Liberi ma eguali : Riferimenti culturali per la costruzione di una sinistra democratica nell’attuale passaggio d’epoca

Never as much as today, more than 30 years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, in a global context characterized by the climate crisis due to global warming, after an economic crisis that has lasted almost a decade, a pandemic that has shocked the world for a little less two years, and in the midst of an international crisis caused by a war that has broken out in the heart of Europe, the democratic left must forcefully pose itself the problem of a renew political culture. Two orders of problems must be addressed and resolved. First, it must be established which political-cultural materials, which traditions of political thought of the past and which perspectives of political-cultural elaboration of the present, can be considered most suitable for the search for and formulation of a renew political culture. Secondly, it is necessary to identify the set of actors, classes and social groups that, over a reasonably long period of time, can recognise themselves in this renew political culture and support its political-programmatic proposals. The article outlines a reflection on the search for suitable cultural references for the construction of this political culture. It takes as its starting point the centrality of the interpretation of individual rights in the perspective of liberal egalitarianism and then it searches for a new recombination with the socialist tradition and environmentalist culture, where the decisive factor is the determination of the conditions of compatibility between the objectives of economic freedom and private property and the constraints arising from respect for the rights of individuals and other living species. Finally, the question arises of the conditions for building a new social coalition in favour of such a political culture in the context of individualised mass society.