... Lewis Libby and of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, the Supreme Court appointment fiasco, Bush-defying declarations from Iran’s president, and rock-bottom approval polls. And Wallerstein wrote just before the disastrous trip to Latin America.

This bleak period actually has some significance for students of Italy. I’m not referring to current questions of the clumsy Berlusconi Washington soap opera, the burden on allies when one of them seems seriously weakened, or other trans-Atlantic reverberations. I leave all these implications to my colleagues on the front page, and stick to our effort to grasp long-term Italian political practices and political culture. So we’ll interrupt, for two issues, our brick-by-brick building of a structure of understanding of Italian politics to reflect on three factors: parliamentary vs. presidential systems, the ending of military conscription, and primary elections.
The first of these is the simplest.
Many Italians feel they have suffered because Italy, like most major European powers, has a parliamentary system. That is, the prime minister emerges from a vote of the parliament and his term of office can be ended at any time by a parliamentary vote of no-confidence. (In the presidential system, the chief executive serves a fixed term that can only be interrupted by death, resignation, or impeachment.) The parliamentary system and elements of proportional representation (the importance of which rise and fall in recent years — according to the parties’ self-serving mathematical calculations) are widely thought to be responsible for the parade of short-lived governments of the post-war republic, with all the attendant ills of ministerial incompetence, irresponsibility, and rimpasti [cabinet reshufflings] in which the voter was a mere spectator. It’s a heavy price to pay, no doubt, but take this minute to reflect, perhaps with a smug smile, on one of the system’s virtues: a thoroughly discredited government, or one supported by a shattered coalition, or one that has reached a point of moral and political exhaustion… leaves. Usually rather quickly.
Compare this with today’s Washington. One need not be a Bush antagonist to recognize serious malaise. But there is no way to end the malaise for many, many months, more than three years. This simple factor of time led the New York Times to remarkably unvarnished prose: “An administration with no agenda and no competence would be hard enough to live with on the domestic front. But the rest of the world simply can’t afford an American government this bad for that long.”
Our clock is going to tick very, very slowly. When Italians count their political blessings, they should start with the factor of time. Next week we’ll relate the upcoming years of American discontent to both the ending of the military draft in Italy and the U.S., and to the selection of candidates by primary elections, a current debate in Italy.