The attempted assassination of Donald Trump at the weekend is yet another extraordinary cameo moment. But what does it all mean for the most powerful country on earth, and indeed for the rest of us? Perhaps it is as simple as this; 2024 will be yet another seminal moment in the decline and fall of the American empire.
In The History of the Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon luridly evokes the Rome of 408 AD, when the armies of the Goths prepared to descend upon the city. The marks of imperial decadence appeared not only in grotesque displays of public opulence and waste but also in the collapse of faith in reason and science.
The people of Rome, Gibbon writes, fell prey to “a puerile superstition” promoted by astrologers and to soothsayers who claimed “to read in the entrails of victims the signs of future greatness and prosperity.”
Rome, argues Gibbon, did not collapse because of the decadence of the emperors, but in the decadence of all Romans, and indeed in the collapse thereby of the system which the Romans had created to elect their leaders.
Rome therefore did not fall because its emperors managed it badly; it collapsed because Romans stopped being able, in their collective systems and structures of self-governance, to elect candidates who were meritocratically capable of doing the job.
The emperors were incapable of running the empire – usually because of old age, advanced conditions of delusional narcissism or both.
Empires – and America is as much an empire as Rome – tend to decadence.
As James Traub has written in Foreign Policy, perhaps in a democracy the distinctive feature of decadence is not debauchery, but terminal self-absorption — the loss of the capacity for collective action, the belief in common purpose, even the acceptance of a common form of reasoning.
“We listen to necromancers who prophesy great things while they lead us into disaster. We sneer at the idea of a ‘public’ and hold our fellow citizens in contempt. We think anyone who doesn’t pursue self-interest is a fool”.
Herein, the social compact and structures disintegrate, not because of the Donald Trumps, but because of the Donald Trumps in all Americans. Decadence, in short, describes a cultural, moral and spiritual disorder — the Donald Trump in us.
Politics, in this reading of history, is a consequence of society – a corollary of our own best and worst attributes. Rarely has that been clearer than it was on Saturday night.
America is staring into the abyss.
The reprehensible attempted assassination of Trump will have profound reverberations for US democracy. Within seconds of being blanketed by Secret Service agents, Trump was yelling “fight, fight, fight” to the crowd.
The instantly ubiquitous photo of him pumping his fist against the backdrop of the Stars and Stripes will become the emblem of his campaign.
America has been, for the past few decades, a bifurcated, polarised society incapable of communicating across societal fissures. Now it hovers on the brink of all-out cultural, if not civil, war.
Within the construct of a society where people tend towards trust rather than conspiracy, people would wait for the facts before jumping to conclusions about the shooting. However America, in 2024, is not such a place. It is riven by self-interest and a loss of common humanity.
After the shooting, two Republicans vying to be Trump’s vice-presidential pick blamed Democrats for inciting hatred against Trump. The recently confirmed candidate, Ohio senator JD Vance, claimed that Biden’s campaign rhetoric “led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination”.
South Carolina senator Tim Scott said Democrats’ “inflammatory rhetoric puts lives at risk.”
Elon Musk, owner of X, where these statements were posted, waded into the swamp, speculating on how the shooter got so close. He suggested it was “either extreme incompetence or deliberate”.
Many on the left quickly claimed the shooting was staged or a false flag operation to boost Trump’s election chances. However, no senior Democratic official has supported these rumours. The suspected shooter, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, did not provide clear motives. Though a registered Republican and gun enthusiast, he had donated to a pro-Democratic group. It’s likely, as with most US assassins, that Crooks acted alone and was delusional.
A democratic society becomes decadent when its politics – its fundamental means of adjudication – becomes morally and intellectually corrupt. Judging by the depravity and pitiful spectacle which is this election – from a stuttering, stumbling Democrat refusing to let go, to a psychopathic narcissist inciting hate to the point at which he is almost assassinated – the rot runs deep.
It is arguably too late. Even a quasi-idealistic, self-correcting, liberal democracy, armed with the rule of law, can only do so much when faced with social dynamics that are this self-destructive.
America, an empire in a state of decadent, terminal decline, and saddled with this tragic gerontocracy, seems to have little left of a society to save. DM