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.
