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is probably more than a smidgeon of truth to such claims. but they also smack
of the cultural determinism that i opened this essay by rejecting—and there are
good reasons to reject it, at least as a totalizing explanation of a complex social
idiom. other european societies have labored under repressive regimes without
exhibiting obviously segmentary tendencies—tendencies, moreover, that were
far from quashed by the emergence of the equally fractious italian nation-state.
Countenancing the Neoliberal
how is this feature of Roman society connected to questions of tolerance and
racism? in a segmentary structure of sociopolitical relations, encompassment be-
comes an active principle, since the objects of one's condescending acceptance
at one moment easily become the targets of competition, jealousy, and ire at an-
other. Given a context of rampant neoliberalism, especially one in which the state
has been demonstrably unable to protect itself from specific leaders scheming to
protect their sectional interests, the one circumstance that could seem to “jus-
tify” racism in cosmopolitan Rome was competition over resources. The current
situation of economic uncertainty, the condition of
precarietà
that particularly
afflicts the young, is a highly combustible breeding ground for resentment. it also
exposes the fault lines of a segmentary social order.
in so doing, it illuminates the micropolitics of Roman social life. Romans,
for example, see no contradiction on excoriating the speculators who evict old
Roman families while also exhibiting hostility toward newly arrived immigrant
families that replace the evicted. both the wealthy speculators and the indigent
migrants are, to local right-wingers, dangerous and alien forces—and, to make
matters worse, they have by definition rejected any hint of
accommodazione.
what is more, both are identified with the left-leaning political parties, the larg-
est of which, the Democratici di sinistra, “liberalized” the real-estate market in
legislation enacted in 1994. This action allowed proprietors to evict tenants more
easily than before and to raise rents at dizzying speeds, and it thereby created
the very situation that is now generating such tension. The italian parliamentary
leftists, exemplifying in perhaps extreme form a betrayal of principle that was be-
coming disturbingly common among european left-wing socialists in the 1990s,
thereby exposed their own involvement in economic practices that were radically
at odds with their marxist ideological pretensions and gave the very term
liber-
alization
an odious name. since the left more generally is seen as the political
space of intellectuals, and since intellectuals and artists are among those seen
to have “invaded” the “traditional” spaces of life in Rome's historic core, it was
perhaps inevitable that many disaffected working-class Romans would utterly
reject the presence of the wealthy, of intellectuals, and of immigrants, all in one
conflated and detested package, and would all too easily be lured by right-wing
populism.
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