What is “Un-American”?

We must acknowledge America’s history of state authoritarianism and racial violence – but also dare to claim its aspirational tradition of egalitarian democracy. Let’s Make MAGA un-American, finally.

By Thomas Zimmer, February 15, 2026

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“This is Un-American. This is not who we are.”

We have all heard these phrases many times. From politicians, journalists, friends, neighbors… I am sure many of us will have expressed a similar sentiment ourselves at some point in some form or context.

It certainly has been a constant refrain throughout the Trump era. Outside of the MAGA Right, the assault on the Capitol on January 6, for instance, was widely described as “fundamentally un-American” (Öffnet in neuem Fenster); and the lawless violence committed by masked agents of the state terrorizing the people of Minnesota, this “un-American overreach” (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) of an authoritarian government, has often elicited a similar response in mainstream circles.

It is striking how much this lament is a recurring theme in the American political discourse. It is an indication of how deeply ingrained in the country’s collective imagination certain ideas about the “soul of the nation” (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) are: For something to be “un-American” in the way the term is usually deployed (rather than just wrong, illegal, or immoral), it must violate an essence defined by a set of ideals and values, something that is non-negotiable as a tenet of what “America” is and what it means to be “American”: A supposedly eternal commitment to liberty and freedom, to democracy based on the notion that “all men are created equal.”

The reality of U.S. history, society, and politics has never been aligned with such ideals, of course. As a result, racism and other forms of bigotry have, certainly in the recent past, been constantly declared “un-American” while also continuously acting as organizing principles of American life; similarly, Americans have often reacted with a reflexive “This is not who we are!” to violent abuses of state power at home and abroad while those continued to shape the nation and its place in the world.

As the “Not who we are” lament reached its latest crescendo after the murder of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, the critique of this particular way of metabolizing the stark discrepancy between ideal and reality also grew louder. At the risk of paying too much attention to social media: There was a lot of angry shouting in my Bluesky circles towards the end of January, with some people expressing their exasperation with what they saw as a form of ignorant, complacent, and self-congratulatory mythologizing of U.S. history, even declaring all the talk about ICE and Border Patrol violence as “un-American” as an outrageous form of gaslighting. Meanwhile, others dismissed this line of criticism since it seemed obvious, to them, that declaring racialized state violence “un-American” was a form of aspirational speech – not an attempt to whitewash history, but to remind the nation that it should finally live up to the ideals that have so prominently shaped its collective imagination.

(I have decided not to link to specific participants in this debate, by the way, as I would rather focus on the bigger questions surrounding this online spat and have no interest in getting into a social media confrontation with any particular people. But if you are interested, you’ll find plenty of examples easily enough if you simply type “This is un-American” into the Bluesky search bar, as I have done here (Öffnet in neuem Fenster); you’ll also see that elected officials have weighed in on both sides of this debate, either calling the paramilitary occupation of Minneapolis “un-American” (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) or insisting that it was, in fact, “deeply American.” (Öffnet in neuem Fenster))

I don’t really care about this particular round of social media discussion. But it did trigger something in me – or rather relate to something I have been thinking about a lot lately: About more or less helpful ways to interrogate U.S. history, learn from it, bring it to bear in our current moment; about how to mobilize aspects of the nation’s collective imagination in support of a vision of democratic pluralism rather than, as the Right does, in service of faux-patriotic, exclusionary “real Americanism”?

My point is this: What the MAGA government is doing does not constitute some accidental departure from an otherwise heroic democratic tradition. America has a long tradition of racial violence perpetrated and condoned by the state, of state authoritarianism in service of a white supremacist vision and an exclusionary ethno-nationalist understanding of who gets to belong. There exists a willfully ignorant, self-exculpatory exceptionalism that mythologizes U.S. history into an easily digestible, triumphant tale that is as ahistorical as it is politically useless. Worse than useless, actually, as it engenders a self-satisfied, naïve, and dangerously unimaginative complacency that has for too long hampered the (small-d) democratic response to the radicalizing threat of rightwing authoritarianism. We should have discarded whatever notion of “It cannot happen here” was still floating around a long time ago.

But to insist that America – its history, identity, and political tradition – is solely defined by these continuities of racist authoritarianism and white patriarchal domination is equally ahistorical. From the start, the American experiment was also shaped by an egalitarian promise, by an aspiration to realize the idea that “all people are created equal” in a pluralistic democracy. That aspirational tradition isn’t any less authentically American than the idea of a white Christian “homeland” defined by hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and wealth. That is the thing about our existential crisis: It is the latest iteration of a conflict between two fundamentally incompatible visions of what “America” is supposed to be that has defined the nation since its inception.

There has never been a consensual answer to the question of “who we are.” The definition of what is (un-)“American” is constantly in flux, endlessly contested – it exists in eternal tension between past and present, between reality and aspiration. It is a constant struggle over the national story, national identity, the boundaries of the nation and who gets to define them – over the ideas and values that should guide “America.”

The MAGA Right claims that “real America” was only ever intended to be, only ever existed, and therefore must continue to exist as a white Christian ethno-state. To renounce America’s aspirational tradition of egalitarian pluralism as pointless, superficial, and purely hypocritical is to help them perpetuate the idea that the injustices of the past and present, which they idolize as a manifestation of the “natural order,” represent the one true essence of the nation.

If we can get rid of the willfully naïve exceptionalism that glorified America as inherently benevolent, virtuous, and free, let us not replace it with its dark mirror equivalent that only serves to confirm MAGA’s tale – but with an aspirational creed, fueled by an acknowledgment of injustice, as our common understanding. America’s egalitarian promise, although never realized yet, is as authentically American as anything the Trumpists could ever muster.

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Traditions of authoritarianism

In June 2021, leading Never Trumper Bill Kristol posted on ex-Twitter (Öffnet in neuem Fenster): “We’re the world’s oldest democracy. It’s hard for us Americans to take threats of coups and even the dangers of authoritarianism seriously. But it’s time to do so.”

I’m not bringing this up to single out Kristol, specifically: I wish I had a dollar for every time I have encountered versions of this argument in conversations with journalists, politicians, and private acquaintances (and Kristol, at least, acknowledged it was high time to abandon these ideas and has certainly acted accordingly since).

Such notions reflect a deep-seated mythology of American exceptionalism. In its purest form, it holds that Americans are essentially immune to authoritarianism of any kind – the “soul of the nation” won’t allow it, or the country’s DNA, or the freedom-loving national character… The political mainstream has generally – or at least rhetorically – moved to a slightly more nuanced understanding of the American story. But exceptionalism lingers. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been approached by American media with a request to talk about the threat of authoritarianism because “You, as a German” understand what “We,” because of America’s supposedly stable democratic tradition, can only struggle to grasp. 

These are the central themes of the exceptionalist mythology that has long blunted the response to the Trumpist threat: “We” have always been a democracy; therefore authoritarianism cannot thrive here; and in any case, “we” simply don’t have any experience with how to handle it if it ever arose.

But the defining question in U.S. history has always been: Who is “We”? For most of America’s existence, and until quite recently, those who lived within the nation’s borders and happened not to be white men had plenty of experience with state authoritarianism. Significant parts of the country existed first as a slavocracy and then, after a brief interlude during Reconstruction, as a one-party apartheid regime during the so-called Jim Crow era. During the same period, Native Americans were disenfranchised, dispossessed, and persecuted by the American state. It is certainly true that even before the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, the American political system was fairly democratic, at least by contemporaneous international comparison, if a person happened to be a white Christian man – but it was something else entirely if they were not.

This is not some ancient history. There are a lot of people who voted in the last presidential election who remember disenfranchisement and state-enforced racial segregation all too well as the defining features of their own youth. Nor was American authoritarianism ever just a regional issue, it was never confined to “just” the South. Slave-holding elites exerted a dominating influence over the Republic before the Civil War, and Southern segregationists were immensely powerful in national politics until the 1960s. Moreover, there is a strong domestic tradition of white nationalist, white supremacist extremism across the country. The Ku Klux Klan was very much a national organization in the 1920s; 20,000 people attended a Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City in February 1939; in the 1960s, George Wallace quickly realized that his fight against racial equality resonated with white voters far beyond the South; and a well-established far-right grassroots activism has shaped political culture on the ground across post-war America.

Put differently, Trumpism as an authoritarian project fueled by white male grievance stands in continuity with several key strands of the American political tradition: With a conception of “freedom” defined as the power to curtail the freedom of others – an idea invoked by white settlers, apologists of slavery, and opponents of Black civil rights as justification for their quest to dominate; with an aggressive minoritarianism that claims the right to overrule the political process, ignore election results, and nullify the law should the prerogative of a certain “worthy” (white, male) minority ever be threatened – an ideology that fueled the secession of the Southern States in defense of their right to enslave others; an exclusionary blood-and-soil nationalism that animated nativist movements, America Firsters, and paleo-conservative thinkers all the way to Stephen Miller and Donald Trump.

Visions of democratic progress

I generally believe a more critical understanding of U.S. history has taken root outside of hardcore rightwing circles: A decade of Donald Trump dominating American politics has soured most intellectually mature people on the notion that all you need to know about America’s past is that it was gloriously heroic. My sense is that any mainstream audience is a lot more open today than it was even ten years ago to grappling in earnest with the fact that the United States had no reasonable claim to be a functioning liberal democracy in the modern sense before the Voting Rights Act of 1965, that until then America had been quite democratic by contemporaneous standards if you happened to be a white man – but something else entirely if you were not. 

However, in the established mainstream imaginary, 1965 came to mark a moment of democratic re-birth that supposedly set the country on an entirely different path. A story emerged that combined a relatively unsparing critique of American history pre-1965 with a nostalgic insistence that the country left that history behind with the civil rights revolution of the 1960s. It was a kind of updated version of the liberal consensus of the immediate post-1945 era: All was not well yet, but the country was getting there; the system was fundamentally healthy and would be able to deal, in good time, with whatever vestiges of injustice still plagued the nation. In this tale, the moral arc of the universe was bending towards justice, and the country was irreversibly moving towards “post-racial” democracy. Such a framework of liberal progress made it easier for people to discard the continuities of racial violence and state authoritarianism – to regard racist police violence as an unfortunate aberration rather than a defining feature, for instance; or to largely ignore the inhumanity of America’s immigration system and the staunchly lawless, violent machinery that was set up to impose it.

Unfortunately, the passing of the civil rights legislation in the 1960s did not actually usher in democratic consensus. A hierarchical ethno-state dominated by white Christians or a pluralistic democracy with sincere egalitarian aspirations? That conflict was not resolved in 1776. It wasn’t settled in 1865. And it remained an open question after 1965 as well.

The forces who rejected the vision of egalitarian pluralism were not confined and condemned to an existence on the fringes of society. They have instead engaged in a comprehensive counter-mobilization. The Civil Rights Act not as the culmination of noble egalitarian ambitions but as a fateful turn in the wrong direction (Öffnet in neuem Fenster): That is the defining position on today’s political Right far beyond the rabid MAGA base. The Trumpists didn’t depart from a previously stable democratic consensus. They represent the radical wing of a rightwing coalition that was never on board with egalitarian principles and democratic pluralism to begin with.

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Authoritarianism rising

The past thirteen months have done a lot to dispel whatever notion of “It cannot happen here” mainstream opinion was still clinging to. Perhaps, if we allow ourselves that little bit of optimism, this might ultimately constitute a lasting legacy of Trumpism? Early on, as America’s elites and elite civic institutions displayed a pervasive tendency to acquiesce and align themselves with the regime, as it seemed the vaunted guardrails were comprehensively failing and American democracy was proving a lot less resilient than most observers had expected, Americans turned to those who had studied (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) the rise of authoritarianism elsewhere to explain what was going on. Scholars who had devoted their lives to studying autocracies around the world in a comparative perspective – people like Steven Levitzky, Lucan Way, and Daniel Ziblatt (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) – rose to the status of leading public intellectuals. That is a) good, because these are serious, smart, insightful people, and b) diagnostically interesting, because it tells us something about changes in the collective imagination. We now routinely apply insights that emerged from this comparative work to the situation in the United States: Like the concept of “competitive authoritarianism” to describe a regime that exists somewhere between democracy and full-blown autocracy; or the idea of a “playbook” authoritarian movements tend to follow upon taking power. The rise of such concepts signals how much we have moved away from a purely exceptionalist understanding of America’s past and present. Why would anything that happened in Russia, Hungary, Turkey, or India be of relevance to the situation in the United States if the nation was inherently different from other countries and its “soul” immune to the rise of authoritarianism? The idea that there is something to be learned from the experience of these societies builds on a repudiation of American exceptionalism; in a relatively short span of time, we went from “It cannot happen here” to “We better start paying attention to what’s been happening elsewhere because that is exactly what is happening here.” I’d call that progress.

Dark exceptionalism is bad, too

At this point, however, I do believe we need to be careful not to let the pendulum swing too far in the other direction – and replace one form of exceptionalism with another. A dark exceptionalism seems to be on the rise, no less essentialist than what it seeks to replace: Whereas the traditional exceptionalist tale presented America as intrinsically good, noble, and democratic, this mirror narrative views the nation as inherently incapable of anything but hierarchical violence. There is indeed an eternal “soul of the nation,” it seems to proclaim, only it is not defined by an unconditional love for liberty, freedom, and justice, but by a brutal commitment to dispossess, dominate, and subjugate. There never was democracy in these United States – and there never will be.

I believe such dark mirror exceptionalism is deeply mistaken. It seems almost certainly counterproductive politically. It’s hard to see how such a message should motivate and mobilize enough people to go out into the streets, organize, protest, and resist? But I admit I am not a strategist. As a historian, however, I do want to caution that such essentialist notions of national character are fundamentally ahistorical.

Most importantly, we must distinguish between acknowledging traditions of racial violence and state authoritarianism on the one hand – and reducing the nation’s history to those traditions on the other. “American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it,” James Baldwin declared in a speech (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) he delivered in October 1963. It is among the most profoundly true and insightful things anyone has ever said about the United States. Anyone who works and thinks about American history should adopt it as a guiding paradigm. And I believe it can also help us navigate this acutely perilous political moment in which we find ourselves right now. More various, more beautiful, more terrible. We need to grapple with all of these conflicting dimensions.

A profound – and oftentimes violent – division over the very nature of what “America” is supposed to be has been the historical norm. The American experiment, if that is the right term, was always shaped by incompatible visions, ideas, and traditions. Competing forms of nationalism: One conceived of America as a credal nation. Anyone can be an American, in this understanding, as long as they subscribe to certain ideals and aspirations: Freedom, liberty, and that “all men are created equal.” Another rejected the aspirational creed as the basis of the nation and instead defined America in racial and religious terms, as an ethno-state in which wealthy white Christians deserve to rule and have a right to draw the boundaries of who gets to be “American.”

It is simply not true that the latter, with all the brutal subjugation it fueled and legitimized, is the sole true political tradition while the former is just hypocritical theater intended to distract us from that reality. That is certainly not how those who, throughout American history, appealed to the aspirations of freedom and equality saw it – those who worked tirelessly to make the country into the land it never had been yet, by reminding the nation of its egalitarian promise. Those who fought to abolish slavery and free themselves and their fellow human beings; those who reconceptualized the nation in the wake of the Civil War by amending the constitution so profoundly that it constituted a “second founding” (Öffnet in neuem Fenster); the women who demanded the right to participate in the political process as equals; those who protested against the injustice of racial segregation and marched for their right to vote; and yes, those who took to the streets in Minneapolis in solidarity with their neighbors, no matter what the color of their skin may be or what gods they may worship.

They all took inspiration from the egalitarian promise which they insisted was as real and authentic an American political tradition as anything the Trumpists can deploy. I believe it should inspire us too. All people are created equal: A society in which the status of the individual is no longer shaped by their race, gender, religion, or wealth. Isn’t that the grandest idea humanity has ever come up with?

Who gets to be a patriot?

Who gets to tell the national story? Who gets to define national identity – and thereby determine the boundaries of what counts as “American” and who belongs in America? The Right understands precisely that this is what the political conflict is all about. And no matter how much the Democratic consultant class insists we should all ignore what they discard as “culture war issues”: There is no way around this fight. It has to be fought, and if democracy is to prevail, it has to be won.

It is time, as grandiose as that may sound, to reclaim patriotism from the Right. Too long have rightwingers been allowed to drape their grievances and bigotries in the nation’s collective symbols, to call on the patriotic mythology of the nation in order to pretend that their desire to dominate is somehow an expression of the timeless essence of the nation. The American “Left,” very broadly defined, has struggled to contest this terrain. I count myself among those who are – rightfully, I believe! – wary of any political project that wraps itself in the flag, of anything that could, perhaps even unwittingly, help sanitize the nation’s history and legitimize the destructive forces of nationalism. But this reluctance, the tendency to abdicate and surrender the field of patriotism to the Right has allowed a bunch of ethno-nationalist extremists to present themselves as the guardians of the national mythos.

This is one reason why the “No Kings” protests were so effective. The slogan, in all its simplicity, referenced a founding myth, now mobilized in defense of democratic self-government – not in service of perpetuating lazy, self-satisfied exceptionalist ideas but as an affirmation of democratic aspirations, even if America has certainly never fully lived up to them yet.

Such efforts to activate the national mythos in defense of democratic pluralism will at times feel clunky and “cringe.” But we should not shy away from invoking that part of the American story: As a reminder to ourselves and the authoritarians who control the government that their claim to be the sole representatives of “authentic” Americanism has no historical basis, that there is an American tradition of egalitarian pluralism that puts their vicious, exclusionary domination fantasies to shame.

I often think back to a remarkable moment in early August 2024, during a democratic campaign rally in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Three members of the band Bon Iver, whose frontman Justin Vernon grew up and still lives in Eau Claire, played a rendition of “Battle Cry of Freedom” (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) – one of the most popular, feistiest Civil War songs, an anthem of abolitionism, written in 1862.

“We’re gonna close out with a nice, old patriotic song that’s been roaming around in my head these last few months,” Vernon said, before singing: (Öffnet in neuem Fenster)

Oh we’ll rally round the flag, boys, we’ll rally once again,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom,
And we’ll rally from the hillside, we’ll gather from the plain,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom.

Then Vernon launched into the chorus:

The Union forever, hurrah! boys, hurrah!
Down with the traitors, up with the stars;
While we rally round the flag, boys, we rally once again,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom!

Vernon then sang the third verse – “And although he may be poor, no man (a variation from the original ‘he’) shall be a slave” – before closing with the chorus one more time. “Shouting the battle cry of freedom.”

I know everything to do with the cursed 2024 election is anathema to a lot of people on the liberal-left. And believe me, I don’t bring up this moment to re-litigate the Harris campaign – but because it was, although fleeting, driven by what I believe is the right instinct: An urge to finally, aggressively assert a different patriotism, one that opposes the Right’s claim to the red, white, and blue. We are the Union, we represent a nation that is defined by egalitarian ideas of multiracial, democratic pluralism – and we are willing to defend it against those who betray and sully those ideas.

I thought about this moment when I saw video footage of an anti-ICE protest in Minneapolis in late January centered around clergy coming together to sing “Down to the River to Pray.” (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) I’m assuming many people will have been introduced to this song, like I was, via a memorable scene in the Coen brothers movie “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) that came out in 2000. But it’s actually an abolitionist song from the 1840s (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) that was also sung among enslaved people. As the historian Brad Proctor noted (Öffnet in neuem Fenster), commenting on the protest in Minneapolis: “The song exists in the historical record as history of defiance to slave catchers, to family separation, to immoral detention and capture and forced migration.”

What could be more appropriate as a historical reference for this moment, as the nation must now decide which of these American traditions will get to shape the country going forward. We must never forget that the Right’s vision of white Christian patriarchal domination is indeed deeply rooted in U.S. history. To counter and overcome it, all those who want these United States to finally become the land it never has been yet should take heart from that other American tradition, that gloriously democratic promise of egalitarian pluralism.

Let’s Make MAGA un-American, finally.

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