We are grateful to Brandon Bloch for his generous reading and for the comparative questions he raises. On his first question on whether the DC’s failure to critically address its own founding myths prepared the ground for Berlusconi, we are skeptical that an alternative policy course from the 1970s onward could have prevented the collapse of the DC. Strategic choices certainly mattered but the crisis was heavily overdetermined by structural features of postwar Italian politics. The German comparison is instructive precisely because it highlights what Italy lacked. Unlike the CDU, the DC never operated within a fully consolidated bipolar system in which alternation in power reinforced democratic legitimacy.

The Italian Communist Party, the largest communist party west of the Balkans, was excluded from power throughout the postwar period. The DC was thus “condemned” to govern continuously while also absorbing and recomposing the demands of diverse social, territorial, and factional interests. It increasingly functioned as a system of mediation and patronage, gradually losing the “political spirituality” that had first grounded its appeal and drive. The fate of Aldo Moro is instructive. Moro suggested a “third phase” of the democratic experience, a decisive break with the Cold War logic that had imposed an insurmountable constraint on Italian politics. Notably, in 1979 historian George Mosse recognized that Moro’s vision held pertinence for the fate of Western democracy writ large. One year earlier, Moro had been kidnapped and murdered by the Red Brigades, a far-left Marxist-Leninist terrorist group.

The second question on memory, amnesty, and anti-fascism goes to the heart of our anthropological approach. At one level, we agree that Italy’s postwar settlement entailed significant elements of erasure and moral compromise, including a broad amnesty that was never fully revisited. It is, however, important to highlight here that leftist forces were actually pushing for a policy of amnesty. The amnesty law of 1946 was decided and signed by Palmiro Togliatti—the communist leader who was at the time minister of Justice of a government of national collaboration (De Gasperi was prime minister).

At a second and more important level, our emphasis on personal transformation by no means minimizes these dynamics but rather serves to suggest that anti-fascism functioned less as a coherent public memory coming to terms with the past and more as a lived, often fragile ethical reorientation rooted in individual experiences of war and dictatorship. The fact that some of the most ardent supporters of the new democracy had once been attracted to fascism does not render their commitment less real. In fact, it was because of this background experience, coming of age during fascism, that the turn to democracy involved an existential dimension that injected the democratic ideal with a transcending ethos. The “Christian” in the party’s name was much more than a decorative device. We insist that Christian Democracy in hindsight was the single most important political newcomer in the twentieth century, providing an alternative not just to fascism and Nazism but also to liberalism and socialism.

In this sense, the contemporary crisis of Christian Democracy does invite us to rethink the mid-twentieth century not as a settled democratic achievement, but rather as a contingent moral and political experiment. Its successes were real, but so were its unresolved tensions, frictions, and contradictions, which continue to shape Italy’s and Europe’s democracy today.