Hanging in the Balance

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Hanging in the Balance
An Italian Journalist Contemplates the Discontent of the American Empire

Book Presentation
L’impero in bilico
(2024, Solferino)

by
Antonio Di Bella, journalist

The author in conversation with
Stefano Albertini, NYU
Chiara Basso, NYU

In ENGLISH

“This book wants to try to overcome the stereotypes of right and left and tell the America of Trump and Biden with all its contradictions and reasons.” Antonio Di Bella spent much of his professional life in the United States as a Rai correspondent. An adventure that began with the First War in Iraq and culminated in the assault on Capitol Hill of which he was a direct witness (the only Italian television reporter). As he says in these pages, the siege of Congress, more than the result of an improvised action, represented the eruption of a political and psychological state common to a large layer of public opinion; the desire for revanchism of a middle class that, rightly or wrongly, feels in danger in the face of the advance of the rights of immigrants and bearers of new identities who seem to have more attention than the traditional categories. The oldest liberal democracy suffers from acute pathologies, which now spare almost no European nation (and not even India and Brazil). But it’s hard to imagine the West getting up, if the United States doesn’t do it first. This is why it is urgent to understand what is happening across the Atlantic in the election year that sees Trump’s possible return to the White House. And investigate, through events, anecdotes, protagonists and witnesses of the last twenty years of American history, the roots of a discontent that risks undermining the very cornerstones of our democratic model. Preface by Federico Rampini.

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