America, Actually: The Country Worth Fighting For

Here is what we've been sold: government is the problem. Taxes are theft. Washington is corrupt. And if you love your country, you should want it off your back. Here is who sold it: a 50-year, billionaire-funded project to make sure that the only entity capable of checking concentrated wealth — the government — couldn't. The anti-government feeling isn't wrong. The target is.

Nancy MacLean documented the actual playbook: Democracy in Chains traces the academic and political infrastructure built by oligarchs to make government unable to act in the public interest — and reveals exactly how the "freedom" they're selling is freedom from accountability, not freedom for you. Then sit with what that's done: Arlie Russell Hochschild went to Louisiana bayou country and found people whose land had been poisoned by petrochemical companies — people who love their country fiercely and who had been convinced that the government trying to regulate the poison was the enemy. The grief in Strangers in Their Own Land is real. So is the misdirection. Then resist — Paul Beatty's The Sellout puts the entire performance of American values on trial with a satirist's precision and a comedian's nerve, and refuses to let anyone off the hook. Then build: Robert Reich's The Common Good makes the simple, radical argument that a country is a collective enterprise, that we owe each other something, and that government — when it actually works — is how we deliver on that. The thing to hate isn't government. It's the theft of it.

Love your country enough to fight for what it was supposed to be.