The US democracy sold as pure, moral and unprecedented is increasingly under lens. Behind the facade of democratic virtue lies a history of conquest, slavery and imperialism; carefully constructed narratives masking brutal truths for 250 years are now crumbling
We have been deceived — again and again — into believing that US democracy was born as a noble product of collective will. The story handed down to us is that George Washington, in a moment of virtuous restraint, rejected Colonel Lewis Nicola’s suggestion to crown him king, choosing instead the path of liberty and republicanism. This moment is celebrated as the moral genesis of American democracy. But 250 years on, the illusion fractures under the weight of historical reality.
What has been marketed to the world as democracy is, in fact, a meticulously engineered architecture of power: elitist at home, imperial abroad. The so-called “rules-based order” championed by American diplomats is not a codified universalism — it is an ideological cudgel wielded only when convenient, a system of selective legality designed to mask naked geopolitical aggression.
America’s origin myth is steeped not in egalitarianism but in extermination, slavery, and expansionism. The Declaration of Independence, crafted by men who themselves owned human beings, is less a document of freedom than a philosophical smokescreen. The economic engine of the new republic ran on the backs of enslaved Africans — auctioned, whipped, raped, and bred like livestock. The foundational wealth of the United States was extracted not merely through commerce or innovation, but through racialised brutality institutionalised as law.
Simultaneously, Indigenous nations were decimated by policies so ferocious they now fall under the ambit of genocide. The Trail of Tears, initiated under Andrew Jackson, led to the deaths of thousands during forced removals. The Sand Creek Massacre (1864), the Bear River Massacre (1863), and the slaughter at Wounded Knee (1890) are but a few unambiguous testaments to settler — colonial annihilation. These were not chaotic by-products of war — they were methodical acts of ethnic cleansing, carried out under Government authority. The Indian Boarding Schools, operating well into the 20th century, functioned as laboratories of cultural erasure. Native children were stolen from their families, stripped of language and identity, and subjected to systematic abuse. Many perished. Their bodies remain buried, literally and metaphorically, in the margins of American history books.
Slavery’s formal abolition was a bait-and-switch. The 13th Amendment, often cited as a moral landmark, explicitly permits involuntary servitude “as punishment for crime.” This clause birthed the carceral leviathan that now holds more than two million people — disproportionately Black and Brown — in cages. Chain gangs were simply replaced by prison labour. Jim Crow laws mutated into mass incarceration. Democracy, in the land of its supposed origin, has been operationalised as an instrument of racial management.
Beyond its borders, the United States has imposed its will through fire and steel. Since the mid-20th century, over 800 American military bases have metastasised across the globe — encircling rivals, destabilising regions, and foreclosing sovereign futures. The map of US bombings reads like a grim eulogy for the postcolonial world: Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1945), Korea (1950-53), Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia (1964-75), Grenada (1983), Panama (1989), Iraq (1991, 2003), Yugoslavia (1999), Afghanistan (2001-2021), Libya (2011), Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan — the list is encyclopaedic, the outcomes catastrophic.
These assaults were not aberrations. They are the sinews of US foreign policy. Civilian casualties, mass displacement, decimated infrastructure — these are collateral sacrifices at the altar of American primacy. The 2003 invasion of Iraq, launched under the pretext of non-existent weapons of mass destruction, killed hundreds of thousands and unravelled an entire region. It was not just a war crime; it was an act of ontological vandalism.
Meanwhile, the CIA functioned as the state’s clandestine sword arm-executing assassinations, staging coups, and manipulating foreign Governments with pathological impunity. Operation Ajax in Iran (1953), the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in Congo (1961), the orchestration of Chile’s 1973 coup and Salvador Allende’s death, the slaughter following Suharto’s rise in Indonesia — these are not Cold War footnotes. They are the operational grammar of empire. From Latin America’s death squads to Africa’s proxy militias, the US exported death in the name of freedom, dissolving democracies while preaching democratic virtue. The façade cracked further on 22 June 2025, when the US military launched the airstrikes on alleged Iranian nuclear sites. Again, no Senate approval. Again, no UN mandate. No evidence presented, no imminent threat substantiated. Just premeditated violence delivered from above, wrapped in the rhetoric of preemption.
These violations are not the exceptions — they are the doctrine. They expose the hollow core of the “rules-based international order” that American officials regurgitate at every diplomatic summit. Where were the rules when the International Atomic Energy Agency’s findings were ignored? When do civilians become uncounted corpses? Sovereignty is sacred — until it obstructs US interests. Legality is upheld — until it isn’t. Morality is espoused — until it becomes inconvenient.
Antonio Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony is not an abstraction here. American dominance is sustained not only through bombs and bases but through narratives. The cinematic heroism of soldiers, the pageantry of the 4th of July, the mythologising of the Founding Fathers — all cultivate acquiescence. This is not democracy; it is imperial pedagogy. History is sculpted to erase Indigenous resistance, to sanitise slave rebellions, to omit the bloodied cost of expansion. Power survives by shaping memory.
Domestically, this hegemony manifests as a fortified police state. Urban policing is militarised, racialised, and terminally unaccountable. Surveillance pervades every digital crevice. Billionaires underwrite elections while voters are purged from the rolls.
Meanwhile, whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden are criminalised for revealing the very duplicities on which the system runs. Justice is rationed. Dissent is criminalised. The machinery of control is bipartisan. And yet, resistance grows quieter when comfort replaces conviction. US policymakers have long perfected a dual strategy: attracting the brightest minds from other nations through the front door with scholarships and opportunity, while welcoming corrupt elites through the back door, bringing with them vast stolen wealth. This was not a coincidence; it was policy. Intellectual capital is harvested, while accountability is outsourced. Those who manage to benefit — regardless of where they come from — often learn to stay silent. Silence becomes the currency of survival.
Meanwhile, American officials, often standing in nations hollowed out by these very dynamics, deliver polished speeches about anti-corruption and a “rules-based order.” It is disarming to witness a person speak of justice while actively undermining it, to see a smile accompany the quiet betrayal of their conscience. At 250 years, the United States is not an enlightened republic; it is a paradox on the verge of collapse. It exhorts others to uphold international law while treating treaties as toilet paper. It funds brutal regimes while sermonising about human rights. It cloaks militarism in democracy and calls it liberation.
To participate in this pageantry is to be complicit. To swallow the official myths is to ingest poison disguised as principle. American democracy, if it is to mean anything, must be exhumed, dismantled, and reimagined — not venerated as sacred scripture, but interrogated as a living contradiction.
(The writer is Colombo based journalist and columnist. Views are personal)