Italian Left governments preserved Right policies under new personnel

Evidence

The government of the Right from 1861 to 1876 had merely, and timidly, created the general external conditions for economic development—rationalisation of the government apparatus, roads, railways, telegraph— and had restored to health the country’s finances, over-burdened by the wars of the Risorgimento. The Left had attempted to remedy the hatred aroused among the people by the Right’s unilateral fiscalism, but it had only succeeded in acting as a safety-valve: it had continued the policies of the Right with a left-wing personnel and phraseology. Crispi, on the other hand, gave the new Italian society a real heave forward: he was the true man of the new bourgeoisie. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 448

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘safety-valve’ or ‘transformism’ idea of a left carrying forward right-wing policy under left phraseology resonates with later Gramsci’s passive revolution and with how nominally progressive Islamophobia-adjacent governance can continue exclusions. — connects to: Italian party convergence under Depretis erased substantive Left-Right differences until socialism; Transformism organically absorbed revolutionary personnel into the Italian ruling class; Italian parliamentary parties dissolved into factions that converged into one ruling bloc — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1874
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Italian party convergence under Depretis erased substantive Left-Right differences until socialism; Transformism organically absorbed revolutionary personnel into the Italian ruling class; Italian parliamentary parties dissolved into factions that converged into one ruling bloc — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1874