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.
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?