The American Paradox

On April 14, 1775, the first organization dedicated to the abolition of slavery in North America was founded in Philadelphia.

On April 14, 2025, exactly 250 years after the founding of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society (and nearly 160 years after the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution), Donald Trump announced to the world that he has the power to kidnap anyone, citizen or not, and deprive them of all legal personhood, turn them into slave-like objects, and render them to what is essentially a death camp.

Someone innocent of any wrongdoing, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, whom the United States Supreme Court ruled must be returned to the U.S., can be dehumanized, transformed from a legal subject, and imprisoned in a concentration camp in El Salvador beyond all legal scrutiny, according to Trump and his accomplices. Neither innocence nor the Constitution nor citizenship will protect one from this extraordinary rendition. As Trump put it: “homegrowns are next.” This is where we are.

Every person in power and every journalist who has bent over for Trump, as well as for his predecessors, over all these years has deformed themselves into a section of a monstrous bridge, a bridge Trump has walked along right into the position of a dictator. Now he and his accomplices are not only destroying the livable world in general, heating and polluting it, in denial of all planetary and ecological limits, as mass extinction and ecological catastrophe flare all about us. He is also blatantly sending whomever he capriciously desires to death camps, enriching himself and his class in the process, destroying the worlds of countless people.

It is still too early to tell how the people of the United States will respond to Trump’s totalitarian power grab, nor how far Trump will go to suppress resistance. Not only are his executive orders nakedly unconstitutional and illegal, they also violate deeply rooted principles of justice and social norms that are hostile to tyranny. Moreover, these norms are bound with a civic identity rooted in the violent rejection of a tyrannical king — King George III who, as a limited, constitutional monarch at the time of this nation’s founding, had less power than Trump claims to have today, and whose abuses mostly involved imposing taxes and limiting territorial expansion, abuses that pale in comparison to Trump’s. The relatively minor tyranny of King George, however, led to revolutionary war.

Indeed, on April 19, 1775, a mere five days after the formation of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society in Philadelphia, fighting broke out in Lexington, Concord, and other sites in Massachusetts between colonists and the redcoats of the British imperial army. Though the causes were complex, the first battles of what would come to be recognized as the American Revolution were in large part animated by a spirit kindred to that of the abolitionists in Philadelphia. Both opposed tyranny. Both opposed the rule of an order whose force, along with an outdated sense of tradition, comprised its main justification. Both thought better reasons, rooted in something like mutual care and a fidelity to critical thought, ought to regulate the lives and societies of humankind. Both thought human dignity demanded that human beings govern themselves, according to the rule of law, not some ridiculous monarch.

As we approach the 250th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, it would be a repudiation of this spirit of equality and democracy, a spirit that legitimizes the United States itself, to not forcefully reject Trump’s declaration of dictatorship. And yet, this spirit of democracy has from the beginning been accompanied by a countervailing spirit, a genocidal spirit of slave owners, imperialists and white supremacists not inconsistent with Trump’s. These two form the American Contradiction, a contradiction that saw the democratic and egalitarian impulses of the Revolution checked by the plutocratic and imperialist designs of the U.S. Constitution.

As Luther Martin, one of the lesser-known Constitutional Framers and a slaveowner himself, put it: slavery “was inconsistent with the principles of the [American] revolution and dishonorable to the American character to have such a feature in the Constitution.” And yet the Constitution, protecting slavery, and designed to further and secure empire, became the law of the land.

Even the mass death of the U.S. Civil War less than a century later was insufficient to extinguish this contradiction; a contradiction that accepted the reforms of the New Deal, and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s, among others, only begrudgingly because these were imperative to maintaining the imperial order — the rule of plutocratic force as opposed to the exception of equality and justice. And perhaps this American Contradiction leads ultimately to what we can describe as the American Paradox: that America can’t truly become America until it stops being America. Perhaps it’s already no longer America. Maybe it hasn’t ever been. And if it hasn’t ever been, it cannot be restored. To realize its deepest values, then, its legitimizing truth, it must become what it was so long mistaken for, a New World — beyond borders, beyond exploitation and profit, beyond war — a new world altogether.