It’s Over

An Argument for Giving Up on the United States of America

Maybe you’ve been here before: the relationship is clearly over, and everyone—except you—can see it. But you are clinging to it. You spend years, maybe, trying to salvage it. But the truth is that it was broken beyond repair a long time ago. From the outside looking in, this is clear. But from within your bubble, you simply cannot imagine the truth that everyone else can see, the truth that will one day be obvious: It’s over.

While the metaphor is imperfect, I am arguing that there is a similar attachment at work with the United States. We are clinging to something that is essentially in complete collapse, and has been for a number of years. From a distance, this would be clear. From within the American bubble, it feels unimaginable. But imagination is precisely what is required at this moment. 

Psychologically, the fascist is like the abuser, violently clinging to an imagined and idealized past, a past that—to the extent that it ever existed—can never be recovered. And it is precisely because unconsciously the fascist knows that the nation cannot truly be saved, he works to destroy it and everything good in it. 

We should fight fascism, of course. But we should not make the mistake of believing that, because it is obviously better than fascism, the neoliberal order (in this case, in the form of the United States) is our salvation. There are indeed good and even beautiful things about the idea of the United States. And I do believe that it was once possible for an America to emerge that rejected its racist past and its imperial ambitions. But the evidence suggests that such an opportunity has passed.

It has become clear that American identity is deeply and irrevocably entangled in whiteness. The great reckonings of the Civil War and the Civil Rights movements essentially failed to disentangle American culture from the racial caste system. For those white people who voted for Donald Trump, it would be better to destroy the country than to lose the privilege of whiteness. And so here we are, dismantling every liberal or progressive institution, domestically in the form of education, and abroad in the destruction of USAID and the deepening of our commitment to Palestinian genocide. We are collapsing under the weight of the fundamental contradictions of American society.

Our other deep cultural commitment, as Americans, is to individualism. As a result, we have created institutions and a political climate that serves as an impediment to dealing with the reality of climate collapse. As with race, the absurdity of our individualist position forces us into denial. For those of us who take the global polycrisis, and specifically climate change, seriously, saving the United States or the neoliberal order ought not be our primary objective. Yes, supporting a center left politician is better than a fascist like Trump. But we must recognize more broadly that the United States is a fascist empire and the enemy of life on the planet. Like the friend who can see that relationship is toxic and abusive, the rest of the world already knows this.

The nation state is above all else an idea. A notion. It—and its systems, like capitalism—require a quasi-religious belief. There’s a tendency to cling to a notion—like the United States. This is a form of unhealthy attachment, or even idolatry. 

It’s easy to bypass the millions who voted for Trump and blame him, or Musk, individually. But we have to look not merely at broken individuals, or even a broken system, but at a broken culture. This is due in no small part to a broken educational system, one that has failed in its most fundamental responsibility: to teach its citizens how to think in order to participate in a democracy. Ours is a failure, above all else, of imagination. American culture has become inexorably entangled with consumerism, whiteness, and individualism. And now, with the combined power of the military and the media—especially social media, which has largely replaced a functioning educational system and legitimate journalism—the United States is primarily a force for destruction on the planet.

This isn’t an argument for the absence of hope or against fighting fascism, but for the presence of imagination along with the fight. The question that so many of us have now is “what should we do to fight this fascist takeover?” The answer, I believe, can be found only if we let go of the delusion that the takeover is something counter to the American project. It is the American project now. And our ability to imagine a new world requires that we open our eyes to this reality.