America has always been like this: a place of immense contradiction, promise and disappointment, where noble, progressives ideals are embedded in a founding document written by men who purported to believe that all are created equal, even as most claimed the right to treat other human beings as property and to kill and displace the original tenants of the land. We helped defeat fascism in Europe, Americans can rightly claim; we also helped inspire Europe’s fascists, who looked longingly at the United States’ reactionary tradition of genocide and racial segregation.
Whether the country is good or evil is the wrong debate: like most people, and every other nation on earth, it’s a bit of both. Progress has always come in uneven fits, with hypocrisies galore — killing Nazis while putting Japanese-Americans in concentration camps — and a loud chorus of reactionaries claiming that every step toward fulfilling the promise of equal rights is itself part of the march to tyranny, classically liberal rhetoric perverted to defend white dominion over others as the true definition of freedom.
