Is America on Step 1? 11 To Go?

The catastrophes that has befallen must be a turning point. We are making choices every day that determine our future. We must choose wisely and righteously.

Submit or be killed. Foreign or domestic that is now our policy. The Donroe Doctrine at work.

Trump says he won’t have to bomb Venezuela again if they just hand over the oil. Stephen Miller, on CNN, put it plainly: “We live in a world governed by strength, governed by force, governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

He sounds like a comic book villain. Except he’s the deputy chief of staff.

And yesterday ICE agents shot yet another American — at least the tenth such shooting since Trump took office. This time on video and in the streets of Minneapolis. A woman named Renee Good — not a target of any investigation, just a legal observer monitoring police conduct — was killed by federal agents. The administration’s response? Kristi Noem, Homeland Security Secretary, called Renee a domestic terrorist.

This has to be a wake-up call.

“Venezuela killed the United States. Or rather, it revealed it was already dead.”

That’s how Arnaud Bertrand opened his piece this week. I think he’s partly wrong. Or at least, he’s asking the wrong question. But his argument is important enough that it deserves reflection.

Bertrand draws on Confucius, Marcus Aurelius, Ibn Khaldun. A canon of thinkers who made the case that nations need mythology to function. The story a nation tells itself isn’t trivial, he argues. It’s everything. It’s what constitutes the nation in the first place.

His central point is that hypocrisy was never the problem. The gap between who we say we are and who we actually are? That gap was proof the ideal still had a hold on us. We could be called back to it. We could be shamed by the distance between our words and our deeds. Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.

But now Trump isn’t pretending Venezuela is about democracy or drugs or freedom. He’s openly saying we’re taking their oil. We’re taking their wealth. Submit or be destroyed. The gap between ideal and reality has closed. Not because we got better. Because we abandoned the ideal entirely.

Bertrand’s fear is that when a nation stops even pretending to be good, it dies inside. The little light that says “this is not who I want to be” goes out. Once that light is extinguished, there’s nothing left to appeal to. No conscience. No mechanism for self-correction. Just naked power.

He asks what’s waiting in America’s wings. What story will fill the vacuum?

I’d encourage you to read his full argument because he makes it well. But I think he’s looking at this moment exactly backwards. This isn’t death. This is the first step toward recovery. And I’ll explain why.

So yes, the mask is off. Trump has been clear about what’s happening in Venezuela. This is about oil. This is about taking resources from a country less powerful than us. He’s calling it the “Donroe Doctrine” and he’s not pretending it’s anything else. We’re talking about taking over Greenland. We’re talking about the Panama Canal. We bombed a sovereign nation, kidnapped its president, and told the vice president she’ll do what we want or we’ll bomb them again.

Full-on imperialist. Full-on aggressor. Take what you want from nations weaker than you.

But here’s the thing. This isn’t new. This is who we’ve been for a hundred years. The only thing that’s changed is the honesty.

And that honesty is not death. That’s the first step toward something different.

If you’ve ever been through a twelve-step program, or loved someone who has, you know what I’m talking about.

You don’t get better while you’re still telling yourself the pretty story. The alcoholic doesn’t recover while insisting he’s a social drinker who occasionally overdoes it. The addict doesn’t heal while believing she’s got it under control. Recovery can only begin at rock bottom. When the lies stop working. When you look in the mirror and see exactly what you’ve become.

That’s not the death of possibility. That’s the prerequisite for change.

James Baldwin said it plainly: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

I’m not saying Americans will wake up. I’m saying the lie is gone, so waking up is finally possible.

America has been telling itself a story about freedom and democracy while overthrowing governments for a century. Forty-one interventions in Latin America alone. We ran cocaine through Central America to fund the Contras. We looked the other way while our Afghan allies controlled the opium trade. We kept dictators on the CIA payroll until they stopped being useful.

The mythology didn’t stop any of that. The mythology laundered it. It let us feel like the good guys while doing monstrous things. That comfortable middle, where you get to be the monster and feel like the hero, is what allowed all of this to continue for so long.

That’s what’s dying now. And I say good riddance.

Speaking of which. You want to talk about drugs? Let’s talk about drugs.

The justification for Venezuela is that Maduro runs a drug cartel. Our own intelligence agencies say that’s not really true. “Cartel de los Soles” is a term for various military officers involved in trafficking. It’s not an organization Maduro directs. But let’s set that aside.

If we’re going to start kidnapping people and bombing countries over drugs that kill Americans, I’ve got a suggestion for where to start. The Sackler family.

The Sacklers created a crisis that has killed over 500,000 Americans. More than every combat death in World War I, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam combined. They marketed OxyContin as non-addictive when their own research showed it was profoundly addictive. They pushed doctors to prescribe higher doses when patients developed tolerance. They knew what they were doing. They did it anyway.

And when the lawsuits came? They paid a fine, admitted no wrongdoing, and kept their billions. No one went to prison. The Sackler name is still on buildings at Harvard, Yale, Oxford, the Louvre.

I’m from Appalachia. I’ve watched what opioids did to my community. The devastation. The destruction. Families torn apart. Lives ended. And the people who caused it are still making money. Still getting invited to galas. Still treated like philanthropists instead of mass murderers.

The only difference between the Sacklers and a Latin American cartel is that the Sacklers had better lawyers and paid the right people. One drug dealer gets a museum wing named after him. The other gets drone strikes.

That’s not a war on drugs. That’s class warfare with bombs.

And it’s not just foreign policy. The mask is coming off everything.

Trump takes bribes openly now. Cryptocurrency payments. Pardons for sale. His transition team operates like a fundraising operation. And the Supreme Court says that’s fine. Presidents can’t be prosecuted for official acts.

This isn’t corruption hiding behind institutions anymore. This is corruption becoming the institution.

Here’s what Democrats need to understand. Their party has been part of this system too. Pelosi enriched herself. The Obamas enriched themselves. The Clintons enriched themselves. They just did it with better optics and longer timelines. They delayed the monetization. Laundered it through foundations and speaking fees and book deals. They maintained the veneer of legitimacy.

Trump’s innovation isn’t corruption. It’s impatience with concealment. He cashes out in real time and dares anyone to stop him. So he just says it. We’re taking your oil. We’re taking bribes. We do what we want.

And now we get to decide if that’s who we want to be.

Bertrand may be right about what happens to the state. When America stops pretending to be good, the state may become even worse. The internal brakes are gone. The mythology that once restrained our worst impulses, however imperfectly, has been stripped away.

But I’m not talking about the state. I’m talking about the people.

Here’s what changes when the mask drops. Shame stops working on elites. They’ve abandoned it. But clarity starts working on citizens. The propaganda loses friction because nobody’s bothering to dress it up anymore. Moral language becomes available again because denial has collapsed. You can’t gaslight someone into thinking the house isn’t on fire when the president is on TV bragging about the matches.

We’re in the burning down right now. The mythology is burning. The institutions are burning. The systems, the checks, the balances. All of it is on fire.

The question isn’t whether the old America survives. It won’t. That America is already gone.

The question is what rises from the ashes.

Bertrand asked what’s waiting in America’s wings. That’s the right question. But I don’t think the answer has to be terrifying. It could be something worth building.

We could collapse and stay collapsed. A failed state. A cautionary tale. An empire that ate itself.

We could rise as the worst version of ourselves. A naked predator. Putin’s Russia with better aircraft carriers. A bully with nuclear weapons and no pretense of principle.

Or we could rise like the phoenix. Different. Transformed.

Here’s what I know. We don’t need Venezuela’s oil. We don’t need Greenland. We don’t need to become what we’re becoming. The future is not oil. The future is not imperialism. The future is not sending our sons and daughters to die in wars so billionaires can extract more wealth from the ground.

Because make no mistake. If it comes to a real war with a powerful nation, it’s going to be us on the front lines. The poor. The working class. The kids from Appalachia and the Rust Belt. It won’t be Trump Jr. It won’t be Barron. It’ll be people like the people I grew up with. Sent to fight for resources we don’t need and profits we’ll never see.

America has everything it needs to be something different. The human capital. The capacity. The potential to be beautiful, bold, productive, helpful. To ourselves, to each other, to the rest of the world.

But we can’t get there through the existing system. Not through the Democratic Party as currently constructed. Those people benefited from the same corruption. Not through going slightly backwards to a more reasonable, more theoretically legal version of the same extractive bullshit. That poison will still be in our heart. Still be in our soul.

It’s going to take new people. New movements. Maybe new parties. It’s going to take courage in the voting booth. Voting for candidates who look like long shots. Because truly transformational change always looks like a long shot from inside the burning building.

We’ve seen it work. I helped recruit a bartender from the Bronx to run against one of the most powerful Democrats in Congress. She won. Bernie Sanders built a movement on $27 donations that nearly toppled the entire party establishment. Twice. These weren’t flukes. They were proof that contagious moral clarity can outrun donor gravity. Not always. Not inevitably. But possibly. And possibility is what we’re talking about here.

The steps after the first one are going to be hard.

The moral accounting will be painful. Making amends, where amends are possible, will be difficult. We’re going to resist it. We didn’t do this, we’ll say. We didn’t enslave anyone. We didn’t overthrow governments. We just lived our lives.

How can we possibly be responsible?

But we are. Because we were born into it. All of it. The beauty and the trauma. The ideals and the monstrousness.

To claim the birthright that is genuinely beautiful about America, the real promise of self-governance, of dignity, of people building something together, we have to accept the debts too. We have to hold it all.

Now look. This could go badly. Change is terrifying. Being different is terrifying. The death of mythology doesn’t guarantee resurrection. We could collapse. We could become something even worse than what we are now.

But it was already going badly. That’s how we got here. Decades of failure. Failure to be good to our own people. Failure to be good to our neighbors. Failure to be honest about what we were doing and why. That’s what led to this moment of terrible clarity.

Trump didn’t create this. He just stopped pretending.

And now we face the choice that was always coming. Do we accept our role as predators? Or do we rebuild as a nation worth believing in?

I know which America I want. I know which America my kids need.

Hope isn’t going to get this done. We will need effort and discipline. We will need to refuse these bastards attempts to dictate the terms of what’s America is and what we can be. We earn our future by building it from the wreckage of past and our present.

Like every journey it starts with a first step. This one starts with looking in the mirror and admitting we have a problem.

We have a problem.

And now, thanks to a president who can’t be bothered to hide it, we can’t pretend it isn’t there.

Let’s choose well,

Corbin