Pardogatto Progressivism

The switch in radicalism from left to right is the key challenge of our age

"Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga com'è, bisogna che tutto cambi", Tomasi di Lampedusa, Il Gattopardo

Change is key to politics. Even when you actually don’t want any. The quote in Italian above comes from one of Italy’s most famous novels - Il Gattopardo - or in English, The Leopard, written in the mid 1950s by Tomasi di Lampedusa and published posthumously in 1958. The book was a huge hit, even if di Lampedusa never got to see it, winning a major literary prize in 1959 and being made into a hit movie in 1963 starring Burt Lancaster and Claudia Cardinale, during the era of peak US-Italian film collaboration. More recently, Netflix just produced a glossy, six-part multi-million adaptation, should spectacular Italian costume dramas be your thing.

But the reason people reading this politics Substack might know about Il Gattopardo is because of that famous quote. In English it means “If we want everything to remain the same, everything must change”. At least that’s my half-baked translation (I did once sell a used car in Italian, so trust me ragazzi).

Il Gattopardo deals with a Sicilian noble family trying to respond to the tumult of Garibaldi’s expedition/coup and the rapid transition of Italy into a unified modern nation state, along with the inevitable death of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the associated power of the Sicilian nobility. The quote reflects an acknowledgment that even reactionary conservatives - and there ain’t much more reactionary than a nineteenth century Sicilian aristocrat - must move with the times if they wish to preserve their status, wealth, or indeed, lives.

So famous is this quote that there is even a Wikipedia page on the ‘Di Lampedusa strategy’. There is a useful quote there from the Australian social scientist Judith Bessant: “the di Lampedusa strategy involves placating, appropriating and incorporating the opposition in order to secure the older-prevailing system.”

The Harvard political scientist Daniel Ziblatt is well-known for arguing that democracy in the nineteenth century was most likely to prevail and consolidate where moderate conservatives were able to triumph over reactionaries. Arguably they did so by adopting the Di Lampedusa strategy - making peace with democratic and industrial change to secure their own privileged position. You may not like it, but this is what peak electoral conservatism looks like.

If I were being especially provocative I might even say this is the story of Scandinavia during the era of social democracy - incomes were to be heavily taxed but wealth and property were, if not unscathed, less scathed. There’s a reason why the Wallenberg family, whose wealth originated in the mid nineteenth century, still own over a third of the Swedish stock market.

But… this isn’t a post about conservatives. At least not fully. It’s a post about their political rivals - progressives - by which I mean parties and politicians on the left, including liberals and socialists. Parties whose underlying ideology looks to change, to a future quite distinct from the present, to the possibility of perfecting human life.

At least it did.

Over the past couple of decades, many progressives have found themselves in an awkward and novel position. As defenders of existing political institutions, as defenders of norms of civility and moderation, as technocratic policymakers shifting policies at the margin in response to past evidence.

Indeed, it feels like the new mantra of progressivism is the inverse of the Gattopardo formulation: “If we want everything to change, everything must remain the same”.

It’s not Gattopardo, it’s Pardogatto.

I think this has crept up on progressives. In part it reflects the triangulation of the 1990s and lessons drawn from that about ‘not scaring the horses’. There is too the increased reliance on ‘insulated’ institutions, outside of the democratic process, from independent central banks, to ombudsmen, to fiscal knuckle-rappers such as the OBR, to dare I say it, the institutions of the European Union. Or, again dare I say it, universities.

The view that technical, professional or scientific expertise should trump the vagaries of popular opinion or electoral volatility is not inherently progressive. Indeed, it looks rather like the views of mid twentieth century gattopardo conservatives. But progressives have found themselves, perhaps unintentionally, as the defenders of technocracy.

You can see this in the pass-the-smelling-salts response to Michael Gove’s infamous quote about experts. Or in the US, in the #theresistance support of nominally independent figures standing up to Trump, from Robert Mueller to Jerome Powell. And in the UK this often finds itself manifested in an endearingly naive view of the efficacy and kindness of the <checks notes> European Commission.

There is also, I think, a sociological story here. Left-leaning parties have over the past few decades become ever more the parties of the Professional Managerial Class. It began with the ‘sociocultural’ professions, such as education, arts and charities. Then moved into medicine and public health. And since the era of populism began, now includes unlikely progressives such as managers and financiers in the private sector.

These are all people who broadly benefit from a regime that puts experts in charge and leaves existing institutions to get on with the job. Given the mess that populists have made of previously expert-led institutions in Trump 2.0 you can absolutely see the point here. The opposite of technocratic expertise is not somehow better expertise.

But I think it may create a blind spot - one that as a member of the Professional Managerial Class, I am sure I share too. To continue with my penchant for reversing famous quotes, progressives, especially in America, have often been fond of the following line about the defenders of rapacious capitalism by the feted American journalist Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

A slight change gives us “It is difficult to get a man to criticise something, when his salary depends on his understanding it.” In other words, those of us embedded in institutions, often designed to solve other political problems, are very leery of any criticism of those institutions.

We say, no, these institutions perform very important roles that most people don’t understand - but I do! Central banks do tough things to stop politicians mucking around with the economy at election time; the legal rules of the European Union might sound overly restrictive but we need them to prevent countries free-riding; public health interventions are needed to stop a virus spreading. Trust us bro.

But people no longer trust institutions, or the reasoning behind them. Perhaps they should. But they often don’t. And the technocratic response to this has increasingly been to cast the public as fools, as misinformed, as dancing to the beat of hostile, illiberal forces. Perhaps also true. But politically ineffective.

Whether pardogatto progressivism is an understandable response to right-wing populism and it’s ‘theory’ of disruption; or an extension of Third Way triangulation; or a reflection of the voter base of progressive parties, I think it has become a pathology.

It has left progressives, particularly those more towards the centre of the political spectrum, without a theory of change. Progressives find themselves playing defence - expending their energies on protecting institutions that their political ancestors would have sought to reform or revolutionise.

The fates of post-Obama liberals I think are most reflective of this. Obama, a temperamental conservative if ever there was one, was perhaps the first pardogatto progressive, at least in vibes. His agenda was to clean up the messes of Bush’s over-reach, domestically and abroad. But I think he also went beyond pardogatto progressivism, first by actually achieving the one thing American progressives had failed at for fifty years - passing a near-universal, if still flawed, healthcare plan. And secondly, by virtue of his identity as the first black President. Oh, and there was a slogan too - Change We Can Believe In.

Since that time, the Democrats’ message seems to have been “We Can’t Believe Trump’s Changing Things”. And yes, Donald Trump has been a terrible President, even more so in his second term. But the political strategy of defining yourself by opposition to his changes has artificially constrained the Democrats. It has made them seem the party of stasis, not change. In an era of mass economic discontent - whether it’s a vibecession or not - their message has not hit home. And their response to the racial and cultural tumult and chaos produced by Trump has often been ‘this is not who we are’, as opposed to ‘this is who we could become.’

The first two years of Keir Starmer’s government provide another example. The ‘Ming vase’ strategy of the 2024 Election was almost definitionally pardogatto progressivism: “if we want things to change (who’s in government), then everything (fiscal policy, immigration policy, welfare policy) must stay the same”.

This has not, I put it to you, been an enormously successful strategy. The public voted for change. But they didn’t expect that change to be so passive. Much like the Labour government technically didn’t raise one of the big three taxes on working people but did in fact raise Employer NI, a tax that would simply be passed through to working people, the government did technically change, it’s just from a political perspective it often felt hard to tell.

A couple of months after the July 2024 Election I wrote one of my more prophetic posts about the inability of the government to move past the Ming vase strategy. I argued that Keir Starmer was coming across as a doctor sitting by the bed of a very sick patient, tutting away about how bad things were and whose fault that was, but not really offering much hope of a solution. Labour was all diagnosis, no prescription.

I am very much not alone in castigating the current government for the absence of a vision, a theory of growth, a narrative response to rising racism, etc etc. But this was all pretty clear at the time and even more so now.

And Britain’s demand for actual change and a story behind it has not gone away. It has instead moved to the inchoate anger, sometimes rage, of Reform and Restore UK. These parties are outbidding one another with promises of draconian (and in my view immoral) action against not simply illegal immigrants, not simply recent migrants, but elderly non-Brits who have lived here for forty years but happen to live in social housing. The inaction of the current government is producing ever more extreme promises of action, any action, who cares for the human consequences.

We are however, now at a political pivot point for pardogatto progressives. The omertà within Labour about the stultifying stasis of the current government is long gone. While a policy debate should have happened before the 2024 election, at least one is emerging now, from both Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting. With policies that would be actual changes - on fiscal policy, on our relationship with Europe, on our electoral system. These changes would not all be popular. They would, however, be changes.

We don’t know for sure what will happen in Makerfield, but I think it likely Andy Burnham will win, because of his personal popularity that massively outweighs his party’s popularity. And why is Burnham popular? Because he is associated with action.

There are lots of pieces about Manchesterism and the degree to which Burnham is responsible versus Howard Bernstein or Richard Leese and I’m in no position to adjudicate. But Burnham is the elected politician, the person who tells stories to the public about where Manchester is going and why, and the person who is judged on the perceived success of that story. So he is the emblem of action.

People sometimes pooh-pooh Burnham as charismatic and hard to pin down. And perhaps his political ideology is not as well fleshed out as some political figures of the past. But compared to the current government?

And charisma is crucial if you want to sell change - people need to know what you are doing, why you are doing it, what they will see that will look different, and why it’s important that you are re-elected to keep the change going. Burnham might well come across as more authentic than other politicians but I don’t think it’s just a story of ‘he’s not a holier-than-thou London professional’ - it’s that his narrative is not just about who he is but where he - and we - are going.

Maybe Burnham won’t be able to convert that energy and sense of direction into reality in Westminster. Britain seems to hard to govern. But it’s especially hard to govern if you don’t have a vision of change you believe in or can sell to the public. If your story is just ‘the last guys were bad and disruptive and I’m here to clean up the mess and set things right’. Otherwise, to go back to Italian politics once again, you end up veering between ‘good times’ politicians like Berlusconi who shake things up, followed by ‘bad times’ politicians like Romano Prodi who come in with a mop to clean things up. That’s no place for progressives to be if they really want change.

Speaking of who wants change, as I was finishing this post, a Dickensian ghost of progressivism past apparated into the discourse. Sadly Tony Blair has cut back his Dickensian locks of the Covid era when he briefly looked like Vigo the Carpathian from Ghostbusters II. But his scene-stealing talents remain very much in place, despite his calmer hair.

Blair wrote a piece even longer than this one (!) denouncing the current Labour government’s strategies on welfare policy, energy policy, foreign policy and tax policy. He also went after both Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting. I imagine if Clement Attlee or Harold Wilson had been in the room they might also have had to duck punches. It was a ‘bold’ intervention for sure.

For my taste, the piece majored too heavily on AI without indicating that the author had a particularly precise view of how AI tools work. You are welcome to read my guide to Claude Code, Tony! But I do agree with Blair that the country lacks a vision of how to grow, how to be as far in the forefront of the ongoing tech wave as it can be, and how to position itself internationally.

Blair’s own vision he calls ‘radical centrism’, which I guess is a good way for him to get dogpiled on Bluesky. For him this is about leading with policy ideas rather than internal political fights. I mean sure, that would be great, but there are reasons political fights dominate - to get into power you have to win them. Still, once you do, you do need an agenda, you need the promise of action. Of change.

So I think, despite what looks like the start of a long Burnham-Blair Cold War, the two have quite a bit in common. They have theories of change and the charisma to tell a story about it. They are not afraid to blow up some existing institutions to get there and they both have a feel for why radical right populists have been successful.

They are not content to have Nigel Farage and Donald Trump, both figures who hark back to mythical and unattainable pasts, be the avatars of the politics of change. If conservatives have abandoned the field of conserving, progressives should not swoop into claim it. Progressives need things to progress. They need change. And they need a simple, perhaps tautological, theory of change:

“If we want everything to change, everything must change”.

There, that wasn’t so hard.