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 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.
Horseshit. People assert this and never justify it, and it’s just a right wing scare tactic to normalize the idea that people of different cultural backgrounds can’t live together. Any multicultural city you go to in America is, almost without exception, going to be a better place to live than some suburban white enclave.
Pretty sure I’m as left wing as they come and deduced this on my own, but okay.
Also, people living together in a city =/= running an entire superpower. Horseshit example.