a longtime friend of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, whom he defended as recently as last month, causing a headache for Ms. Meloni, who is a strong supporter of Ukraine in the war with Russia.Mr. Berlusconi also prompted a mutiny of centrists in his own party in July when he sank the government of Prime Minister Mario Draghi, whom he publicly admired, as he reached for another taste of power.“It’s very important to understand immediately that Berlusconi is no friend to democracy,” Paul Ginsborg, the biographer of Mr. Berlusconi, said in a conversation recently, before his death.But given the composition of the new government, some analysts believe that Mr. Berlusconi may be the best friend proponents of a pro-Europe, centrist and democratic Italy have.“The responsible part of the center-right is embodied by the leader considered for a long time the most irresponsible in the world,” said Claudio Cerasa, the author of a new book, “The Chains of the Right,” about the embrace of conspiracy theories by nationalists and populists.“Europe expects much from us,” Mr. Berlusconi wrote last week on Twitter. “And we consider ourselves the guarantor of the next government.”Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesMr. Cerasa, who is also the editor of Il Foglio, a newspaper founded by Mr. Berlusconi’s family but is now independent, noted that Mr. Berlusconi alone on the Italian right had rejected Trumpism, anti-elite populism and Euroskeptic nationalism. He also served as a counterweight to vaccine skepticism exercised by Ms. Meloni and Mr. Salvini, and he governed in coalitions with the center left.Many in the political establishment believe that Mr. Berlusconi will prevent Ms. Meloni from endangering European unity by gravitating back toward her old allies, including the Euroskeptic and hard-right Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary and Marine Le Pen in France. “He’s like a compass,” Mr. Cerasa said.It is not clear that Ms. Meloni is following him. This month, she, along with former President Donald J. Trump and Mr. Orban, took part in a rally of the far-right Spanish party Vox. “We are not monsters,” she said in a video message. “The people understand that.”Ms. Meloni, aware of concerns about her ideological past, is eager to assuage international markets by appointing mainstream technocrats to key economic ministries. But they keep turning her down.Some argue that Mr. Berlusconi’s most lasting legacy on Italian politics — more than the debate he forced about burdensome taxation or judicial overreach — may be his creation of a modern European right-wing coalition, made from previously untouchable parties, which are now led in their current iterations by Ms. Meloni and Mr. Salvini.In doing so, Mr. Berlusconi eliminated the notion, John Foot, a historian of Fascism, said, that “a Fascist should not speak, should not exist, should not have a place in Italian society.”Mr. Berlusconi said in 2019 at a political rally that, when it came to Mr. Salvini’s League party and the “Fascists,” “we let them in in ’94 and we legitimized them.” He insisted, though, that “we are the brain, the heart, the backbone.”“Without us,” he said, “the center right would never exist and will never exist.”Ms. Meloni last month in Rome. Some argue that Mr. Berlusconi’s most lasting legacy on Italian politics may be his creation of a modern European right-wing coalition.Gianni Cipriano for The New York TimesSome of Mr. Berlusconi’s longtime supporters cast that alliance as a democratic masterstroke, for forcing the fringe to normalize and compromise in the transactional reality of the capital.“He transformed these two movements which were, let’s say, loose cannons, or who were out-of-control variables, and brought them into the constitutional harbor,” said Renato Brunetta, who helped found Mr. Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party. “This was an element of stabilization.”But after Forza Italia helped trigger new elections, Mr. Brunetta, who was a minister in Mr. Draghi’s government, quit the party and said Ms. Meloni was “actually regressive when it comes to right-wing culture in Italy.”Ms. Meloni, for her part, appreciated what Mr. Berlusconi had done. In a recent interview, she acknowledged that he “did something unexpected” when in 1993 he supported the mayoral candidacy of the leader at the time of her National Alliance party, who later served as Mr. Berlusconi’s foreign minister.“That surely brought many who maybe did not have the courage to say it, and thought it in their hearts, to come out,” Ms. Meloni said. “In this sense, it is the theme of legitimization.”But, Ms. Meloni added, “I believe the time of the right had arrived.”It now clearly has. Ms. Meloni’s party received 26 percent of the vote, larger than any other. She insisted she was not merely carrying Mr. Berlusconi along because she needed his party’s small percentage to govern, as he once needed her party.“We don’t need to carry him with us,” Ms. Meloni said. She added, “He may be the person who has imposed himself in the Italian history, in the Italian Republican history, more than any other in the last 20 years.”Indeed, despite his shuffling gait and the flag-bearing youths who shield him from view as he exits the stage, things seem to be going Mr. Berlusconi’s way.Last week, his hair looking lacquered, he held court during the first seating of the newly elected Senate.Mr. Berlusconi, center, on Thursday at the first seating of the newly elected Senate in Rome.Antonio Masiello/Getty ImagesAll of the contradictions of Italy’s history and current politics were on display. As were the tensions between the right-wing partners.The session was opened by a Holocaust survivor and senator for life who noted that Mussolini’s Fascism took power 100 years ago. Senators elected as their president Ignazio La Russa, a leader in Ms. Meloni’s party, who carries the middle name Benito and keeps Mussolini memorabilia in his house.Mr. Berlusconi, who received handshakes and selfie requests from senators, threw down his pen and angrily cursed Mr. La Russa, whose presidency he tried to block as a reprisal for Ms. Meloni’s refusal to make a minister out of his own lieutenant, Licia Ronzulli, a former nurse who sat beside him and used to help organize his after-hours soirées with young women.Mr. Berlusconi’s girlfriend, Marta Fascina, 32, won a seat in the Parliament representing a Sicilian town she never campaigned in. On Sept. 29, his birthday, she arranged for a hot-air balloon to release thousands of red balloon hearts over his villa’s garden.The next day, Mr. Berlusconi posted a video of his birthday dinner where waiters in white gloves brought out a multitiered cake — one for his soccer team, one for his political party, one for his media empire.Atop it all sat a likeness of a Mr. Berlusconi, much younger and in his trademark suit, grinning next to an edible earth. More

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      The U.S. Thinks ‘It Can’t Happen Here.’ It Already Has.

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      The move from democracy to autocracy isn’t a sudden shift. It is not a switch that flips from light to dark with nothing in between. But it’s also not quite right to call the path to authoritarianism a journey. To use a metaphor of travel or distance is to suggest something external, removed, foreign.It is better, in the U.S. context at least, to think of authoritarianism as something like a contradiction nestled within the American democratic tradition. It is part of the whole, a reflection of the fact that American notions of freedom and liberty are deeply informed by both the experience of slaveholding and the drive to seize land and expel its previous inhabitants.As the historian Edmund Morgan once wrote of the Virginians who helped lead the fight for Anglo-American independence, “The presence of men and women who were, in law at least, almost totally subject to the will of other men gave to those in control of them an immediate experience of what it could mean to be at the mercy of a tyrant.” Virginians, he continued, “may have had a special appreciation of the freedom dear to republicans, because they saw every day what life without it could be like.”Similarly, the legal scholar Aziz Rana observed that for many Anglo-Americans in the 18th century, freedom was an “exclusivist ideal, accessible only to Anglo-Saxons and select Europeans, whose heritage, land practices and religion made them particularly suited to self-rule. Such exclusivism presupposed that settler security, as well as more grandiose dreams of utopian peace, required the subordination of internal and external enemies, who threatened Anglo social and political supremacy.” Freedom and domination, he wrote, were “bound together.”This duality is present in our federal Constitution, which proclaims republican liberty at the same time that it has enabled the brutal subjugation of entire peoples within the United States. The Constitution both inspired the democratic vistas of radical antislavery politicians and backstopped the antebellum dream of a transcontinental slave empire.Move a little closer to the present and you can see clearly how American democracy and American autocracy have existed side by side, with the latter just another feature of our political order. If we date the beginning of Jim Crow to the 1890s — when white Southern politicians began to mandate racial separation and when the Supreme Court affirmed it — then close to three generations of American elites lived with and largely accepted the existence of a political system that made a mockery of American ideals of self-government and the rule of law.It was a system that, as the legal scholar and former judge Margaret A. Burnham wrote in “By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners,” rested on “the chronic, unpredictable violence that loomed over everyday Black life.” In one of many such episodes detailed in the book, Burnham recounts the last moments of Henry Williams, a Black G.I. killed in 1942 by an Alabama bus driver named Grover Chandler for what Chandler perceived as “impudence on the part of the young soldier.” Rushing to escape the bus after being assaulted by the driver, Williams spilled his laundry on the ground. “As he turned to pick it up, Chandler fired three shots, one hitting Williams in the back of the head. He died instantly right there on Chandler’s bus.”All of this took place while the United States was fighting a war for democracy in Europe. Which is to say that for most of this country’s history, America’s democratic institutions and procedures and ideals existed alongside forms of exclusion, domination and authoritarianism. Although we’ve taken real strides toward making this a less hierarchical country, with a more representative government, there is no iron law of history that says that progress will continue unabated or that the authoritarian tradition in American politics won’t reassert itself.If we do see even greater democratic backsliding than we’ve already experienced over the past decade — since the advent of Donald Trump, yes, but also since the decimation of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder — there’s no reason to think that most elites, and most people, won’t accommodate themselves to the absence of democracy for many of their fellow Americans. After a time, that absence of democracy may become just the regular order of things — a regrettable custom that nonetheless should more or less be left alone because of federalism or limited government. That, in fact, is how many politicians, journalists and intellectuals rationalized autocracy in the South and reconciled it with their belief that the United States was a free country.In his 1909 biography of John Brown, W.E.B. Du Bois reflected on the legacy of the antislavery martyr with an observation about what it does to a society to tolerate exploitation, degradation and unfreedom. “The price of repression is greater than the cost of liberty,” he wrote. “The degradation of men costs something both to the degraded and those who degrade.”American traditions of authoritarianism have shaped American traditions of democracy in that they frame our ideas of who, exactly, can enjoy American freedom and American liberty. They degrade our moral sense and make it easier to look away from those who suffer under the worst of the state or those who are denied the rights they were promised as members of our national community.As we look to a November in which a number of vocal election deniers are poised to win powerful positions in key swing states, I think that the great degree to which authoritarianism is tied up in the American experience — and the extent to which we’ve been trained not to see it, in accordance with our national myths and sense of exceptionalism — makes it difficult for many Americans to really believe that democracy as we know it could be in serious danger.In other words, too many Americans still think it can’t happen here, when the truth is that it already has and may well again.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Threat to Democracy? Start With Corruption, Many Voters Say

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      In a Times/Siena survey, respondents’ concerns about democracy often diverged from typical expert analysis.A rally called Save America last week in Mesa, Ariz. People have very different ideas of what that term means. Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesWhen we started our national poll on democracy last week, David Leonhardt’s recent New York Times front-page story on threats to democracy was at the top of my mind. His article focused on two major issues: the election denial movement in the Republican Party, and undemocratic elements of American elected government like the Electoral College, gerrymandering and the Senate.But when we got the results of our Times/Siena poll late last week, it quickly became clear these were not the threats on the minds of voters.While 71 percent of registered voters agreed that democracy was “under threat,” only about 17 percent of voters described the threat in a way that squares with discussion in mainstream media and among experts — with a focus on Republicans, Donald J. Trump, political violence, election denial, authoritarianism, and so on.Instead, most people described the threat to democracy in terms that would be very unfamiliar to someone concerned about election subversion or the Jan. 6 insurrection — and I’m not just talking about stop-the-steal adherents who think the last election already brought American democracy to an end.The poll results help make sense of how so many voters can say democracy is under threat, and yet rank “threats to democracy” low on the list of challenges facing the country.When respondents were asked to volunteer one or two words to summarize the current threat to democracy, government corruption was brought up most often — more than Mr. Trump and Republicans combined.For some of these voters, the threat to democracy doesn’t seem to be about the risk of a total collapse of democratic institutions or a failed transition of power. Or they may not view the threat as an emergency or a crisis yet, like being on the brink of sustained political violence or authoritarianism.Instead, they point most frequently to a longstanding concern about the basic functioning of a democratic system: whether government works on behalf of the people.Many respondents volunteered exactly that kind of language. One said, “I don’t think they are honestly thinking about the people.” Another said politicians “forget about normal people.” Corruption, greed, power and money were familiar themes.Overall, 68 percent of registered voters said the government “mainly works to benefit powerful elites” rather than “ordinary people.”Another 8 percent of voters cited polarization as the major threat to democracy. Like corruption, polarization poses a threat to democracy but might not necessarily count as an imminent crisis.And perhaps most surprising, many voters offered an answer that wasn’t easily categorized as a threat to democracy at all. Inflation, for instance, was cited by 3 percent of respondents — about the same as the share citing political extremists and violence. For perhaps as many as one-fifth of voters, the “threat to democracy” was little more than a repackaging of persistent issues like “open borders” and “race relations” or “capitalism” and “godlessness.”The 17 percent of voters who cited something related to Mr. Trump and election denial seemed to elevate the issue of democracy the most: Overall, 19 percent of those respondents volunteered that the state of democracy was the most important problem facing the country — more than any other issue.Among everyone else: Just 4 percent stated that concern as the No. 1 issue.My colleagues have more on this story here. More

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      Poll Shows Voters See Democracy in Peril, but Saving It Isn’t a Priority

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      Voters overwhelmingly believe American democracy is under threat, but seem remarkably apathetic about that danger, with few calling it the nation’s most pressing problem, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll.In fact, more than a third of independent voters and a smaller but noteworthy contingent of Democrats said they were open to supporting candidates who reject the legitimacy of the 2020 election, as they assigned greater urgency to their concerns about the economy than to fears about the fate of the country’s political system.Voters who are open to candidates who reject 2020 election resultsThinking about a candidate for political office who you agree with on most positions, how comfortable would you be voting for that candidate if they say they think the 2020 election was stolen? More