Come si USA. Guida (e curiosità) per l’elezione del presidente americano
By Marco Respinti.
D’Ettoris editore, 2024.
Paperback, 100 pages, 12,40€.
Reviewed by Carolina Riva Posse.
Emilio Komar was a Slovenian-Argentinian philosopher, an immigrant, and an heir to the rich Austro-Hungarian world of his native Ljubljana and his beloved Škofja Loka. He used to say that only true Italians can understand true Frenchmen. In other words, only he who inhabits his own world can understand others. What Komar meant was that real attachment and fidelity to one’s roots make us understand what other people can feel toward their own country.
If we live on the surface of things, we only reach the surface of things. When we read Marco Respinti’s work, we are reading a proud Italian who admires the United States profoundly. In Come si USA, translated as How it is US(ed), we find a guide to the electoral process in the United States of America. But it is much more than that.
The purpose of the book is to understand the reasons for the intricate electoral system, which has proven to be remarkably stable and orderly throughout American history. Mainly addressed to an Italian audience that is naturally less familiar with American voting, it can also be useful for Americans to understand how the whole design is ordered to secure a fair system against totalitarian democracy.
Respinti was introduced to the American world by his mentor, Mario Marcolla, whose relationship with Russell Kirk, in turn, guided him to follow a golden thread between their native Europe and America. Marco Respinti, a Senior Fellow of the Russell Kirk Center, then became Kirk’s translator in Italy. This new book is animated by the conservative intent to seek the historical and eternal foundations of our political order, the continuity of civilization and an understanding of the human person.
America is part of the world born out of the expansion of Europe. It is part of what could be called, following Giovanni Cantoni, “Magna Europa.”
One of the main misunderstandings Respinti’s work addresses is the false idea of an unjust system of voting that can produce a winner who has lost the total number of votes. The suspicion that the system has failed emerges from the way things are portrayed often in the media. Respinti explains the purpose of the architectural design of the different stages of the election: from primaries and caucuses to the conclusive steps just completed in 2024.
The popular vote is not the definitive phase of the electoral operation. It is the states that vote for the president. The whole point of America’s system is to prevent ochlocracy, Polybius’ concern about the rule of the mob. In the US, the key to understanding this system is the Electoral College. Respinti compares the American system to the Conclave that elects a Pope. There is no direct voting of a president in the US. Instead, the states vote for the president. The principle of subsidiarity is avant-la-lettre, evidently an inspiration for the disposition of the process. The US is a nation of states, a federal reality that seeks to be faithful to the original insights of its founders. It is meant to be a “territorial democracy,” respecting the state’s cultural identity, far from the Jacobin massification and centralization.
Respinti’s work is an occasion for re-considering the United State’s identity, with the flavor of antique Roman pietas intertwining with innumerable other traditions. America was, from the beginning, open in manifesting its religious roots and prudent in designing a modest system that doesn’t promise salvation but appeals to the use of reason nurtured by experience, dialogue, and respect in search of ordered liberty.
Carolina Riva Posse writes from Argentina.
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