IMAGINE HOW DIVORCED FROM THE REAL WORLD YOU HAVE TO BE...:

In Italy, the return of Berlusconi, the 'brutta figura' (Ian Fisher and Elisabetta Povoledo, February 1, 2008, IHT)

For Silvia Tomassini, owner of a boutique in Rome's ancient center, Silvio Berlusconi is "arrogant." At 71, he is too old. He is "a strange politician, not a normal one," she says, who endlessly commits "brutta figura," which loosely means you cannot take the man anywhere nice.

Yet when elections come again to Italy - and they may soon because the center-left government of Prime Minister Romano Prodi fell last week - Tomassini will vote for Berlusconi. Polls show that nearly two years after he lost the prime minister's office, Berlusconi would probably win. In Tomassini's case, she does not love him but thinks he cares for working people. Plus she hates the other side.

"He's not a person of class or culture," she said. "But he's better than the center-left."

...to imagine that an important qualification for a nation's leader is that you can take him somewhere "nice"?

MORE (via Mike Daley):
Twilight of the Nation-State: European transnationalism is a utopian dream, Pierre Manent warns: A review of Democracy Without Nations? The Fate of Self-Government in Europe by Pierre Manent, translated by Paul Seaton (Bruce S. Thornton, 2/02/08, City Journal)

The consequences of this shift from sovereign state to transnational abstraction show up with particular clarity in the European opposition to the death penalty — a desire, Manent believes, to strip the state of what Max Weber called its “monopoly of legitimate violence.” The rejection of the death penalty reflects a belief that contemporary societies have left the Hobbesian state of nature behind. Yet the persistence of violent crime puts the lie to this assumption. In ending the death penalty, and “thereby protecting the murderer of the person it could not protect,” the state “severs itself from the original source of its legitimacy.” September 11 also undermined the European project in its current form, Manent believes, by exploding the myth of mankind’s inevitable elimination of differences and revealing instead “the mutual impenetrability of human communities.”

The E.U.’s hostile stance toward its Christian heritage also reveals its essentially abstract and utopian nature. “Politics and religion,” Manent writes, “always and necessarily overlap in some measure, since both are modes of ‘communion.’” Since the religious communion preceded and created the conditions for the “sacred community” of the nation, the attempt to excise all religious sentiment from the state, as the E.U. seeks, entails abandoning that older communion, again with troubling consequences: “Once the nation is abandoned as a sacred community, the lay state itself is laicized and becomes merely one of the innumerable instruments of governance,” such as those of the E.U. bureaucracy.

Manent considers in this light Europe’s troubles with its Muslim immigrants, as well as the position of the dwindling number of European Jews. Distrustful of differences — particularly religious ones, given the volatile Islamist presence — modern Europe prefers a vague “humanity,” divorced from any particular community. But as Manent observes in analyzing Europe’s dislike of Israel, “empty — hollow and vain — is any humanism that claims to detach itself wholly from all responsibility toward or for a particular people, or from any distinctive view of the human good.”

The refusal to acknowledge its Christian roots, Manent believes, has led Europe to “the verge of self-destruction.” To meet this threat, he urges Europe “to become fully aware of the original Christian character of our nations” — but not to abandon the secular state. “The neutral state,” he writes, “and the Christian nation go hand in hand.”

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 2, 2008 3:49 PM