“The emperor only values his throne and will do anything to protect it, while all others are mere resources to be exploited,” writes Aleksandar Đokić, a Serbian political scientist and former lecturer at RUDN University in Moscow. “In other words, the Russian empire is knowingly throwing its own people, people of its own nation, into a meatgrinder, a virtual abyss.”
Okay, here’s why it upsets me so much when people call the US an “empire”. There’s a cold civil war in this country right now about who we’re supposed to be. Should America be a multicultural, inclusive democracy trying to atone for the sins of the past and build a better, kinder future, or is it an imperialistic ethnostate built on white supremacy?
When people write America off as always having been the latter, and act like it’s doomed to always be the latter, they’re effectively giving up on the fight. They’re basically saying they agree with the far right, their vision of the country is correct. Which gives them more power.
There’s so much good here, mixed in with the bad. This country has made incredible progress towards becoming a more perfect union. Sure, there’s still huge, glaring ways we fail to live up to that promise, still a huge amount of work to be done. But looking back at how far we’ve come, I really do believe we can make it.
But that’s not going to happen if the far right smothers democracy in its crib right now. And so that’s why I push back against people writing America off as an “empire”: because it could easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy. And I really don’t want to live in that world.