By Roberto Savio
Introduction: The day that changed everything
On September 11, 2001, I was in New York City on one of my frequent visits to the United Nations, where I had a consulting contract. That morning, I woke up late, around eleven, to recover from the jet lag of my flight from Italy. I was staying at the Hyatt Park, now the Millennium Hotel, just steps from the Crystal Palace, built to support the United Nations.
As I went down to the lobby, I was struck by the extreme agitation, from the staff to the guests. I tried to speak to a bellboy I knew, but he ran off without answering me. I then went to reception, where everyone was on the phone and no one paid any attention to me. Finally, someone I knew told me, "There's been an attack on the Twin Towers!" And she, too, ran off.
So, with the professional instincts of a journalist, I went out into the street to hail a taxi and go to the location. But the street was deserted. There wasn't a single car in sight, and the few pedestrians were also hurrying, presumably to get home.
So I did the only smart thing left to do, which was to watch television. The images were clear and terrible. But the news anchors were moving about in complete darkness, in a state of unprecedented confusion. It was clear that this was an attack, not an accident. But by whom? And why? The CBS anchor wondered, "But who could possibly wish ill on America, when we have always helped the entire world?" And the NBC anchor: "The Evil Empire already vanished with the fall of the Berlin Wall two years ago. Where does this hatred come from?"
New York comes to a standstill
On the day of the attack, as on the next, New York ceased to exist. The streets were deserted. The shops, restaurants, and supermarkets were closed. There was no public transportation. At my hotel, where the staff hadn't shown up, management hastily put together some pathetic sandwiches, which was all they could offer the guests to eat. Everyone was at home processing the shock, avoiding unforeseen dangers, and watching television. Only on the second day, beyond the horrifying images of people falling from the sky, of employees and firefighters covered in a blanket of ash, did figures and facts begin to emerge. And, in those days, the American dream vanished.
The American myth and its crisis
The United States had been the clear victor of World War II. And since then, the undisputed leader of the world, challenged only by the Evil Empire, the Soviet Union. But American citizens viewed the socialist world as politically absurd and economically backward, a world from which people were constantly fleeing, seeking refuge in the world of freedom, democracy, and prosperity—the United States. It was the Americans who had initiated the reconstruction of Europe, which, despite historically being the center of the West, was now an arm of American hegemony. And their development aid to the Third World had saved millions from hunger and famine. In the collective imagination, this had enormous proportions, which bore no resemblance to reality. Shortly before September 11, the New York Times had published a poll showing that the average American believed development aid represented anywhere from a minimum of 5% to 10% of the Gross Domestic Product. In reality, it was 0.10%.
The prevailing sentiment in those days was one of disbelief. In American history, Americans had first read about and then witnessed wars, massacres, and all manner of violence as distant events, even when their own children were involved, as in World War II. But they had never suffered an attack on their homeland. And the fact that this had been possible was the first, subconscious feeling of distrust toward institutions, a feeling that, with other events and over time, would become an important part of today's political reality. Until then, polls had always registered a calm confidence in a state that guaranteed security.
From the American dream to Trump and Musk
A thorough analysis of how the American Dream has gradually faded would require far more space than we have here. But I will attempt to summarize the threads of the tapestry that have slowly covered the United States we once knew, replacing them with those of Trump and Musk.
First of all, it is important to remember that in the 1980s some very significant things happened, not only globally, but also in the United States.
The first was the Cancún Conference of Heads of State in 1981, convened by the United Nations to continue the dialogue for a New World Order, based on cooperation and international solidarity, adopted by acclamation by the General Assembly in 1973. I was the Summit's communications director, and I experienced it firsthand. The 25 most representative heads of state of the time were there, and from Indira Gandhi to Mitterrand, from Nyerere to Trudeau, they all spoke of the need to strengthen international cooperation. When it was Reagan's turn, elected shortly before, his speech was categorical, later echoed by Thatcher: "The American people have elected me to defend their interests, not those of others. And therefore, I do not accept the straitjacket of United Nations resolutions. From now on, America will choose its own path."
During those same years, spurred by American pressure, the international community adopted the Washington Consensus, drafted by the U.S. Treasury, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the World Bank. The Consensus broke with the prevailing economic doctrines since the end of the conflict. It eliminated all social components, making the market and its laws of absolute competition the center of society. The state was to withdraw from a central role and allow the market to replace it. Non-immediately productive expenditures, such as healthcare and education, were to be borne by the private sector. And competition, at all levels, from the individual to the global, was to be the yardstick by which success was judged.
The result was that many factories and businesses relocated to countries with lower labor costs and less stringent regulations. America lost millions of jobs, jobs held by people who had previously been a middle class—white, rural, and socially conscious. But the same thing happened in rural areas, among white, conservative, poorly educated Americans with unconscious racism toward Black workers.
Wars and the financial collapse
It's important to remember that, after the attack on the Twin Towers, the United States launched the war in Afghanistan, from which it would ignominiously withdraw twenty years later. Shortly after, in 2003, it began the invasion of Iraq, from which it withdrew in 2011, giving rise to the Islamic State (ISIS), which would become a major destabilizing force throughout the Middle East. During these years, Americans discovered that their country was not invincible. They had to overcome the trauma of Vietnam. Instead, the failure of the world's most powerful military machine continued. In the end, only a tragic toll of ruins and death remained, along with a total expenditure of approximately eight trillion dollars. To put this in perspective, the current US budget is thirty trillion dollars.
But, in my opinion, the final blow to the American dream came a few years later with the Wall Street Crash, an event I witnessed firsthand. Unregulated finance had turned the stock market into a veritable casino, a place of increasingly risky bets. Under Clinton in 1999, a law that, since 1923, had established a clear division between deposit banks (those serving individuals and businesses, providing loans and mortgages) and investment banks—that is, banks for speculation—was repealed. The capital of the low-yield deposit banks flowed into investment banks. Americans don't say, as we Europeans do, "play" the stock market, but rather "invest" in it. And many citizens do so, as do their pension funds.
In 2008, the speculative bubble burst, engulfing Lehman Brothers, a Wall Street icon, and triggering a crisis that, obviously, affected the entire world. It is estimated that every country in the world had to allocate approximately $20,000 per person in bailouts to prevent a total financial collapse. In the crisis, millions upon millions of Americans lost their savings. Their pensions were also at risk. Since the 1980s, the bargaining power of unions has steadily declined. Wages in real terms, in terms of purchasing power, have been steadily decreasing. Many citizens face precarious and part-time jobs, struggling to make ends meet. Many have to work two jobs to survive. The poverty rate has risen to 15%, and child poverty has reached levels comparable to those in Africa. UNICEF's figures are dramatic. And so begins the conviction that the elites are enemies of the people, that politics no longer has anything to do with the real concerns of citizens. Voter abstention increases. And lo and behold, the immigrant, the workforce upon which America was built, becomes the enemy who takes my job, contaminates my child's class, takes away hospital beds, and commits crimes and misdeeds.
Religion, sovereignty and the new right
It is not only politics that fuels this feeling of frustration and anger, which explains Trump's great success. Religion plays a part as well. Fundamentalist evangelicals now number 60 million in the United States, and their message echoes the economic and social vision of the Washington Consensus. We must compete because God judges us by our success; those who are poor are poor because they haven't strived. They support an Israel that reclaims its ancient kingdom of Samaria and Judea (therefore, through extensive ethnic cleansing), because they preach that Jesus will have a second coming , a return to the land, only when Israel has returned to the times of Jesus. And in this world, Bannon's sovereigntism flourishes, seeking to transform the right wing into a major international movement (later surpassed by Musk, who advocates an anti-establishment sovereigntism of the extreme right). Catholic fundamentalism flourishes, embraced by J. Vance, the vice president appointed by Silicon Valley and a possible future president. The fundamentalism that leads the Secretary of Defense (or rather, Secretary of War, as he prefers) to bring religion into the armed forces, to present the war against Iran in religious terms. And a population where the level of economic and social hardship reaches 20% sees the rise of the first billionaire in history (let's define a billion: 1,000,000,000,000), who boasts of not paying taxes, eliminates American development aid, and dismisses tens of thousands of public employees without justification.
The Internet and the end of shared truth
Shortly after came the development of communications technology. Facebook was born in 2004, Reddit in 2005, and Twitter in 2006. Suddenly, millions of Americans found themselves connected to each other, bypassing the enormous US media system, which was, in any case, concentrated in the hands of a few. I was one of the internet's biggest advocates until (I think it was Bill Gates) launched a slogan: "Now it's not important to know; it's important to know where to look," which led me to a state of great concern. If I find what I've been looking for but don't possess it, it will slip through my fingers like water off a duck's back.
But the problem is that the internet wasn't born as a common good, as a service for humanity. It was born as a source of profit, and with the orgy of available information, being consulted became fundamental. Hence, the abandonment of any meaningful mechanism of ethical or professional control over the information circulating. Therefore, to maintain the connection and not lose the user, priority was given to the most sensational, extraordinary, and shocking news. Very soon, this would be exploited by creators of fake or biased news, with a great flourishing of conspiracy theories that, for example, saw the President of the Republic and the Pope as a network of pedophiles covered up by the secret services. I read, I think also in the NYT, that the FBI estimated that 45 million people adhered to these conspiracies, which stripped institutions of all legitimacy. And lo and behold, the internet gave them a megaphone, carrying the most incredible ideas from the bar to the whole of society. And, above all, to the extremists, who are infinitely more fanatical than ordinary citizens.
Numerous studies and statistics highlight the impact of isolation, which leads young people, instead of socializing, to shut themselves away online, in a virtual world where AI becomes their true friend and advisor. This occurs within a society that has always idealized the individual over the social, and where a winning political line sees the reduction of the state as freedom for citizens, taxes as an unjust expropriation of the fruits of their labor, and social spending, such as healthcare, as a clear socialist imprint.
Obviously, a wave of suffering is underway in the United States. The mayor of New York, who identifies as a socialist, has been elected, and other avowedly progressive figures are entering the political arena. But this is happening amidst intense polarization, a profound and intolerant clash that offers no glimpse of a path to national consensus in the immediate future, but rather the opposite. Trump calls Democrats "communists," and politics has become the primary instrument of division. The future certainly does not appear to be a return to the America of the past.
Bin Laden's legacy and Europe
Bin Laden could never have imagined, by destroying the Twin Towers, that he would set in motion such a mechanism of destruction.
But its legacy isn't measured solely by treaties. It's also measured by everyday gestures, which we've ceased to recognize as such. Today, no one is surprised to have to arrive at the airport two hours before departure: shoes and belts in the tray, liquids in 100-milliliter bottles, queues, metal detectors, pat-downs. The younger generations experience it as a law of nature because they haven't known what came before. It was enough to arrive half an hour early, check in, and go directly to the gate. No security checks. That world vanished one September morning, and it hasn't returned. This is terrorism's most silent victory: not having changed our ideas, but our habits, to the point that we no longer remember ever having them differently.
We should also analyze how this mechanism didn't remain confined to the United States. With diverse characteristics, and in different contexts, it also spread to Europe. Just look at the Maastricht Treaty, on which our European Union is based. Concluded in the midst of the frenzy of the extreme capitalism of the Washington Consensus, in the small Dutch city of Maastricht in 1992, it establishes obligations and powers solely in the economic sphere. The social sphere is part of an addendum, which has no legal force. And now, of the 27 member states of the Union, a majority are sovereigntist, and therefore opposed to real power from Brussels. Next year we will have elections in Spain, France, Italy, and Poland—countries of considerable influence. If sovereigntism prevails in these countries as well, the Europeans, who view Trump as an aberration, will have achieved their dream: to destroy the European Union.
An economist and journalist, he focuses on the governance of globalization and is the international director of the European Centre for Peace and Development. He founded several international organizations, such as the World Social Forum, and has worked within the UN system and as a communications consultant in various developing countries. A communications expert, political analyst, social justice and climate activist, and advocate for global governance, he has spent much of his career at Inter Press Service (IPS), the news agency he founded in 1964 with Argentine journalist Pablo Piacentini, and is the editor of Other News.
Source: https://www-other--news-info.translate.goog/noticias/el-11-de-septiembre-y-el-fin-del-sueno-americano/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=es
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