In an article dated November 3, 2024, Federico Rampini reported that the Democrats’ decades-long dominance in the states of California and New York had led local branches of the Democratic Party to fanatical and maximalist positions.

To limit a similar risk of extremism without checks and balances, in the presidential elections of November 5, the journalist with dual Italian and American citizenship resigned himself to the “split vote”: he chose Kamala Harris in “anti-Trump” mode, despite judging her to be a terrible candidate, but in Congress he voted Republican, in “anti-Kamala” mode. He “held his nose” to prevent the return of the unpresentable Trump to the White House, and then he “held his nose” a second time to shorten the political leash of Harris, who in the last four years had moved from the extreme left to positions more moderate, without ever explaining the genesis of his path.

Rampini had a tendency to brand anyone who criticized NATO for the eastern expansion of the alliance in Europe as “pro-Putinian”, yet it was the exact same principle expressed by him in the article, albeit expanded on a global level: without the checks & balance of an adequate opposition, a hegemon exercises his power arbitrarily.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States committed serious errors of hubris. They unleashed preventive wars that caused hundreds of thousands of deaths. They implemented deregulations that produced enormous economic disparities, which in turn made democratic societies increasingly resemble feudal societies. They extinguished the category of statesmen, replacing them with real “statesmen”, entrepreneurs who, thanks to an unprecedented issue of money, financed their businesses with public money at zero interest rates, becoming richer than entire nations. They enlarged the state apparatus enormously, which gained enormous self-referential power, reducing political power almost to a representative role.

Digression. The only “stinker” who in November 2024 deserved the gesture of holding his nose by voting for him was himself: the unpredictable, unwatchable, and dangerous Donald Trump, declared enemy of that murky and magmatic system of state power. End digression.

Then it is clear that after the end of the Cold War America also did good things, as did the New York and Californian Democrats. Any absolute leader, at the end of his controversial life, will still have done good things, and it will be the task of historians to count the lights and distinguish them from the shadows.