There are countries accustomed to hating America, others admire it, still others fear it. Sometimes at the same time. But feeling sorry for America is a relatively rare feeling.
It is a reflection that can arise by observing the scenes of protest and violence in the USA, Europe and elsewhere, following the barbaric killing of George Floyd. At first everything seemed terrifying. The traits that a 40-year-old like me has come to know from childhood, the optimism, charm and American informality that vanished into the thin air of guerrilla warfare. The decline of the USA seems a more than plausible prospect.
Echoes returned from time to time, first in my history books, then in my TV, now on a monitor screen. Korea, Vietnam. On 11 September, the G8 in Genoa. Richard Nixon, Donald Trump. Periodic images that clash with the myths of the American dream, of the land of the free and opportunities.
A detachment that only apparently arises from moral or political considerations. The real spark which the rest follows, however, is instinct, aesthetics. Politics is just the shell that packs the US decline.
The reasons for anti-Americanism
A feeling that arises from what can be seen, sometimes very clearly, beneath the external veneer of this country. A lethal mixture of injustices, hypocrisies, racism and ugliness. In this case even more evident, because it is represented in the "home" scenario.
It is not a question of contesting abuses or abuses of some militia in distant countries or of different cultures. It's about seeing clearly everything you really don't like. The abuses of a police state. The reckless reckless carelessness of the common citizen. The creeping racism that penetrates all the corners of society. The obsessive hypocrisy of political correctness that destroys form and leaves substance standing.
It then becomes easy to blame the USA, to give voice to the prejudices that this country has never tried too hard to prevent, prejudices about its miseries that also serve to cover ours, those of the "Western world".
If it's aesthetics that matter, the United States today simply doesn't even remotely resemble the country the rest of us should aspire to, envy, or replicate.
Dawn of the Dragon
“My” American myth was born from the consideration that whatever moral or strategic challenge the USA had to face, there was the feeling that its political vivacity corresponded to its economic and military power. That the US democratic system and culture were so deeply rooted that they could always regenerate.
Now something seems to change. America seems bogged down. A new power has emerged on the world stage to challenge American supremacy, China, with a weapon the Soviet Union never possessed: economic might.
China, unlike the USSR, offers an image of growing wealth, vitality and technological progress (although not yet at the level of the USA), while protecting itself with linguistic and cultural distances from the West. America is instead a sort of "Modern Family", like that of the series of the same name. A little family full of flaws, ideas and contradictions, which shows everyone its strengths and weaknesses. Today, from the outside, it seems that this strange, dysfunctional but very successful family is collapsing. Its merits are no longer enough to prevent its defects from causing its decline, with the associated risks even civil war.
The USA as a collective drama
America, alone among nations, experiences the agony of this existential struggle in the company of all of us. American drama quickly becomes our drama. In the weeks following the Minneapolis events, demonstrators protested in support of Black Lives Matter in London, Berlin, Paris, Rome and elsewhere. Countries in which the police are much less militarized and weapons have a very low diffusion compared to the USA. The USA continues to have an extraordinary cultural hold on the rest of the western world.
The racial issue has mixed with other national grievances creating a confused picture. Protests in Bristol brought down the statue of an old slave trader. London targeted Winston Churchill, in Milan they smeared the statue of Indro Montanelli.
For the USA this cultural domination is a double-edged sword. It fascinates talents from all over the world, welcomes them to study and build careers, and rejuvenates itself thanks to the "brains" of other countries. But this dominance comes at a cost: it amplifies everything, good and bad things. Today, the ugliness that is on display is amplified and multiplied, including by the leadership.
Is it Trump's fault?
Street protests, explosion of civil and class conflicts, institutional failures in managing a pandemic, and above all extreme polarization of irreconcilable partisanship. It all happens in the last year of the first term of the most chaotic, hated and disrespectful president in modern American history.
Of course, not everything can be blamed on Trump. The tycoon is partly heir to trends that arose earlier, at least since September 11th: "the Donald", however, seems to have accelerated them all, and at the same time.
Ethics or aesthetics?
In summary, then: is the dismay at what comes from the USA aesthetic, as I was saying, or political? Is US decline aesthetic or political? If it were a question of injustice, we should understand why there were no marches in Europe for the mass incarceration of Uyghur Muslims in China. Also nothing to support the protests in Hong Kong, or against human rights violations in Saudi Arabia, or in Iran. Simply, due to the scope of US cultural hegemony, the murder of George Floyd and the response of authority have become metaphors for everything that is wrong and unjust in the world. American cultural power has become a boomerang.
The protests are an act of defiance with which the Western world (starting from the American citizens themselves) contests the corrupt values that the entire West has absorbed, and of which the USA is simply considered the paradigm.
The King is naked
Have the “American Dream” and other clichés been suddenly, and perhaps irremediably, exposed by Trumpian cynicism? The cynical counter-reading actually began with Obama, a cynic himself, Nobel Prize winner for a non-existent peace, and culminated in Trump, whose abandonment of the American idea marks a rupture in the history of the world. But if America no longer believes (and it shows) in its moral superiority, what is left?
There was an abyss with famine, horror and deportations in the Soviet Union. Today there don't seem to be huge differences with Putin's Russia. And with Beijing overseeing mass surveillance of its citizens and incarcerating a group of ethnic minorities almost en masse, almost the same can be said of China. The USA like the others. The same. He was suspected, for many it was obvious, now it is for everyone. And through the mouth of the President himself, who in 2017 responded on TV to a statement such as “Putin is a murderer”: “there are many murderers. We have many killers. Do you think our country is so innocent?”
Previously, the cynical idea that all societies were corrupt and self-centered had been rejected outright by the US. Today, international relations do not rely on values, but on currency. Stop. End of power, ideals and history.
Trump's presidency is a watershed, however you see it. Not just for the United States. but for the world itself: it is something that cannot be canceled. Once spoken, words cannot be changed; the images that are displayed cannot be invisible.
Trump himself is an expression of American decline
During him, after him, the flood. Still represented by him, if he wins again in the next Presidential elections, or by Biden, a septuagenarian supported by transversal powers no less hypocritical, who must be protected from the crowd because he is among the most vulnerable categories to the virus. The future projection of the USA is not encouraging.
And the idea that these demonstrations are the premise, if not the reflection, of US decline, a tabula rasa, is strengthened given the period. Covid has reinforced this exact concept for many: nothing will be the same as before.
In the 18th century the Netherlands was the dominant global power. Today they are a successful country, but they have simply lost their power. The collapse of the American Empire is a given, it is in the figures of History. It happened for all empires. We just need to try to understand what will replace it, when it will replace it and following what shock.
And here the times may not be so fast. If the US retreats from its role as the world's sole superpower, for most countries in its orbit there is no realistic alternative to its leadership.
What comes next
When Trump pulled the United States out of the Iran nuclear deal, three major European nations (UK, France and Germany) attempted to keep it alive on their own, with limited success. Their combined power compared to the US was irrelevant. In Libya, under OBAMA (not Trump: Obama), the UK and France could only intervene in support. Like unreliable teenagers.
The truth is that we live in an American world and will continue to do so, even if US decline is real, even if American power slowly fades. The Europe that saw tens of thousands of people listening to Obama speak at the Brandenburg Gate when he was not yet president is the same one that sees tens of thousands of people in the streets despite a global pandemic demanding justice for George Floyd. An international community obsessed with America and dominated by it.
If this is a humiliating moment for the USA, it is also a humbling moment for Europe. Countries that could break away from American power by evoking the political will to do so prefer to mount symbolic opposition hoping for a change of leadership.
US decline: all is not lost?
The collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of the two blocks represented the beginning of serious problems. And America's most serious problem is that the rest of the world today can see how far the country has fallen short of its achievements. It's hard to dispute some of the criticisms leveled at the US: hopelessly racist, overly ambivalent about poverty and violence, a place of guns everywhere and brutal policing.
Yet this is also a nation that is not Russia or China, as far as Trump can or wants us to believe. In Moscow and Beijing, to begin with, it would not be possible to protest with these numbers and with such vehemence, even if the objectives of the protests are confused. A rapper during a press conference or a protest leader speaking to a crowd of protesters in Minneapolis seem more skilled, powerful and eloquent speakers than almost all European politicians I can think of.
The same cannot be said of the US president or the democratic candidate who wants to replace him.
Who is without sin
It must be said that although there is evident racism in America, subtle, deep and pervasive prejudices remain in Europe. Europe's failures may be less obvious but no less prevalent.
Are there greater opportunities for the success and advancement of black and ethnic minorities in Europe?
Just look at the composition of the European Parliament (or any point of sale, law firm or board of directors) to understand.
In the United States, let's face it, the world sees itself, but in an extreme form: more violent and free, rich and repressed, beautiful and ugly. The truth is, we don't like what we see when we look in the US because we see ourselves.
