Paolo Di Canio hasn't told us anything about his real views – but he's revealed plenty about ours

You don’t get a Mussolini tattoo unless you think he was a pretty neat sort of guy. There are people who adore Mussolini, who bought the Duce soap holder and sent off for the set of six Duce place mats, and they don’t have Mussolini tattoos.

So the new Sunderland manager is almost certainly a fascist. Next question: so what?

The first thing to be said is that the obsession with defining a person by their political views is a peculiarly British, peculiarly middle-class, peculiarly media-driven preoccupation.

Perhaps it is because we have traditionally been so unspeakably squeamish about discussing politics in this country that doing so still holds a sort of voyeuristic allure, like going through someone’s drawers and sniffing their underwear. There are very few countries in which Di Canio’s political convictions would have caused as much of a stir as they have here.

The emergence of Di Canio onto the national stage seems to have belittled the nature of the discourse, even in intelligent circles.

Take the faintly ridiculous piece in The Guardian this morning. I’m not delighted about singling it out for ridicule, for there are ridiculous pieces in all papers on all mornings. But it does seem to crystallise the emotional puerility of the debate:

“Of course, what fascists like Di Canio conveniently forget or downplay is that when it suited, Mussolini was perfectly willing to employ the same racist rhetoric as Hitler. He enacted discriminatory racial laws in the late 1930s and facilitated the deportation and murder of Jews. In any case, fascism vigorously opposes the representative democracy that works to safeguard the interests of different groups and ideas. In that sense, at the very least, it's antithetical to a 21st-century football league that brings together many different organisations, each of which in turn increasingly depends on multicultural teams.”

That’s 95 words arguing why fascism is bad. Goodness knows why the writer thought we needed reminding. If you do need a columnist to tell you that fascism is bad, by the way, then you’re probably not reading The Guardian. And if you do happen to be a fascist sympathiser who just happens to come across the article, what are the chances that it will change your mind? So while including the phrase “murder of Jews” in an article about the ex-Swindon Town manager may make for pretty punchy prose, it serves very little real purpose beyond making us all feel a little better about ourselves for not being fascists.

With that in mind, let us return to Di Canio’s appointment, and the anger it has provoked. Di Canio’s motives are obvious. He wants this entire circus to stop right now so he can proceed with the urgent business of nailing down 17th place in the Premier League table. It is easy to imagine him feeling slightly bemused by the whole business.

What about everyone else? What about, say, Davey Hopper of the Durham Miners' Association (DMA), who is demanding the club return a union banner on display at the Stadium of Light? What about David Miliband, who resigned as the club’s non-executive-director-adviser-thing within seconds? What do they want?

You could argue they are taking a stand based on their own moral compass, which seems fair enough. But a stand for what? What are they hoping to achieve?

Do the fans vowing to shred their season tickets and the disinterested observers smearing their outrage all over the internet genuinely believe their actions can help to arrest the worldwide tide of fascism?

Let’s just consider that possibility for a second. Imagine you’re a fascist, still working in your current job. Then, you get promoted. Hate mail drops onto your doormat.

Newspapers who took tea and scones with fascists in the 1930s now delight in demonising you. Now, consider this question: does the experience make you more or less likely to recant?

Di Canio and his tattoos salute the Lazio fans

The fallacy of public vilification is that those we disapprove of can be humiliated into changing their nature.

In fact, virtually any informed academic from Freud to the present day will tell you that humiliation often induces reactions such as hysteria, irrationality, mania and violence – the very conditions upon which extremist political ideologies thrive. The public flagellation of Di Canio may, in fact, be turning him even more fascist. Well done, everyone.

And anyway, do we really need Di Canio to ‘clarify’ his political views? Doesn’t his football management career at Swindon offer enough insight into what he thinks, and what he values?

Di Canio has a rabid insistence on discipline and punctuality. He is obsessed with charisma and leadership by force of personality. Obsessed with the cult of strength and the intolerance of weakness. “If someone has an appointment at 9.30, I can’t accept that they turn up at 9.45,” he said on taking over at Swindon. “It means they are not strong enough.”

Then, of course, there is the Mussolini tattoo on his arm. The clues are there, people.

Belief is one thing, of course. Action is quite another, and speaking in practical terms, I’m struggling to see how Sunderland having a fascist manager tangibly changes anything at all.

There are existing FA, Fifa and criminal laws in place to prevent political gestures or racist behaviour, which means we are unlikely to see the Roman Salute in the Stadium of Light dugout any time soon. And if anybody has worked out how choosing between David Vaughan or Jack Colback can be transformed into an overtly fascistic act, then do let us know.

At the root of the distaste over Di Canio’s appointment, I think, is a simple disappointment with human nature. We wish fascists didn’t exist.

We wish the fascists that do exist would go away and leave us in peace. Rapt by our own moral worth, we wish for the millionth time today that people were just a tiny little bit more like us.

Which is completely natural. But ultimately, not all that helpful to anyone but ourselves.