by BOAVENTURA De SOUSA SANTOS
Trump’s victory is a desperate and historically understandable gesture by US society to halt the decline of the imperial prosperity it experienced throughout the 20th century and, above all, after the Second World War. It is a desperate gesture, because society has to turn to a president convicted by the US criminal justice system, who has performed very badly during the Covid-19 pandemic (1.2 million deaths, many of them avoidable), who has incited the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and who openly claims to be willing to eliminate the very essence of US democracy – the limited powers of each sovereign body (checks and balances) – in exchange for the promise that everything will go back to the way it was before.
But it is also a historically understandable gesture because all previous empires have declined and died due to the internal degradation of their social, economic, political, and cultural life. If anything, external enemies delivered the final coup de grace. It is difficult to define what the decline of an empire consists of, when it begins and when it ends. For example, the Roman Empire began to decline after the death of Marcus Aurelius (180 AD), but only collapsed three hundred years later. Broad generalizations should be avoided on this subject, which is prone to determinism and insensitive to historical contingencies. I can imagine future historians worrying less about the decline of the American empire than about how long the empire survived the predictions of its decline.
When I talk about decline, I’m talking about the discourse of decline as a political weapon for access to power. Trump’s main slogan, MAGA (Make America Great Again), is clear in this respect. There is decline, but it can be halted, even reversed. The popular vote given to Trump shows that this discourse is convincing in the US today.
Halt the decline or fall into the abyss?
Social polarization, the concentration of wealth, the increase in social inequality, the degradation of the quality of the political elite and of democratic coexistence, the dominance of financial capital over productive capital—these are all seen as signs of decline. Decline is a structural but discontinuous process. It can be halted at times by the same forces that are responsible for its decline.
Because of its rentier nature, financial capital was the first to show signs of halting the decline. The day after Trump’s victory, Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index announced that Donald Trump’s victory had helped, overnight, to increase the fortunes of the 10 richest people in the world. According to the index, these fortunes gained almost 64 billion dollars on Wednesday alone. It was the biggest daily increase recorded since the index began in 2012. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, also saw his fortune grow the most. His net worth increased by 10%, the equivalent of 26.5 billion dollars. He was one of the biggest supporters of Trump’s campaign and was promised a position in the next government; the fortune of Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon, increased by more than 3%, which means an increase of 7 billion dollars; Bill Gates, owner of Microsoft, saw his wealth rise by 1.2% to 159.5 billion; Larry Page and Sergey Brin, co-founders of Google, saw their wealth increase by 3.6%, each reaching a fortune of around 150 billion.
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