Trump: the moan of the wounded nation

I remember the last July 4th lived in the United States, in 2022, already returned to a certain normality after the long pandemic. The joy with which the neighbors lived that night of celebration, each in their neighborhood with the people close by, was an act full of citizenship. I celebrated it in the Harlem neighborhood, with neighbors from multiple countries, origins, races, and cultural traditions. From the European perspective, we look at it with some indulgence: as an act of alien ingenuity, revealing of a nation as dominant in the last century as it is young in its historical journey. After all, it is a nation that has just turned a quarter of a millennium since its founding. Thus, while nations with more than a thousand years of life like Catalonia survive being part of a state, a nation in its youth like the American one has enough strength in the year 2026 to threaten a country like Iran – the contemporary political form of a civilization with more than two thousand five hundred years of history like Persia. This arrogance is probably the reason why we have a feeling towards the United States of both fascination and antipathy. What makes a creature relate with such virulence against ancient civilizations of continents like the Asian or the European – China, Iran, Germany, to give the latest examples?Trump's United States is unaware of its original sin: being David in the grand narrative of history, facing Goliath with the weight of tradition. Cycles of domination have their limits, and if the Carolingian Empire did not even last a century and the Roman Empire – the greatest example of European hegemonic domination – lasted five, we can think that the path remaining for the great globalization power will be short, no matter how much Trump said the opposite on Saturday, July 4, from Mount Rushmore. There he announced for the umpteenth time a new "golden age" like the one founded by Presidents Washington and Jefferson or grown by Lincoln and Roosevelt – the four, carved into the background stone of South Dakota. The evolution of economic, demographic, and geopolitical data, however, suggests the end of the first great golden chapter – the one that began with the post-World War II agreements.

We must also return to the origins that are being commemorated these days. Barack Obama himself stated recently that the United States is a nation born in incongruity: full of violence from the first day, when it declared independence from Great Britain in the summer of 1776, but also founded on ideals of individual liberation from the colonizing state, already inserted in the nation's first text: the Constitution of 1787. More paradoxes: if every democrat must thank Thomas Jefferson and George Washington for defending the equality of all men born in the same territory – a true principle of the Constitution – both, in their individual capacity, were slave owners who exercised dominion over other more helpless beings.This contradiction remains today in the North American nation. Always with the word freedom in hand, it simultaneously exercises dominion over others with a shared passion. What is the thread that unites dominion and freedom, the two great values of the United States? Both today and decades ago, when the hegemony of consumer capitalism began, the engine of its naive capacity to dominate the world is individualism. That is why the image of a country that takes to the streets collectively to celebrate a date that the president has appropriated for personal interests and ego.Militarization, violence, and the spectacularization of banality have complemented these days the firing of the celebrated anniversary: having turned an ideal of liberation of a people, two hundred and fifty years ago, into a large market of the imaginary yankee more antiquated. The United States has presented itself to the world as the great mall of our time, precisely when shopping centers are giving way to a digiesphere global.

A triple light source is running out that the irreverent America offered the modern world: an idea of democracy, an idea of freedom, and an idea of progress and well-being. The latter is evidenced by recent data from the Pew Research Center: the majority of Americans today think that the country's best days are behind it, contradicting a president whom they have probably even voted for. The anxiety of not wanting to fall into second place after a long hegemony is not reason enough for the cruelest honesty: recognizing that the chimera of omnipotence has ended in a world more interdependent than ever.There are interesting signs, such as those coming from the New York local patriotism of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, from where the 250th anniversary of the founding is invited to be thought of as a mirror of the present to rethink the future. Because nostalgia can be the worst legacy of a certain glorified view of the past.