Faulty reasoning signals

• Confirmation Bias - 25.4% (253 hits)
• Anchoring Bias - 2.1% (21 hits)
• Availability Heuristic - 11.1% (111 hits)
• Representativeness Heuristic - 1.5% (15 hits)
• Hindsight Bias - 0%
• Overconfidence Bias - 8.1% (81 hits)
• Framing Effect - 18.1% (180 hits)
• Loss Aversion - 0%
• Status Quo Bias - 1.3% (13 hits)
• Sunk Cost Effect - 0%
• Optimism Bias - 0%
• Pessimism Bias - 4.5% (45 hits)

Article text

America Was Never a Democracy

This Independence Day, we will tell ourselves a lot of stories about what it means to be American.

One consistent narrative, however, even 250 years in, is our country’s inability to reckon with the genocide of Indigenous people that kicked the whole thing off.

According to Rebecca Nagle, a citizen of Cherokee Nation, a writer and journalist, and the host of the new podcast First America, the Founding Fathers initially faced an identity crisis.

“They were in a tricky place: They’re not English anymore, they’re actually literally fighting a war to no longer be English, but they’re not yet something else,” she says.

So they reached for a symbol close at hand: that of Native people.

Soon enough, Indigenous figures were appearing on Colonial American guns, pamphlets, and ships.

Colonists even dressed up as Native Americans for the Boston Tea Party—a practice that historian Philip Deloria refers to as “playing Indian.”

As Nagle puts it, “Playing Indian is kind of the bridge that gets them to this new American identity.”

On a recent episode of What Next, Lizzie O’Leary spoke to Nagle about how America’s original sin is written into who we are today.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Lizzie O’Leary: I want to talk about the Declaration of Independence.

The part that so many Americans are taught in school is: “We hold these truths to be self-evident … life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

But in the first episode of First America, you focus on a different part.

Could you explain that to me?

Rebecca Nagle: The part we all know is the part where Thomas Jefferson is pontificating about these enlightenment ideals.

It’s the preamble, kind of the introduction.

But when you look at the document, it’s actually just a list of grievances against King George III.

I think of the declaration as a breakup letter.

It’s as if our Founding Fathers are breaking up with the king of England, and it’s that part of the breakup when you tell the person you’re breaking up with everything that they did wrong.

There are a lot of historians who think that the list has an order, that it starts with the smaller grievances and ends with the things the founders were most angry about.

And the last complaint, the crescendo in this long list, is about “merciless Indian savages.”

So, alongside those beautiful, lofty Enlightenment ideals, Native people are called “savages,” which was a way to say that we were actually less than human, that we weren’t entitled to those basic human rights.

One of the main reasons colonists rebelled against the crown was that they wanted more Indigenous land—they wanted to move farther west into North America, but the king was telling them no.

That version of our origin doesn’t fit nicely into the “taxation without representation”/independence/democracy version of the story, but it’s as much a part of the origin of the United States as the rest of that.

I think so much of the understanding of our country’s mythology can be explained by: “History is written by the victors.”

But this goes deeper than that.

It feels like this foundational American myth that governments and American organizations have really latched on to.

What do you think gives it the emotional potency that goes beyond “These were the people in power who wrote down their version of what happened”?

I think the ultimate myth that we tell ourselves in the U.S. is that our founders created a democracy.

That’s not the full story.

Those men wanted an empire that actually wasn’t that different from what England was doing.

They wanted to control land and people who actually didn’t have elections, representation, accountability, and any say in what that government would be.

And at the same time, they were building up, while extremely limited, a representative democracy.

They were also building out an empire, and that empire functioned by top-down tyrannical rule.

That’s the part of the story that every side of the political spectrum gets wrong.

Even with “No Kings” protests—the whole name of the protest is the idea that our Founding Fathers said no to monarchy, to tyrants, and threw that off.

What is more accurate is that they didn’t want to be colonial subjects themselves but still wanted to be an empire.

They just wanted to be the center of power of that empire.

We’re experiencing the rise of authoritarianism in the U.S., and people are looking around and saying, “Where did this come from?

How could this be happening?”

They’re looking to Hungary and Germany and Russia, for example.

The truth is, part of our government, since the founding, has been authoritarian.

Part of our government has always governed people without their consent, without elections, without constitutional norms, without limits, without the kind of balance of power that we’re all used to.

And it’s changed over time, but that first group of people that were governed that way here were Indigenous people.

So much of what the current administration is doing isn’t borrowing from right-wing leaders from other parts of the globe or other parts of history; it’s just borrowing from this body of American law that’s always existed.

That’s why it’s been so hard to fight: It’s baked into the system.

So many things that are happening now—bombing Iran, bombing boats in the Caribbean, abducting the leader of Venezuela, deploying the military and the National Guard to U.S. cities, even the way Trump is using Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol—go back to policies that were first created to dispossess Indigenous people.

We wonder why the U.S. border is so militarized.

Well, for the first century of our republic, the border was a literal war zone.

So much of this stuff goes back to that history, which we constantly leave out.

I think that’s one of the reasons we’re struggling as a country to understand how we got here.