A woman in a place that knew il duce

Of course people with extremist political views try to whitewash longheld bomb-throwing ideologies when they run for office if they want to win, as most voters favor candidates somewhere in the sensible middle.

That’s why

Blake Masters — a name right out of an Ayn Rand novel — the GOP candidate for senator in Arizona, has scrubbed his website of its former lie that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” from Donald Trump.

He apparently still believes in the lie, and won’t commit to abiding by the results of his own election. Because he’s a nutball crank, former right-hand man of Peter Thiel, the Facebook billionaire who says that giving women the vote in the 1920s “rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ an oxymoron.” But nutters have to pretend not to be loons until Nov. 8, at least.

A lifelong extremist who has been involved with neo-fascism since she was 15, a praiser of the inventor of fascism, the dictator Benito Mussolini, will be the next prime minister of Italy.

Naturally, during the weeks leading up to last Sunday’s election, the successful candidate — which in Italy involves getting on the order of 26% of the nationwide vote, then scrambling to create a coalition — was sprinting toward the middle.

Giorgia Meloni, who will also be the first woman premier of Italy, along with, well, its second fascist leader, now is leaning away from her party’s embrace of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, for instance. She and her party have traditionally been euroskeptics; now she and the other leaders of the, er, Sons of Italy, who had said “the time has come to tell Europe that Italy must leave the eurozone” says instead: “I don’t think Italy needs to leave the eurozone and I believe the euro will stay.”

This is what happens when reality meets rhetoric. Yes, back in 2018 she sent a congratulatory note to Putin on his re-election “victory”; now she, in the words of Italian journalist Mattia Ferraresi, has “reinvented herself as a torchbearer of Atlanticism and a staunch supporter of NATO” and Ukraine during this Russian invasion.

Italians have a weird relationship to electoral politics in general. The descendants of the known-world-conquering Roman Empire, which at its height in A.D. 117 stretched from Hadrian’s Wall at the Scottish-english border — don’t mess with the Scots — throughout Western Europe and down to southern Egypt, take the long view. Their big time was 2,000 years ago, and they don’t have anything to prove. Until the middle of the 19th century, governance had dissolved so far that there was no such thing as a unified Italy — the grand peninsula was all a bunch of citystates. Even now, while nominally identifying as Italian — except perhaps for the ever-independent Venetians — they are more northern, and efficient, or southern, and devil may care. Or Sicilian. Or Sardinian. The Milanese believe in business above all, calling the Romans softies with government jobs. The Romans think the Milanese don’t know and prove it when the northerners come to the rollicking capital to relax and eat really, really well.

Living and working in Italy almost all of September, from Venice to Siena to the countryside to Rome, I never once heard an Italian mention the upcoming election of last Sunday. There were zero campaign posters on city walls, zero candidate rallies. The general attitude about a quarter of voters backing a neo-fascist is a shrug. Italian premiers are not known for longevity in office. There have been 69 governments since 1945. Sensible people simply hope that this Meloni, with her ANTI-LGBTQ hatred and belief in “the natural family,” will soon fade away. It’s said that there is no feminine term for