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.
End of this, we won’t be able to reconcile with the folks who voted and cheered this on. We are diametrically opposed world views. And we cannot live peacefully together or apart.
Everybody is entitled to their own opinion. My opinion is that I honestly don’t believe we’ve ever really been given a chance to try to live equally and peacefully without interference and manipulation by very wealthy individuals who’s own interests rely on stoking fear to make us blame each other for our oppression and exploitation within the hierarchy they have created.
Every time we’ve made progress, they’ve used their money and power to double down their attacks on equality and democracy because a society that truly promotes equality and freedom is a society that cannot protect their established heirarchy.
I recommend this book to anybody who really is interested in understanding just how long oligarchs have been trying to undermine and thwart democracy in the U.S.
How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America
One of the terms the author uses frequently in the book is mudsill:
Mudsill theory is the proposition that there must be, and always has been, a lower class or underclass for the upper classes and the rest of society to rest upon. The theory and similar rhetoric has been dubbed “the Marxism of the Master-Class” which fought for the rights of the propertied elite against what were perceived as threats from the abolitionists, lower classes and non-whites to gain higher standards of living.
Also recommend this interesting work by Steve Kangas who passed away under odd circumstances, but did some interesting research on modern day conservativism in the U.S.
The Origins of the Overclass
There will always be those who even if they’re poor will support those whose are rich. Hoping for more scraps from the table or that they’ll be uplifted.