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.
Was that the case at the Battle of Blair Mountain or via the anti-war movement during Korea and Vietnam?
The Republicans, as an institution, existed for a historical heartbeat. They took power in the midst of the Civil War in 1861, struggled for 16 years, and then surrendered to the slavers in exchange for a single term of the Hayes Administration. Lincoln ended the plantation system and gave a single generation of African Americans an opportunity to flee their southern oppressors, before “moderates” in the party slammed the doors shut. Then it was another century before civil rights for African Americans was raised to national prominence again.
The Radical Republicanism of the 1960s couldn’t survive the end of the decade. The 13th amendment’s “prison” clause was ruthlessly exploited almost immediately, creating a state sanctioned plantation system that persists to this day. And the expansionist policies of the Republicans during and after the post-war era turned the white supremacist tendencies of the Confederate South into transcontinental genocide and imperial expansion, culminating in the globe-spanning American Empire presided over by the Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan Administrations.
We didn’t end slavery. We internationalized slavery.