In Italy we are experimenting, for the first time since the idea of ​​democracy took root, the Epistocracy, at least in a contemporary version. The traditional institutions of Democracy continue to exist but have yielded a (quantitatively) minimal but (qualitatively) important part of their functions to a small group of experts. Gone in the sense that Parliament agreed to do so without prior debate.
- In fact, the executive and legislative powers continue to exist but have passed the most important decisions to get out of the pandemic crisis to a small group. Within the democratic government, there is an epistocratic government.
- Many citizens are fully satisfied with the work of the current epistocratic government, while they harbor a growing rejection for the democratic one and for Parliament.
The affirmation of the Italian Epistocracy highlights the malfunctioning of the traditional mechanisms of Democracy.
- Long before the pandemic, the institutions that are appointed to represent the citizens, i.e. parties, political movements, and intermediate bodies, forgot that democratic choices are nourished by knowing concrete facts and then proved unable to understand the radical change in progress (globalization and technological evolution) and therefore on the whole to provide adequate answers to the problems of coexistence.
- In the last quarter of a century they have canceled the political debate on ideas. Consequently they have not been able to elaborate any cultural proposal in which citizens can identify themselves in order to build the future.
The government is divided into two parts.
- A small group of experts who propose pragmatic solutions to successfully solve (only) some problems that are committed to addressing.
- A larger group that represents the parties that make up and legitimize the government that, persisting in bad habits, take care of everything except solving problems.
The weakness of the party part of the government (just think of the self-defeating resignation of the previous government, resigned for excess of cunning having had the confidence in Palamento for a few days) justified first the need for Mattarella ‘s choice and after the presence in the executive of a epistocratic group that works, in fact, on its own.
- The epistocratic group presents its choices to the rest of the government and the parties that make it up from an almost consultative perspective rather than a democratic confrontation. The parties accept this situation, because it allows them to continue to manage the bureaucratic and financial power.
You can agree or not with the work and the method of governing the competent as it is with the services of a consulting firm. There is nothing wrong with that. It is not an attack on Democracy. On the contrary, it is the distorted mechanisms of our representative democracy that have produced the temporary epistocracy, forgetting that governing feeds on knowledge.
- When the parties decide to pull the plug on the Draghi government, the competent ones are fired.
At this point, however, a question arises: who replaces the epistocrats
Political parties and movements have become culturally impoverished and are now unable to present any proposal to citizens.
- We therefore rely on them with the well-founded fear that they will not do much, but will generate radical social tensions
- You return to the market to look for a good consultant
The institutional reason would have it that the parties were to revive democracy. To do this, they should abandon the logic of power (Pd, Fi, Lega, etc.), moreover motivated by their respective utopian dreams, to start a process of generational change (not so much personal as attitudinal) through ideas and proposals.
Our democracy needs those who are able to understand the change underway and present themselves to citizens with new solutions. The parties, which have become managers of power, will know how to initiate this process of change
. For now, no. Let’s encourage them to study to do it.