A useful digression, however, because it permits a refining of our rough profile of the most important new actor on the Italian political scene (scusate, Berlusconi and Prodi), the floating voter.

Ferrara signs himself “Elefantino” in his own [unpredictable, right-leaning] newspaper, Il Foglio, which, like US Italia, can pack tons of provocation into very few pages. Ferrara is, of course, also a TV personality and, most important for our purposes, the, uh, weightiest ally/critic of Silvio Berlusconi. In the interview, Ferrara, the behemoth of the Right, reminds us that his mother was Togliatti’s secretary and his father was Moscow correspondent for L’Unità in the 1950s. This is true Communist aristocracy.
But such ideological reversals are not uncommon in Italy. Going in the other direction, Giorgio Amendola, the focus of a future column, had liberal blood in his veins and studied with Croce before becoming a Communist Party leader. And rumors persist (I have no fix on the truth here) that a very young Gianfranco Fini [the current Foreign Minister who reshaped the post-Fascist party] once tried to join the PCI.
So the picture we painted earlier of post-war political parties can now be refined. Those parties that absorbed the entire person – thought, lore, periodical readership, vacations and festivals – were supported by workers and voters who did not face decisions at election time. Their political definition came from family, friends, class, neighborhood, a whole social and cultural structure that constituted political "home," from which a move was seldom considered. This pre-destination can be found in the biographies of most of the politicians themselves of these parties.
But there was always a substantial minority among political activists and even voters, who belong in a different category: those who intellectualized politics. For them, the theory, the debate, the philosophy whose public face is ideology – these are the blood of politics, and change is a constant possibility because the thinking and re-thinking is genuine and can produce results. It should be no surprise that they, even when they switch, mostly inhabit the far shores of extreme politics, leaving the mush in the middle to the mindless.
It would be nice to believe that the new family on the bloc, the gang we have defined as "floating" voters, was made up of those informed, thoughtful, moderate citizen- students of public affairs imagined by Plato, idealized in the classical Roman aristocracy, and, for Tocqueville, democracy’s only hope. But today’s Italy, plus the expectations that can be gleaned from the path of U.S. politics, suggests that these two rough groups, the culturally pre-defined voter and the lively enthusiast of intellectualized politics, are being replaced by two other species. The larger mass is increasingly a reactive consumer of media simplifications. Eyes glued to the tube, he/she often also joins the sub-category of those responsive to personality politics. (Think, for example, of the relation of Berlusconi and Antonio Di Pietro to their followers. Plato and Tocqueville would applaud in the case of those who know the leader personally, but fear the engineered media image.) And, second, there is also a minority, increasingly important in the U.S., driven by a particular passion toward single-issue politics.
So before we applaud too quickly the great move toward voter independence, we must seek, in the next few weeks, an understanding of the change.