Thread by @ChittiMarco

I was lazily listening to the news and the US political debate and I cannot avoid myself to think how there is a sort of national "psychology" that shape the political discourse.
That is a sort of MAGA syndrome for Americans and a WAGAW one for Italians. I'll explain.

I doesn't matter the fact that Trump appropriated for himself the MAGA slogan, but the idea of Greatness, of being or having been or going back to be a Great Nation is a very American bipartisan obsession. And it's not only about foreign policy, the leader of the free world etc.

Take Biden's plan for railways: Given the current state of US passengers rail, he could content himself to call for a better/improved rail service. Instead, he calls for a "plan to ensure that America has the cleanest, safest, and fastest rail system in the world." No less.

The necessity and inevitability of Greatness is the curse of the American public discourse and always will be, probably. No politician will be able to win only on a platform of normalcy and just making America a functioning and fairer country among others.

And what about Italy? Well, I say Italy's distinctive feature is WAGAW or: "We are among the Greatest, are we?!?"You cannot understand the Italian public discourse and the way it acts in Europe and in the international context if you don't know what the idea of the "Italietta" is

It's the syndrome of the latecomer, the last to join the group of the "Great Powers" in the 19th century, the weakest, trying to project an image of Greatness (we are part of the club too!!) with what some people colled "beggar imperialism", imperialismo straccione.

There is a constant idea that the country need to be recognized by the grownups (the French, the Germans, the Brits, the Americans etc) its "place under the sun" and every sign of being not treated as equal is a profound attack on the national self-esteem

This is the idea of "Italietta", a minor country good only at operas and food, bad at war and at the other serious stuff reserved to the grownups. You cannot imagine how much this plays in the italian national psychology when a random Dutch start lecturing...

If you talk with a random person of my parents' generation, you can easily see them switching from complaining about the backwardness of the country to proudly remark that "we are still the 6th most industrialized nation" (no matter this is not true anymore since the 1990s)

So, every country has its own cursed self-representation of how it should naturally be: the US, with their anxieties of not being always and forever the best and the greatest, Italy with its enduring syndrome of the impostor among the "Great powers".

We don't need politicians, we need therapists.