Now maybe the thing is you want "America" to stop existing entirely as a concept. But nonetheless the people will still be there. What system(s) will they live under? What will their daily lives look like? How will they relate to one another? What do you want to build?
American self-image is clearly in crisis. But nihilism can't be a solution.
Fin/
Oct 20, 2026, 4:27 PM@Tattie@eldritch.cafe i'm a USian who talks like that, so it's good to hear this perspective from someone outside of the country
it's just impossible for me to be even a little optimistic when this country has gotten worse for basically every year of my adult life (we're close to the same age), and committed most of the worst atrocities of the 21st century. there was a brief reprieve under obama, but he took the optimism and hope that millenials had, and rolled that into bailing out bankers and expanding the forever wars. same for biden, but with less hope and even more blatant atrocities. our entire political system is rotten to the core
i recognize that nihilism isn't a recipe to ever make this country better. but i think part of this is realizing how much we've been propagandized, and that the political system isn't going to be a path to making things better (though i still think that politics can be some level of harm reduction, things would be a lot better now if harris won, even though she sucks a lot)
i think this realization has come pretty recently for a lot of us (for me, it was the gaza genocide and senile joe biden covering up some of the worst war crimes of my life, though i was never an america number one person) and we don't know what to do with it yet
i wish i knew what the answer was, but i think that it's good that more and more USians realize how propagandized we are and how bad our political system is
Oct 20, 2026, 5:40 PM@jiub @Tattie I think it’s important to understand those comments in context: Americans are deconstructing at an alarming rate. This is especially true of millennials and GenZ but it’s happening across the generations. And in the context of deconstruction, it’s easy to have a period of pure hate and anger before you get to the other side and start building.
And that anger is justified! America has done a lot of shit over the centuries. And a lot of us are waking up, realizing that the American Dream was a lie, and that we’ve been made complicit in those atrocities, even though many of us didn’t really realize what America was doing. We’re 100% right to angry about that and want to see the whole American project burn!
And I said “made complicit” not “are complicit” for a reason. America is a cult. We’re kids who were raised in that cult. We waved the flags. We wore the T-shirts. We watched the fireworks and thought we were celebrating the best country on earth. We got excited to send money and aid to those less fortunate than us who lived in worse countries. We believed it, not only because it was convenient and appealed to our whiteness, but because it was all we knew. I’ve had some fascinating discussions with my Ukrainian coworker who grew up under the fading shadow of the Soviet Union and our experiences of the brainwashing are eerily similar.
So people are angry. They’re right to be angry. But also, thanks to that brainwashing, they also often don’t have a better model in mind. They just know they’ve been lied to. But when your entire political science education is all about the American system and how great it is, it’s hard to dream of something better.
A lot of us also don’t have an idea of what America is absent the cult rhetoric. America is… America. What else could it be?
And yes, there is more. It’s bustling cities and wide open fields. It’s road trips to beautiful parks. It’s herds of bison and flocks of geese. It’s lakes and rivers and forests. It’s square dance and pecan pie and beers with neighbors and friends. It’s pizza and cheeseburgers and tacos and tater-tot hot dish and Chinese take-out. It’s hauling a way too heavy couch up to the 5th floor to help a friend move into their university dorm. It’s state fairs and carnivals and churches. It’s hundreds of townsfolk watching their kids play mediocre football against the next town over and cheering for them like it’s the NFL. It’s garage bands and stadiums full of Taylor Swift fans and that one remaining mall that’s still haunted by the local goth kids.
And there’s a real beauty in that America. But it’s also an America that we now know is tainted. It’s an America where all these things are used as a cover so we don’t have to talk about the racism that never went away. So much of the beauty was built on the suffering of innocent people. And we don’t have the English to hate and blame for any of it. We have only ourselves. We did all that. And we just kept eating pecan pie and setting off fireworks like there’s nothing wrong. We’re the best, most free country in the world.
It’s hard to come out of that without nihilism. I’m sitting here in a different country, eating food from a third, with no real desire to ever see a state or county fair again. I wish I could enjoy those things. I’m jealous of those that haven’t been disillusioned and still can. But I can’t. And I don’t know if I’ll ever believe in a place or its people ever again.
@faithisleaping thank you for this answer, it feels very honest, heartfelt, and sad.
I'm holding two contradictory things here. One is the very real need to mourn what you once believed before even considering what might come next. The other is the knowledge that countries tend to fall apart "gradually, then suddenly". That the "what next?" might come sooner than anyone is ready for. And that will be hard on everyone, especially those who have suffered so much already. 😢
@jiub
@Tattie In my opinion, the US as a nation is finished. As a people, though, there's plenty of good left. It's like a termite-ridden house on prime real-estate land. Trying to exterminate the termites and replace all the rotten wood is a bad way to spend effort and money, better would be to just tear it down and build something new.
While bleak, I wouldn't call that nihilism. I'd even go as far as to call it hopeful and optimistic. There's at least a way forward.
@StarkRG I understand. But what "something new" would you build in its place?
@Tattie As someone who hasn't studied sociology or government beyond high school, I can't say anything specific. I'd probably suggest lots of smaller new things rather than try to recreate the monolith it's been. Once things have settled a bit, it would probably be worthwhile forming something akin to the EU.
If you want specifics, though, I like the idea of an elected rotating triumvirate as the Executive.
Oct 20, 2026, 5:12 PM
@Tattie The negativity gets a lot more attention and gets boosted more; a lot of people have also been proposing solutions and alternatives, but, there are several floating around and a lot of disagreement on where to go with it - the part everyone can more-or-less agree on is "This isn't working."/"Not This."; the negativity and appeals to history do serve a useful purpose though, because in the US we were raised under an *extreme* amount of propaganda, and to >
@Tattie even start looking at how to move forward, that propaganda must be broken, which is what we're seeing become more widespread now. Like, most people here were raised from birth to be completely convinced the US is he best country on earth and has the freedomest freedom to ever freedom and everywhere else is worse and terrible - without first dismantling that, there is no place to even fit a vision for the future or consider alternatives.
@Tattie but, that leaves problem - once the propagnda starts to be broken, a lot of people drift unmoored/directionless for a while; the propaganda does not leave space for alternatives - all the alternatives, according to the propagnda, are terrible and bad and worse, afterall, and things liek the socialist movements are fairly small after three red scares, assassinations, mass-incarceration of prominent figures, etc.; so leftist ideas are suppressed, difficult >
@Tattie to find here, and people who grew up in the propaganda were given no tools to go find them or learn more.
The fascists have taken advantage of this to recruit people to the current fascist movement, while the state continues to try to suppress the left (often violently), and is already working on buildng a fourth red scare after the recent DSA wins.
Left orgs and folks *are* trying to spread alternatives, but, it's an uphill battle against a state that >
@Tattie has a *lot* of practice crushing leftist movements, and has a huge amount of surveillance and control infrastructure to wield against them - which leaves a lot of people who don't fall into the fascist side left floating in a nihilistic void, because the propagnda is starting to break, but, part of the propagnda is to hide alternatives, and the alternatives are actively suppressed when they start to gain traction.
@miss_rodent would it follow then that promulgating alternatives would be one of the most important acts of resistance you could participate in?
@Tattie Yeah, and to be clear I agree with your point that it's important to have a vision of the future, this was mainly meant as added context for what is going on here to feed that nihilistic streak, and why the negative/nihilistic voices are so common (and loud) compared to like... those of us who have some idea where we want to be going.
I don't know how to answer this. There *are* good ppl who are standing up, but there are also awful folks who seem to delight in this horror show. Maybe the largest percent are still going about their lives, somehow oblivious, which is beyond frustrating. I often think it would be better to break up. Although the former USSR is still in a lot of misery, not sure how we'd avoid that fate. My state is big enough to weather it, but others might struggle.
@crcollins I feel it's pretty normal and indeed desirable for the majority of people to be going about their lives. In the short to medium term, the less that's disrupted, the better. Food still needs to be grown, things to be built, records to be kept. States, being fairly autonomous, could keep going if the central government collapses. What then? What immediate reforms and reparations should be made? How should the structure of society evolve over the longer term?
See, this is where I'm clueless. My personal outlook is anti-capitalism, but I doubt most folks here would agree. I'd like to see people held responsible & reparations made to those who survive the damn concentration camps & their families. And, I get your point, but there's something ghoulish about going about one's business in the face of all this. I do it too, of course, but I try to do more. I don't know, this feels too big to just "move on."