The merging of a the formerly ‘post fascist’ National Alliance in Italy, the direct descendent of the MSI party which was itself the descendent of Mussolini’s own fascist party, combined with the increasing professionalism and influence of nationalistic parties in Western Europe has some commentators on the far right in various corners of the world in a bit of a spin.

In this merging of the National Alliance [NA] into mainstream parties they see the end result of softening policies to gain electoral appeal. They see a party which they once followed becoming more conservative in its outlook and they feel a sense of betrayal. Such feelings have also been evident in the BNP’s latest successes in the UK. Somehow by accepting reality and trying to appeal to the largest number of people at the same time these parties have apparently ‘Sold out’, never mind that what they are ‘selling out’ was very rarely worth having in the first place.

What these commentators fail to realize is that the parties have done a bargain, and that parties like the BNP are likely to do even more bargains in future, trading unpopular ideals for popular ones, and thus popular success.

The nay-sayers scream and tear their clothes on the outer, but this makes no difference, they have failed to note an integral factor of political change, that it happens gradually when it happens well, and that it is never the work of a single party but rather of a movement, sometimes containing many parties.

In Italy as one party with a long history moved to the mainstream, diluting its ideals slightly to do so, dozens of smaller parties sprang up in their place to continue pushing on the fringes and organizing on the streets. Back when the MSI was at its former political height before the reforms of the 90’s there were many young far right activists and organizations on the streets, but this mattered little because the positions of power were held by the parties created in the post war period to hold down the Italian communist party, itself one of the strongest in the world at the time.

Today there are still young far right activists on the streets from a multitude of competing and co-operating factions, but the reds are only a tiny fraction of their former strength and the party of power now accepts ethnic nationalism as a valid argument and openly states that Italy must remain predominantly Italian.

This is a vast positive change in the political affairs of Italy, if you add in regionalist movements like Lega Nord, most of whom are anti-immigration themselves then the political culture of Italy has changed massively for the better, and a large part of that has been the mainstreaming and eventual merger of the former National Alliance. The commentators mentioned above see only that an ethnic nationalist party, the largest in Europe, has disappeared from the electoral sheet without taking this into account. Even though the NA dropped a lot of its more hard-line politics to get to where they are, they took a lot of those politics with them, and the stuff they left behind did not get left on the shelf, it was picked up by a multitude of smaller less ‘respectable’ parties.

The commentators in question don’t understand how political movements work and for some reason seem to be personally insulted when a party they don’t belong to, sometimes on the other side of the Atlantic or even the world, changes its policies. Thanks to the mainstreaming of parties like the BNP, immigration is now no longer a taboo topic in many conservative and even liberal circles of British society, thanks to the complete mainstreaming of groups like the former NA in Italy it can be argues that Italy is getting closer each day to being a semi nationalist society than any of its more western cousins.

The idea is to get our ideas into the mainstream, to expose them to as many people as possible. Trying to stay in a corner being ideologically pure is fine, and it does have its place in maintaining the momentum of those groups moving to the mainstream, but the ideas of the fringe about the world and how it works should not be unduly influencing those more interested in changing the lives of every day people, let those on the fringe do their job, but separate them from those of us planning on more productive endeavors.

To state the obvious we don’t need more fringe dwellers, we have enough of them already; the places where we don’t have people are the places we need to be. Leaving the ‘pure’ to sit in their basements arguing obscure points of ideology over the internet would be the best thing for them and for the cause overall.

The rest of us, those interested in making the next step and making it well, must move on.