cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/12919255

When I first went to a white high school, something I noticed right away is that there were these young men there, kids really, with a very very distinctly thousand yard stare. Every one of them had been subjected to a police raid, by swat or similar. I will use the phrase, “veterans of the war on drugs”, as a joke, but yeah, that is actually how I expect this time to be remembered. As an adult, I think it’s pretty obvious that the difference with this high school was that the families of the children subjected to these raids more or less abandoned them. Literally, in the case of those subject to incarceration. So it is not that urban schools are not also subject to the same raids; it’s definitely the opposite. Rather, it was so normalized that local community and family structures have adapted to resist them.

Anyway, the US is an authoritarian state. It’s not totalitarian. It’s not fascist, yet, and most people still recognize the democratic elements of the US as legitimate. However the fact remains, the US is ,through and through, from the heights of government, to society at large, authoritarian. Authoritarianism as a concept, can be broken down into two categories, institutional and individual. Anyone that has ever been a child in this country or met a man from here knows that this country has a serious and pervasive issue with individuals inclined towards authoritarianism in their daily lives. And and I am just so so sorry for this, but I don’t understand any other way than just ripping off the Band-Aid, you’re here, I have to assume you’re here for it: outside of the context of American exceptionalism, the idea that a slave society could ever under any circumstances be a bastion for freedom is fucking deranged.

America’s founding myth is just that, a founding myth. It is a fabrication, in support of a government, just like the founding myth of every other empire. Easiest one, America wasn’t the first democracy wasn’t the first modern democracy wasn’t any of this nonsense. You can tell because the government that it split away from and fought a war against, was a democracy. It’s not even the first republic, the Dutch were right there. The revolutionary war was a shortsighted power grab by local elites willing to sacrifice their community in exchange for a chance at securing their ill gotten gains. The founding fathers were warlords, propagandists and hypocrites of the highest order. Their glorious revolution left a third of the free population dead, and a majority of the remainder displaced, to say nothing of the conditions of the enslaved. Then they committed genocide on the Native Americans 100 times over, and helped invent scientific racism and codify white supremacy so deeply into the blood of America that there are people to this day, who would swear to you that it’s a real and natural part of the world. Bottom line, it’s all fine and good to recognize some democratic elements of the US government at its inception, but that does not exculpate the US for its crimes against humanity. Authoritarianism is not the opposite of democracy. They don’t cancel each other out.

Wrapup: by the standards of anyone not currently filating American exceptionalism, the US was an authoritarian state until at least 1963, with the official disintegration of the American racial class system. Immediately, the groundwork for the modern mass incarceration system was laid, and since at least 2001, the US is openly authoritarian again. Specifically, in terms of separate sets of rights for different groups of people, in particular along racial lines. Sorry, again, if through the course of conducting this research this conclusion is disproven, I will be ecstatic and happy to let everyone know. As it stands, the soul of America is not democracy or progressive change, it’s self destructive bourgeoisie capitalism stretched across a skeleton of white supremacy. That is the reality of the situation. I am sorry.