Land of the Free, Home of the Hoarders
A searing indictment of American exceptionalism, this essay exposes how the U.S. hoards joy, freedom, and opportunity under the guise of patriotism — at the cost of global dignity and domestic sanity.
Nationalism vs. Patriotism: A Hijacked Identity
Patriotism is love. Nationalism is supremacy. Somewhere between the end of the Cold War and the dawn of MAGA hats, the American identity morphed from one of civic pride into one of cultural chauvinism. Our national mythos — built on Ellis Island imagery and immigrant grit — has curdled into a gated fortress wrapped in an American flag.
Political scientist Francis Fukuyama observed this transformation, noting that “nationalism, with its dark undertones of ethnic and racial superiority,” has increasingly replaced “a more benign form of national identity” in American politics (Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, 2018). This shift didn’t happen overnight. It festered through decades of culture wars, economic anxiety, and political polarization.
Today, patriotism is no longer about shared values or democratic ideals; it’s a loyalty test. The phrase “real American” functions as a code: white, English-speaking, native-born. Immigration policy reflects this ideology. From the Muslim Ban to Title 42 expulsions during the pandemic, American nationalism has dressed itself in legality while carrying the same old xenophobic baggage. We’re not just protecting borders but enforcing a hierarchy of worth.
I witness this hierarchy play out even in my own family. My sister, who married into wealth, openly admits she doesn’t want our immigration policies to change because ‘they benefit her.’ Her words haunt me — this casual acknowledgment that as long as policies hurt others while helping wealthy whites like herself, she sees no problem. This isn’t abstract politics; it’s the raw confession of privilege I hear across my own dinner table. Her perspective has made it nearly impossible to maintain a close relationship with her — we rarely speak anymore, not because she’s ignorant, but because she’s entitled.
My partner is Puerto Rican, and my sister’s laissez-faire attitude toward policies that dehumanize people like her is deeply hurtful to us both. As long as this mentality persists — this willingness to accept others’ suffering for personal comfort — true freedom remains unattainable for all of us. The poison of nationalism doesn’t just corrupt institutions; it corrupts families. It’s a personal pain that many of us carry, a pain that should invoke empathy in all of us.
When President Trump implemented the ‘Muslim Ban’ in 2017, it affected approximately 135 million people from seven predominantly Muslim countries (Pew Research Center, 2017). Later, under Title 42, over 2.4 million migrants were expelled at the southern border without due process between March 2020 and May 2023 (American Immigration Council, 2023). These statistics, these human lives treated as disposable by my government, should not just horrify us, but also enrage us at the injustice.
And it’s not just policy. It’s culture. It’s the vitriol at school board meetings, the harassment of Asian Americans during COVID-19, the dog whistles on primetime news. Between March 2020 and June 2021, Stop AAPI Hate documented over 9,000 incidents of anti-Asian harassment and violence across the United States (Stop AAPI Hate, 2021). These weren’t random acts of hate but expressions of a nationalist ideology that designates some Americans as more “real” than others.
American nationalism is not simply an internal poison — it is the outward signal that this country believes its own citizens are more deserving of happiness than anyone else on Earth.
As an American, this is not just infuriating — it is galling. It makes me feel like a prisoner in the very place that claims to be the beacon of liberty. The weight of this hypocrisy makes me want to leave, to abandon ship. But even that escape hatch is welded shut. The cost of relocation, of uprooting a family from this gilded trap, is now nearly insurmountable. A 2022 study by the Migration Policy Institute found that emigrating from the United States costs an average middle-class family between $20,000 and $40,000 in moving expenses, visa fees, and initial settlement costs — not including the potentially permanent loss of Social Security benefits and pension access. Because being an American is no longer just oppressive — it is economically suffocating. We are stuck in a system that sells freedom at a markup few can afford. The economic burden of being an American is a weight that we all carry, a weight that should make us all feel the gravity of the situation.
Exporting Pain: The Global Fallout of American Self-Interest
America doesn’t just hoard resources; it exports misery.
Our foreign policy is sold as peacekeeping but often acts as fire-starting. Iraq. Afghanistan. Libya. Military interventions that destabilized entire regions, creating refugee crises we then refuse to help resolve. The hypocrisy is stunning: we ignite the flames, then bolt the doors on our way out.
The Brown University Costs of War Project estimates that post-9/11 wars have displaced at least 38 million people across eight countries (Costs of War Project, 2021). Yet the United States, despite being a primary catalyst for these displacements, admitted fewer than 85,000 refugees in 2016 — a number that plummeted to just 11,814 by 2020 (Refugee Processing Center, 2021). I find myself shouting at news reports, asking how we can sleep at night knowing what we’ve done.
Trade policies fare no better. We subsidize our agriculture, flood developing markets with cheap exports, and gut local economies. American agricultural subsidies totaled approximately $20 billion annually between 2018–2020 (USDA Economic Research Service, 2021), allowing U.S. farmers to export crops at artificially low prices. A 2018 study in the Journal of International Development documented how these subsidized exports contributed to the displacement of approximately 1.5 million Mexican corn farmers following NAFTA’s implementation.
American pharmaceutical companies lobby to block generic medication production abroad. In 2016 alone, the pharmaceutical industry spent $152 million lobbying against policies that would have expanded access to generic medications globally (Center for Responsive Politics, 2017). This lobbying directly contributes to preventable deaths; the WHO estimates that approximately 2 million lives could be saved annually if affordable generic medications were more widely available in developing countries (WHO, 2020).
Tech giants extract data from foreign populations while dodging taxes and regulations. A 2021 Tax Justice Network report found that U.S. tech companies shift approximately $90 billion in profits to tax havens annually, depriving nations around the world of roughly $15 billion in tax revenue. Capitalism — the true engine of our nationalism — demands growth, no matter who gets trampled underfoot.
Climate change offers the clearest indictment. With just 5% of the world’s population, we produce roughly 25% of its emissions. Yet we delay, deny, and deregulate, prioritizing profit over planetary survival. Our refusal to act isn’t just negligence; it’s violence disguised as inertia. The Climate Accountability Institute found that just 20 fossil fuel companies — including American giants ExxonMobil and Chevron — have contributed 35% of all energy-related carbon dioxide and methane emissions worldwide since 1965 (Climate Accountability Institute, 2019).
I feel the weight of this knowledge every time I drive my car or turn on my air conditioning — not just personal guilt, but rage at a system designed to make sustainable choices nearly impossible for average Americans. We’re trapped in infrastructure that demands environmentally destructive behaviors, then told our individual choices are to blame.
The Hoarding of Happiness: A Moral Audit
We talk a lot about the “American Dream” but rarely ask: at whose expense?
The U.S. immigration system is a fortress designed not just to screen for threats but also to ration opportunity. Quotas, backlogs, and bureaucratic cruelty aren’t glitches — they’re features. We sell the idea of freedom, but only to those who can afford the legal fees, survive the vetting, and align with our racial and cultural ideals.
The backlog for family-sponsored visas now exceeds 4 million people, with wait times for some countries stretching beyond 20 years (State Department Visa Bulletin, 2023). The average cost of legal immigration — including application fees, medical examinations, and attorney costs — ranges from $4,000 to $12,000 per person (National Immigration Forum, 2020). These financial barriers effectively screen for wealth rather than “merit” or “need.”
Happiness isn’t just denied through policy — it’s colonized through culture. Hollywood exports a singular vision of joy: wealth, whiteness, and winning. American media accounts for approximately 35% of the global entertainment market (Motion Picture Association, 2021), allowing American cultural values and aesthetic standards to dominate international discourse. American tech platforms dictate how happiness is quantified: likes, follows, and curated perfection. Facebook (Meta) and its subsidiaries alone have over 3.6 billion monthly active users worldwide (Meta Annual Report, 2022). Our cultural imperialism flattens global diversity into a chase for a dream that was never universally accessible.
We’ve built a nation that treats joy as a zero-sum commodity. If we have it, you can’t. If you gain it, we must be losing something.
Meanwhile, we at home are suffocating on the fumes of this broken promise. We pay exorbitant costs for healthcare, housing, and education — while being told it’s the price of freedom. Americans spend twice as much on healthcare as citizens of other developed nations, yet experience worse outcomes (Commonwealth Fund, 2021). The average American college graduate now carries approximately $37,000 in student loan debt (Federal Reserve, 2021). It’s not freedom. It’s indenture wrapped in a flag.
I’ve watched friends choose between medication and rent, postpone starting families because childcare costs more than their mortgage, work three jobs and still fall behind. The American Dream has become just that — a dream, disconnected from waking reality. And the rage this gap produces isn’t directed at the systems causing it, but at immigrants, at the poor, at anyone who can be scapegoated while the wealthy extract ever more profit from our collective struggle.
Who Gets to Pursue Happiness?
“Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” A beautiful phrase. However, in practice, America treats this not as a universal right but as a national privilege. We worship the Founders’ words but violate their spirit at every turn.
Political philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues in her work “Creating Capabilities” (2011) that a just society must ensure every person has access to specific fundamental capabilities — including bodily health, emotional well-being, and control over one’s environment. By this standard, the United States systematically denies these capabilities not only to those beyond its borders but increasingly to many within them.
If the pursuit of happiness is a right, then hoarding it is a crime. If freedom is universal, then nationalism is theft.
The villain here isn’t just government policy. It’s the ideology that capitalism is freedom, that profit is a virtue, and that being born on U.S. soil entitles you to more dignity than someone born in Guatemala, Syria, or Sudan. A 2019 United Nations Human Development Report found that a child born in the United States is 50 times more likely to reach adulthood than a child born in Sierra Leone and will have access to 420 times more resources throughout their lifetime. This accident of birth geography has become the primary determinant of human flourishing.
American nationalism has metastasized into a belief that our joy is worth more than yours. It isn’t. And until we dismantle the systems — economic, cultural, and military — that enforce that belief, we will remain not the land of the free but the empire of the entitled.
The Crisis of American Identity
Millions of Americans wake up feeling like strangers in their own country every day. A 2023 Gallup poll found that 67% of Americans believe the country is heading in the wrong direction — a figure transcending partisan lines. This isn’t just policy disagreement; it’s existential alienation.
I am one of these Americans. I was raised on civic mythology — on “amber waves of grain” and “liberty and justice for all.” I believed in an America that stood for something greater than itself. Now I watch that America recede in the rearview mirror, replaced by armed gunmen at the Capitol, by children in cages at the border, by an economic system that grinds human potential into quarterly profits.
In “Bowling Alone” (2000), Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam documented how American social cohesion began unraveling decades ago. He couldn’t predict how this unraveling would accelerate in the age of social media and algorithmic division. A 2021 study by the Pew Research Center found that Americans are now more politically polarized than at any point since the Civil War, with 40% of both Republicans and Democrats viewing members of the opposing party as “morally depraved.”
This division isn’t accidental. It’s the product of deliberate efforts to fracture collective identity and replace it with tribal nationalism. Media scholar Yochai Benkler’s research at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center has documented how right-wing media ecosystems have systematically promoted nationalist ideology while delegitimizing alternative visions of American identity (Benkler et al., “Network Propaganda,” 2018).
I feel the weight of this fracture daily, in grocery stores where masks became political statements, in family gatherings where certain topics must be avoided, and in the gnawing sense that my “fellow Americans” and I no longer share a common reality, let alone common values.
Resistance in the Age of the Polycrisis
Climate catastrophe. Democratic backsliding. Pandemic aftershocks. Economic inequality. Digital surveillance. We’re not facing discrete problems — we’re facing what environmental scholar Thomas Homer-Dixon calls a “polycrisis,” where multiple systems fail simultaneously, each amplifying the others.
This avalanche of crises produces what sociologist Émile Durkheim termed “anomie” — a state of normlessness where traditional social bonds disintegrate. A 2022 survey by the American Psychological Association found that 27% of Americans report being “so stressed they cannot function on most days.” We’re not just politically divided; we’re psychologically overwhelmed.
I find myself paralyzed by the scale of these crises. Even basic civic engagement feels increasingly dangerous or futile. Protesting carries the risk of violence or arrest — over 14,000 people were arrested during the 2020 racial justice protests alone (Bellingcat, 2020). Voting feels like shouting into the void as gerrymandering and voter suppression reach unprecedented levels — the Brennan Center for Justice documented at least 29 states that enacted 42 restrictive voting laws between January 2021 and May 2023.
And economic precarity makes everything worse. America markets itself as the land of freedom, opportunity, and innovation. Yet, the lived reality creates a perfect contradiction: those most harmed by the system have the least capacity to change it. How can I donate to causes I believe in when I can barely afford rent? How do I attend protests knowing activists are being arrested, surveilled, and sometimes brutalized? The machinery of nationalism and capital has engineered a perfect trap: the “freedom” to speak without the means to be heard, the “opportunity” to vote without fair representation, and the “innovation” that surveils rather than serves. This isn’t just political disenfranchisement — it’s by design.
Every day I feel the crushing weight of knowing what’s happening but lacking the power to stop it. The 24-hour news cycle ensures we witness every injustice in real-time, yet offers no meaningful channel for response. This immobilizing overwhelm isn’t just a byproduct of our media ecosystem — it’s a feature of it. A public perpetually staggered by outrage, grief, and helplessness cannot organize effectively. This isn’t just political alienation — it’s psychological attrition, a war of emotional exhaustion where burnout becomes the ultimate form of social control.
I’ve been told, especially by older generations, that I should “zoom in” — focus on my own life and what I can control. But how can I? I’m a homosexual woman with a Latina partner. Every so-called “personal decision” we make — where to live, whether to adopt, how to navigate healthcare or safety — collides with national systems rigged against us. The larger forces aren’t abstract anymore; they show up in housing discrimination, in visa bureaucracy, in the quiet calculations we make when deciding which neighborhoods feel safe. The suggestion to focus small feels not just naïve, but cruel. There’s no zooming in when the macro invades your micro at every level.
Letting Go of the American Illusion
If American nationalism is a perversion of patriotism, then it’s time to abandon the illusion that this country can be redeemed by appeals to principle. The idea that we can vote or critique our way back to decency assumes there’s still a shared moral center to return to. There isn’t.
Political theologian Cornel West once said that genuine patriotism requires “democratic criticism” — loving a country enough to hold it accountable. But what if that love has been unrequited for too long? What if the accountability never comes, because the system isn’t broken — it’s functioning exactly as designed?
What would resistance look like, not in policy memos or protest signs, but in disengagement from the myth entirely? Refusing to buy in. Refusing to romanticize. Refusing to keep paying moral rent to a nation that’s foreclosed on its soul.
Author James Baldwin once insisted on his right to criticize America out of love. But love must have boundaries. And if we truly believe in justice, then we must recognize when loyalty becomes complicity. There is no salvaging a structure built on stolen land, stolen labor, and a stolen future — not until we stop mistaking the architecture of oppression for something worth preserving.
This isn’t pessimism. It’s clarity. The sooner we stop investing our time, our hope, and our humanity into a machine built to extract all three, the sooner we can begin to imagine something else — something better, something free.
Because happiness is not a finite resource, but America’s leader treat it like a private vault. Because freedom hoarded is freedom denied. And because the longer we pretend this empire deserves our belief, the longer it will feed on it.
America is not sleeping. It’s feeding. And you are the fuel.
If this shook something loose in you — good. I write to expose, unsettle, and rebuild.
Read more stories that challenge the myth of American exceptionalism and dig into the systems we’re told not to question. Follow me on Medium for more.
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