Who Is America For? (an essay)

I’ve been thinking about how much of our current politics comes down to what people think America is for.

The fights look like they are about policy. Sometimes they are. A bathroom bill is a policy. A school board ban is a policy. Immigration enforcement is policy. A court ruling on voting rights is policy. But the energy underneath these fights is bigger than the policy itself. People are arguing over who belongs here, who gets protected by the state, who has to explain themselves, who gets treated as dangerous, whose history is allowed to be taught, whose religion gets treated as neutral, and who gets to move through public life as if the country was built with them in mind.

A lot of us learned America through memorized promises. We stood in classrooms and said “with liberty and justice for all” before we could have explained what liberty or justice would actually require. We learned “all men are created equal” like it was a clean moral foundation instead of a sentence written inside a country that was actively deciding which people counted as men, which people counted as property, which people counted as citizens, and which people counted only when their labor or obedience was useful.

Those words still matter to me, which is maybe the uncomfortable part. I do not want to throw them away as empty propaganda, even though they have been used that way. I also do not want to treat them like sacred evidence that the country is secretly pure despite everything it has done. The most honest way I can say it is that I grew up wanting those words to become real, and I still think there is political power in holding a country to the promises it trained children to repeat.

Those phrases matter now because almost every major political fight in this country is also a fight over whether those promises were ever supposed to include everyone. “For all” sounds simple until people start asking what it would require in schools, in hospitals, at borders, in prisons, at work, in courtrooms, in bathrooms, in elections, and in the stories the country tells about itself.

America has always had more than one story about itself running at the same time. One story says the country is a democracy expanding toward equality. That story shows up in voting rights struggles, public education, civil rights law, disability rights, labor organizing, and every attempt to make citizenship more than a word on paper.

Another story says America is a white settler nation where land, citizenship, safety, and political authority properly belong to some people before others. That story shows up in border panic, anti-Black backlash, Indigenous dispossession, the fantasy of “real Americans,” and the idea that demographic change is something being done to the country rather than something happening inside it.

Another story says America is a Christian nation that lost its way when it became more pluralistic. That story shows up in fights over school prayer, book bans, anti-LGBTQ laws, abortion, religious exemptions, and the constant claim that Christianity is under attack whenever Christian authority is treated as one belief system among others instead of the default setting of public life.

Another story says America is an empire with the right to organize the globe through military power. That story shows up when war is described as freedom, when civilian death becomes collateral damage, when entire regions are treated as chessboards, and when the United States imagines itself as the armed manager of history.

Another story says the liberal free market is the real measure of value, and people prove their worth through productivity, discipline, wealth, self-sufficiency, and usefulness. That story shows up when poverty is treated as a character flaw, when health care is tied to employment, when disabled people are asked to justify the cost of care, when unhoused people are criminalized, and when exhaustion gets repackaged as ambition.

These stories are not sitting politely next to each other in a textbook. They are moving through daily political life.

When people argue about what children should learn in school, they are also arguing about whether the country has to remember what it did.

When people argue about immigration, they are also arguing about whether America belongs to the people already imagined as “real Americans” or to the people who live, work, raise families, and build lives here.

When people argue about trans people, they are also arguing about whether gender hierarchy will remain one of the organizing rules of public life.

When people argue about policing, prisons, welfare, labor, and public health, they are also arguing about which lives are treated as social responsibilities and which lives are treated as problems to manage.

Once I started seeing those fights as fights over the purpose of America, the conspiracy theories started making more sense to me. They are still irrational, but they are not random. They give people a plot, and the plot is usually some version of: the country was yours, someone is taking it, and the people asking for rights are actually the aggressors.

“Cultural Marxism” gives people a way to describe feminism, queer and trans rights, anti-racism, multicultural education, and disability justice as a coordinated attack on Western civilization. The “Great Replacement” gives people a way to describe immigration and demographic change as a plan to erase white people. Anti-trans grooming panic gives people a way to turn trans existence into a threat against children. Anti-DEI hysteria gives people a way to describe even mild attempts at inclusion as discrimination against the people who were used to being centered.

These theories tell people that social change is not happening because excluded people are demanding rights, safety, history, language, access, and power. They tell people social change is happening because a hidden enemy is trying to destroy them.

The facts do not have to work for the story to work. The story works because it gives people a target.

A person who feels economically unstable, culturally displaced, spiritually anxious, or resentful about losing automatic authority can be told that the problem is immigrants, teachers, queer people, Black voters, feminists, Muslims, college students, disabled people, or anyone else who can be made to represent change. Instead of looking at wages, housing, health care, debt, corporate power, war, climate crisis, or the hollowing out of public life, the conspiracy gives them a simpler answer: someone is taking your country from you.

That line carries a lot of weight because it assumes the country was theirs in the first place.

The phrase “taking our country back” depends on a whole worldview. Back from whom? Back to when? Back under whose authority? Usually the answer is never stated clearly because the vagueness is useful. It lets people imagine a return to order without saying directly which people would have to become quiet, invisible, deported, closeted, controlled, or dead for that order to feel restored.

Religious language adds another layer because it makes these political fights feel eternal. When public figures use words like “crusade,” “spiritual war,” “demonic,” “globalist,” “Antichrist,” or “end times,” they are not simply adding dramatic flair. They are changing the moral frame. A political opponent becomes an enemy of God. A policy disagreement becomes evidence of civilizational collapse. A demand for accountability becomes persecution.

The Crusades are a good example because the actual history and the fantasy version are doing different things. Historically, the Crusades were medieval military campaigns, beginning in the late eleventh century, in which European Christians fought for control over Jerusalem and other lands they considered holy. In contemporary far-right imagination, the Crusades often become a symbol rather than a history: Christian men with weapons, holy land, sacred violence, the West under attack, Islam as the enemy, conquest recoded as defense.

That fantasy travels easily into Christian nationalism. In Christian nationalist politics, America is imagined as a Christian country that has been stolen by secularism, feminism, immigration, queerness, Islam, socialism, universities, bureaucrats, or whatever enemy the moment requires. The nation becomes something like a church, a battlefield, and a family inheritance all at once.

The order of the story matters. First, politics gets described as spiritual war. Then the enemy stops being a person with different beliefs and becomes an agent of evil. Then violence begins to sound protective. Then democracy starts to look suspicious because democracy requires sharing power with people who have been cast as threats.

This also helps explain the strange role Israel plays in some Christian nationalist end-times thinking. Support for Israel, in those circles, is often filtered through Christian prophecy rather than Jewish life on its own terms. Israel becomes a stage where Christians imagine the end of history unfolding. Jewish people become characters in a Christian script. Muslims become the enemy in a civilizational war. Palestinians become disposable because their actual lives interfere with the symbolic story being told about the land.

That kind of “support” uses people.

The same pattern shows up when wealthy and powerful people talk about the Antichrist, one-world government, artificial intelligence, regulation, and apocalypse in the same breath. I am interested in the political use of that language, especially when it comes from people who already have enormous influence. If regulation can be framed as satanic control, then tech companies, billionaires, defense contractors, and political leaders get to cast democratic oversight as a spiritual threat. If global cooperation on climate, war, migration, or technology can be framed as the road to the Antichrist, then accountability itself becomes suspect.

That story is very useful for people who do not want limits placed on their power.

The public asks who is profiting, who is being surveilled, who is being bombed, who is being displaced, who is being poisoned, who is being exploited, and who gets a say in decisions that affect everyone. The apocalyptic story answers by warning people about tyranny, demons, globalists, and the end times. The conversation moves away from material conditions and into cosmic panic.

The word I keep coming back to for all of this is domination, and bell hooks gives me the clearest language for it.

Domination is broader than one party, one election, one conspiracy theory, or one law. It is a way of organizing human relationships around control. It shows up when men are taught that authority proves masculinity, when parents are taught that obedience matters more than trust, when churches treat questioning as rebellion, when schools reward compliance over curiosity, when workplaces normalize exhaustion, when prisons are treated as solutions, when borders become theaters of punishment, and when poverty is explained as personal failure instead of organized abandonment.

Authoritarian politics grows more easily in a culture already trained to respect domination. People who have been taught to associate love with control, safety with punishment, and order with hierarchy are easier to move into fascist politics because the emotional habits are already there. The state does not have to invent the desire for domination from scratch. It can borrow from the family, the church, the school, the workplace, the police, the prison, and the border.

Fascism in America does not arrive from outside the country’s history. It grows from materials already here: settler colonialism, anti-Blackness, patriarchy, Christian supremacy, militarism, capitalism, ableism, and the habit of ranking human beings according to who deserves care and who deserves control. It turns old hierarchies into emergency politics. It tells people that equality has gone too far, that cruelty is necessary, that violence is protective, that the leader alone can restore order, and that the people asking for freedom are the real danger.

When I say fascism is domination in a panic state, I mean it takes hierarchies that were already present and turns them into emergency politics: punish the enemy, restore order, follow the leader, stop asking questions, treat cruelty as evidence of seriousness.

Multiracial democracy threatens that arrangement because it challenges the ownership story. Even in its limited and unfinished form, it says the country cannot be permanently organized around one racial, religious, gendered, or economic center. It says the people pushed to the margins are not guests in someone else’s nation. It says the public belongs to all the people who make up the republic.

Reactionary politics treats that idea as humiliation. Shared power feels like loss to people who were taught to experience dominance as normal. Inclusion feels like replacement. Historical honesty feels like attack. Gender freedom feels like social collapse. Religious pluralism feels like persecution. Labor power feels like theft. The old hierarchy starts to look less natural, so its defenders reach for panic.

That panic is everywhere right now. It is in the school board meeting where Black history is described as indoctrination. It is in the campaign ad where migrants are shown as an invading force. It is in the sermon where queer people are described as signs of national decay. It is in the billionaire’s warning that regulation will lead to tyranny. It is in the pundit’s claim that young people have been brainwashed because they do not accept the same myths their grandparents were handed.

The fight is over reality: whose pain is visible, whose history is legitimate, whose body is allowed, whose family counts, whose religion gets state protection, whose labor matters, whose fear becomes policy, and whose freedom gets described as a threat.

That brings me back to the words we memorized.

“With liberty and justice for all.”

“All men are created equal.”

Those phrases have always been unstable because they point toward a country that has never fully existed. People in power often use them as decoration, as proof that America’s intentions were pure even when its institutions were violent. People fighting for freedom have used them differently, as leverage, as accusation, as a reminder that the country wrote checks it never intended everyone to cash.

I care about the demand inside the promise.

If liberty and justice mean anything, they have to mean more than comfort for the people already protected by law, property, whiteness, wealth, citizenship, masculinity, and Christian belonging. Equality cannot depend on usefulness, obedience, respectability, productivity, or silence. A country cannot keep asking children to pledge allegiance to justice while banning history, criminalizing migration, attacking trans people, excusing police violence, treating poverty as personal failure, and teaching people to accept domination as common sense.

I think the work is to stop letting it get away with that.

America is more than blood and soil, or at least it has to be if those memorized promises are ever going to mean anything. It cannot be a family inheritance for some people and a probationary status for everyone else. It cannot keep calling itself free while treating freedom as a threat whenever the "wrong" people ask for it.

The country keeps saying one thing and building another. The work is to make that contradiction impossible to ignore.

EDIT:

But ironically I do love me some good ole post 9/11 patriotic songs tho lol