Leadership Quote by Rocco Buttiglione

A politician doesn’t mourn “traditional values” unless he’s also drawing a map of blame. Buttiglione’s line is built like a lament, but it functions like an indictment: “we” did the desecrating, yet the guilt is carefully outsourced to a vague cultural drift where no one in particular is accountable and everyone is. The verb choice matters. “Desecrated” isn’t neutral; it frames social change as profanation, not debate or evolution. That religious charge is the tell: he’s not arguing policy as much as diagnosing a spiritual vacancy.

The second clause is the trapdoor. “New values didn’t come along” implies that modernity promised a replacement moral architecture and failed to deliver it. It’s a neat reversal of the progress story: liberation without a compass, autonomy without obligations, rights without a shared script for meaning. Subtextually, the audience is being invited to feel not just nostalgia but anxiety - and to treat that anxiety as evidence.

Contextually, Buttiglione’s worldview sits in the European center-right Catholic tradition that reads late-20th-century secularization, sexual liberalization, and loosening family norms as a civilizational unmooring. The line also works as rhetorical cover for a political project: if the present is a moral vacuum, then restoring “traditional values” becomes less a partisan preference than a rescue operation. The brilliance, and the danger, is its broadness. It can name anything from consumerism to divorce to immigration as the symptom, while keeping the cure conveniently constant: re-enthrone the old order, and call it renewal.