As authoritarianism accelerates — as government-sanctioned violence becomes more overt in immigration enforcement, in policing, in the open deployment of federal force against civilians, and in the steady erosion of civil rights — people are scrambling for reference points.
But instead of reckoning with the long and violent architecture of U.S. history, much of this searching collapses into racialized tropes and xenophobic reassurance: This isn’t Afghanistan. This isn’t Iran or China. This is America. We have rights. This is a democracy. This isn’t who we are.
These statements are meant to comfort. They are meant to regulate fear, to calm the nervous system with the promise that no matter how bad things get, this country is somehow exempt from the logic of repression. Instead, they reveal how deeply many people still misunderstand both this country and the nature of authoritarian power.
They rest on a dangerous fiction: that large-scale state violence, political terror, and repression belong somewhere else — to “failed states,” to the Global South, to places imagined as perpetually unstable. This is not only historically false; it is how people in the U.S. have been trained not to recognize what is being built in front of them.
I feel torn about this.
America is the slavers but also the abolitionists.
America is the corrupt corporations but also the Battle of Blair mountain.
America is an imperial army but is also the anti-Vietnam War protesters.
In order to embrace more of the good of America, we need to learn more about the bad.
That tension has been with us since the beginning. Jefferson was the perfect example. “All men are created equal,” but only if you’re white, male, and own land. A history of compromise on slavery in order to “preserve the union”, only to have it rupture anyway. It goes on and on. This is America, and will be until we decide to make some real changes. I don’t see that happening.
I believe we will make a new America after this! A beautiful one!
We don’t have to live by the past. In fact we definitely shouldn’t, but in order to create a better future we do have to be aware of the both the good and the bad, or we risk just repeating them instead of progressing.
That’s the truth about America. It is us. All of it, good and bad. How do we build the America we want instead of trying to recreate a past that didn’t really exist?
It’s a fact that slave holders signed the declaration of Independence saying all men are created equal.
But it’s also a fact that this country was built from the ground up and made great by marginalized and oppressed people. America was built by slaves, it was built by women, it was built by poor people who didn’t own land, it was built by different waves of immigrants who faced discrimination upon arrival, and continue to face it to this day.
It’s also a fact that the marginalized people who built America were not granted the right to vote until they demanded what should have been inherent to any country that believes in equality. (As an aside, there are some very wealthy intellectual conservatives who argue “all men are created equal” should be interpreted as only applying to a heirarchy of land owning white men, because they believe strongly in what they call a “natural” order of heirarchies. They also claim democracy is incompatible with freedom…)
The fact that marginalized people achieved those rights after fighting for them means that this is indeed a country that valued equality because they shaped it into one, but it also means that this is a country that has constantly battled established heirarchies standing in the way of equality. It’s a history of good and bad. This is America.
So instead of looking to the past to recreate an ideal that never really was, why not look into the mirror and figure out where we go from here?
I feel torn about this.
By and large, the second group is always in the electoral and organizational minority. It’s always on the back foot, always in retreat, always losing.
Talking about the America That Is Imperial versus the America That Is Protesting is like talking about Vichy France relative to the French Resistance. This latter group isn’t institutional. It isn’t endemic to the social project that is the nation state. What you’re pointing to is a kind of weed that the national government needs to root out every so often in order to grow its fascist garden.
These groups may be American by residency or outward fashion or in the superficial tokens of identity. But they are enemies of America as an administration. They are anti-American in deed. They’re an insurgency that the American socio-economic system seeks to snuff out.
I don’t understand your logic here. Yeah, a lot of new ideas are pushed forward by fringe or oppressed groups. Those fringe groups can grow in size and power to challenge, and thus change the institution itself.
MAGA was not institutional at first. They were fringe and weird. No one took them seriously. Look at where they are now.
Slavery was institutional at first. But then the Republicans, an institution, were created to counter slavery. Abraham Lincoln literally tricked American citizens into supporting the 13th Amendment, thinking it was necessary to stop the Civil War. In reality, Lincoln kept the Civil War going longer than necessary to pass the Amendment.
Those fringe groups can grow in size and power to challenge, and thus change the institution itself.
Was that the case at the Battle of Blair Mountain or via the anti-war movement during Korea and Vietnam?
Slavery was institutional at first. But then the Republicans, an institution, were created to counter slavery.
The Republicans, as an institution, existed for a historical heartbeat. They took power in the midst of the Civil War in 1861, struggled for 16 years, and then surrendered to the slavers in exchange for a single term of the Hayes Administration. Lincoln ended the plantation system and gave a single generation of African Americans an opportunity to flee their southern oppressors, before “moderates” in the party slammed the doors shut. Then it was another century before civil rights for African Americans was raised to national prominence again.
The Radical Republicanism of the 1960s couldn’t survive the end of the decade. The 13th amendment’s “prison” clause was ruthlessly exploited almost immediately, creating a state sanctioned plantation system that persists to this day. And the expansionist policies of the Republicans during and after the post-war era turned the white supremacist tendencies of the Confederate South into transcontinental genocide and imperial expansion, culminating in the globe-spanning American Empire presided over by the Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan Administrations.
We didn’t end slavery. We internationalized slavery.
The people have always been separate from their government. What we see right now is what this country has always been, but as empires crumble they are more open and extreme in their oppression as they try and hold onto that power.
I like your name lol
The actuality is that there isn’t an America.
We’re too vast with too many different cultures to ever work. Driving through the Northeast could cover several nations on Europe. IMO what’s happening with our hyper-polarization was always guaranteed, even without Adolf Diddler in office.
This will never, ever work, and we need to split up. I live in a left-wing stronghold, then have to vote every four years alongside folks in rural Alabama who currently right now believe the Biblical Levithian is rising from the sea off the coast of Virginia.
The left wing states need to secede and form some sort of union. Once the cash flow from organized, leftist states stops being spoon fed to republican strongholds, they’ll inevitibly collapse. They’d probably attack us, but oh well, they’re attacking us now while we’re in one union.
This may not be your America, but it is the America that has been “built” by oligarchs via 50+ years of fear based attacks on equality that were always meant to blame the slipping standard of living on everybody but the people who were responsible.
While Americans were fighting each other, the same oligarchs were hyping up that fear by offering the false safety of a made up in-grouping and getting very rich doing it. Meanwhile, they were using the remainder of your tax dollars to build a militarized police state right under your nose.
Obviously this isn’t the America you want, because it was never meant to be your America. It’s the America the oligarchs have always wanted, and it definitely didn’t pop up out of nowhere. A lot of people just didn’t realize this is what your tax dollars were building in the name of “safety,” because you weren’t supposed to realize it until it was too late.
Welcome to black America people. You’re now just discovering what us black folk have known forever and tbh I’m not happy you are suffering.
Kinda sad to be honest.
This is america. All the hidden hate is now on full display. It wasn’t crushed at the end of the Civil War and now it looks like we need another. At the end of this these people need to lose all licence. They should be treated as minors in terms of legal rights for the rest of their life.
My wife is still in shock, “But, this is the home of the brave and the land of the free” - hard to tell her she’s addicted to propaganda
The article certainly identifies a strong current in American politics, where Americans assume that the project of America carries on without their intervention, that there is some kind of exceptionalism that will protect us, and credulously accepts any statement on our foreign policy that supports those first two beliefs. But I don’t think that’s what I mean when I say “this isn’t America.” The United States was founded on principles like “all men created equal” and “one person, one vote” by slaveowners who were hammering out the 3/5ths compromise. This inherent contradiction is hard to make sense of, but when I say “this isn’t America,” I’m referring to the stated principles, rather than the historical conduct of our state and nation. It’s like how Captain America can still wear the flag while punching CIA agents — the project of America, the promise of America, is still valid and worthwhile, even though never once in our entire history have we lived up to our stated ideals. America historically is very like this — ICE are just today’s slave catchers — but it still isn’t very America of us.
Yesterday there was a popular meme on Reddit comparing the Minnesota killings to Kent State shootings. I’m not saying it isn’t apt, just frustrated that the obvious through-line isn’t state violence, but state violence against white people. FFS George Floyd died in the same city like 5 years ago and you gotta go back to the fucking 60s to find your example of American State violence?
And this is the problem. Government violence against POC is seen as normal, natural, and right, even by the libs. Because that violence is normal. This is America.
Less than a mile from where Good was killed too
