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.
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.