About All Those Berlusconi-Trump Comparisons

Editor's note: An abridged version of this Memo was first published by RealClearPolitics on March 25.

His last days as Italy's prime minister a perfect caricature of Silvio Berlusconi's leadership. Controversy and political theatre escalated to the very last day.

No one would miss him. Certainly not the Italian people. The most vivid expression of the popular will toward Berlusconi, in the last turbulent years of his government, was etched in the shape of the fist-sized iron miniature of Milan's cathedral that a protester used to clobber the prime minister's face.

Certainly not Berlusconi's peers on the European stage. Berlusconi's dismissal from his post, and his replacement by interim technocratic stand-in Mario Monti in late 2011, was openly encouraged by EU leaders and heads of state, who hoped that restoring some measure of confidence in Italy's politics would ward off a Greece-style financial collapse that European bailout resources could not hope to redeem. (It must have been a delight for German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the target of some of Berlusconi's viler extemporisations, to help show Berlusconi to the exit in his own political house.)

Certainly not Italy's political left, long struggling to establish an identity in a new era of Italian government. But nor the Italian center-right, which, after a couple decades of subservience to the imperious personal whims and cynical political ploys of the man dubbed il cavaliere (the knight), was left with no leader at the helm.

As the primaries grind on in the United States, comparisons between the cartoonish personalities and corrosive politics of Trump and Berlusconi have abounded.

The juxtaposition is well-warranted, but the aim here isn't to run through the long list of Berlusconi's peccadilloes -- that's been done elsewhere, and done well. This isn't about them -- about Berlusconi or about Trump -- it's about us, Italians and Americans, citizens and voters in complex, developed Western democracies. What matters is not only what kind of people we choose to be governed by. Far more, what matters is the stability of the systems of government we choose. Italy chose a handful of Berlusconi-led governments over a space of 15 years. Far more permanently, though, what Italy got was Berlusconismo, a new and noxious way of managing politics and public life that lives on, even with Berlusconi himself sitting outside parliament due to legal sentences against him. That's why Italy serves a monitory lesson. That's why we should pay attention, because the parallels, as ever imperfect, between what happened there then and what could happen here now are striking.

The dawn of Berlusconismo followed a stormy sunset. The shine was already fading off of Italy's political edifice at the turn of the 1990s. The Soviet collapse brought into question the post-war order's reason for being. That order fixed a revolving door at its top through which leaders in the strictest shade of eminence grise alternated key offices. The Christian Democrats, supported by the Socialists, dominated for decades, and an accord to keep out the Communists buttressed the arrangement. Corruption was a defining feature, and overnight, the arrangement became an anachronism. Nor did it fit into the Western European drive toward greater union, a drive Italy with its dyspeptic finances struggled to join. In that context, the Tangentopoli, or "Bribesville," scandal, dealt this arrangement a fatal blow. The old parties, in fact, did not even survive, nor did the very system by which Italians cast their votes for representatives. With 35 percent of lawmakers charged with serious corruption crimes, it was clearly time to turn a page.

It could have been a moment of hope -- the dawn of a "Second Republic" -- a sudden, clear political transition. Berlusconi, who as a businessman was long a fixture of that very system, ably charged the gap. Having fought restrictions on private ownership of mass communications to build a personal media empire, the old cruise-ship crooner was perfectly placed to sound the amplified notes of the unlikely political outsider.

The nature of American political volatility in 2016 is a good bit different, but the disaffection toward the establishment is similar, and Trump's political instinct in exploiting it has been equally ruthless.

A man who who hews to whichever political ideology is most expedient in any given moment, Trump recognized that in an America fed up with the status quo, it was the Republican side where the gap between party leadership and voter base yawned the widest. If Trump gains control now of the Republican Party, he could effect a big change in the structure and behavior of American politics. As Berlusconi de-institutionalized Italy's political parties from the outside in, so could Trump, from the inside out. And what would such a transformation look like? Chris Bickerton and Carlo Invernizzi Accetti, in Political Quarterly, offer a picture:

"The loyalty Berlusconi commanded was always to himself rather than to a political tradition. He pioneered, at least in Italy, a new form of political mobilisation that cut out the intermediary of the party: isolated individuals identifying themselves with political celebrities via the stories and footage of newspapers and television programmes. Berlusconi also differed from Craxi in his practice of political corruption. For Berlusconi, political corruption was merely a component part of his wider business empire; the empire was built for his personal enrichment, not for party financing, and it facilitated the latter only once Berlusconi had entered politics."

Berlusconi wrecked the idea of the political party as the expression of a collective will. As the PQ paper notes, his parties were never even called parties. Forza Italia, which translates roughly to C'mon, Italy!, was just another channel for Berlusconi to push his own personal brand. Ninety percent of its deputies in 1994 had never even held parliamentary office. Foreshadowing any potential Trump presidency, that lack of experience translated into a lack of political energy and policy creativity. Twenty years of Italy as a joke on the international stage starts there. Twenty years of legislation tailor-crafted to Berlusconi's business and legal interests; of spats with the Italian judiciary; of hedonistic sideshows turning the highest office in the land into a side reel while the economy sputtered; started with the notion, proffered now in America by Trump, that experience in office is not important. That the party, if it's even needed at all, exists to serve the leader. Meanwhile, corruption continued unabated, and the economy languished. Berlusconismo froze into permanence the negative elements of Italian political life that had ushered him into office in the first place.

It is clear enough that the GOP understands what a Trump takeover would mean for the party. Trump's policies are hard to peg down. But just as Berlusconi is about Berlusconi, so is Trump all about Trump. Four years spent either at his service or fighting to subvert his aims would do untold damage to the viability and credibility of that party's institutions.

America is of course not Italy. No sense in elaborating here on the manifold differences, but suffice it to say that our republic is older, our political institutions are far more entrenched, and our government is remarkably well-built to withstand its occasional management by fools.

Yet the very shock elicited by Trump's emergence suggests that such political firewall is eroding. If Republicans choose their Berlusconi, what happens then? Trump will almost certainly never build his wall, or enact his destructive trade tariffs.

But to look at the internal political rot that could hollow out parts of our political system, glance at Italy now, four years after Berlusconi's last government: While governed by a center-left party that has managed to oversee some reforms, the prime minister came to power from within the government, not through election -- and Matteo Renzi's leadership displays some of the hallmarks of the Berlusconi years, in its emphasis on the person guiding the ship, the youthful, charismatic, Matteo Renzi, who doubles as the party secretary. The north's separatism has returned with a vengeance, after falling out of sight for a time, felled by its own corruption scandals. One of the leading political parties, the Five Stars Movement, is a nihilistic void led by a comedian whose only ethos is pure hatred of politics. Four years after Berlusconi was shunted aside, Italy is only now mounting a mighty struggle to claim a place as a considered player on the European stage. Meanwhile, the closest thing the center-right has to leadership is still Berlusconi, defanged but directing political movements behind the scenes. This is all to say nothing of Berlusconi's impact on general Italian culture, which warrants a piece all of its own.

Donald Trump's candidacy is a warning sign - a portion of the U.S. electorate showing its rage to the establishment. The establishment should heed the warning. But voters, acting in their own self-interest, should be as wary as ever of slick "self-made men" peddling easy answers to a politics become impossibly complex.

Indeed, Italy doesn't miss Silvio Berlusconi. In many ways, he is still all too present.

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