Age of parody

On Oct. 27, the anniversary of Benito Mussolini’s March on Rome, the dictator’s great-grandson Romano Floriano Mussolini surged forward from his position at far-right back to score his first goal in Italy’s Serie A league for Lazio, the Rome club whose fans traditionally feel that Benito’s goals were, when you think about it, sadly misunderstood, whatever you think of his tactics. The goalkeeper at the Sassuolo-Lazio game, Stefano Turati, shares a surname with one of Benito’s first victims, Flippo Turati, a founder of the Italian Socialist Party who, much like his sporting namesake, tried and failed to block Mussolini’s advance, in his case into the editor’s chair at the party newspaper.We are living in an age of parody. History is meant to be subtle, if not inscrutable. It is not supposed to rhyme with the clodhopping obviousness of a verse by William McGonagall (the Scottish versifier who, until the advent of Amanda Gorman, was considered to be the worst poet ever, but who, unlike most poets, nevertheless made a living, albeit in the circus along with the other freaks). As McGonagall masticated the art of more talented precursors into a ludicrous pulp, so the serious matter of politics has fused with the frivolities of sport, making politics a clownish field of dreams and sport the last public activity in which the audience both cites and understands statistics. Recommended Stories When times are ominous, we look for omens. What doth it betide when governments all over the world advise their subjects to prepare for systemic failure by stocking up on water, tinned food, and toilet paper? There was a time when a priestly caste would open up a pigeon or two, inspect its innards, and issue an augury. The word comes from the Latin “augere,” to increase or prosper; hence Augustus, who presided over Rome’s transition from republic to empire. As the empire of information completes its conquest of the remotest provinces of our inner lives, it spreads panic rather than order. The best we have is anonymous social media accounts explaining why you’re about to starve or, if you’ve prepped correctly, spend several thousand dollars on supplies and three months on an improvised chemical toilet. Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini (1883 – 1945) at a march past in the Via Del Circo Massimo, Rome, 28th October 1934. (Photo by GPA/Hulton Archive/Getty Images) What we have here is a failure to communicate. The problem is not just that we, the people, are getting dumber by the hour. It is also a failure of leadership. Across the Western democracies, we have a failure of replication. Scientists struggle to replicate their results. The young struggle to replicate themselves. Our institutions fail to replicate their values. Worse, our institutions let themselves be corrupted by the intellectual equivalent of a hostile takeover until, revealing a Hegelian arcanum of historical process that soccer fans see every time their team overextends itself and invites a counterattack, they invert their purpose and hasten toward self-destruction by mass-producing an opposing set of values.The political class is supposed to be experts at politics. What kind of expertise is required when politics becomes “show business for ugly people”? The counterfeiting of attraction and the transmission of policy as entertainment. One of the oddities of the age of President Donald Trump is that while counterfeiters, comedians, and outright crooks rushed to Trump like flies on sherbert, he was never as insubstantial as he seemed. He had charisma; as former Vice President Kamala Harris discovered, this cannot be faked on the big stage. He grasped the deep paradoxes of our shallow and sportive times: nothing endorses a lie like an admixture of truth, and, in a time of near-universal frivolity, seriousness must crack a joke.MAGAZINE: TIMOTHY MILLER, AN INNOCENT WOMANI speak of Trump in the past tense. There can no more be a second Trump than there can be a second Mussolini. Il Duce’s dynasty is the paradigm of the now-standard decline from politics to entertainment. His youngest son Romano (1927-2006) became a jazz pianist. Presumably, he started strong with his left before embellishing with appealing melodies on his right; as Mark Steyn said, he made the refrains run on time. Romano married Sophia Lauren’s sister. Their daughter Alessandra became a model, a painter, a pop singer, a reality TV contestant, a minor nationalist politician, and the mother of Romano the sporting Hegelian.Exeunt the Trump children into mediocre parody, quite possibly pursued by the Justice Department. Republicans who survived the Trump era may, like the senators who survived the emperorship of Nero, be relieved that Trump cannot be replicated. But their party now has the same problem, and the consolation that the Democrats may have it worse will not be enough. Across the West, parties have, like young Romano on the field at Sassuolo, become unwitting parodists, echoes of extinct historical forms. This, as the priests used to say on a bad day, does not augur well.Dominic Green (@drdominicgreen) is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.