By Percival Duke
Europe keeps asking what went wrong in the United States.
That question already assumes something false: that the system once worked equally for everyone.
Credit: Courtesy photo
For Black Americans and Indigenous people, democracy in the United States has always been conditional. Temporary. Revocable. What the world is watching now does not feel like collapse to us. It feels like recognition. The mask is off.
A country built on a double crime
The United States was founded on a contradiction so extreme it still shapes everything that followed. Indigenous peoples were nearly wiped out — not by accident, not by “clashes,” but by design. Forced removals, starvation, massacres, broken treaties, cultural erasure. Land was “needed.” Indigenous life was expendable. At the same time, millions of Africans were kidnapped from their countries, shipped across an ocean and enslaved to build the economy that replaced those Indigenous worlds. The original people were killed to take the land. Another people were imported to work it for free. That is not just a tragic beginning. It’s a blueprint.
Slavery was not a side chapter — it was the system
American capitalism was not built alongside slavery. It was built on it.
Enslaved Africans were assets. They were insured, mortgaged, traded, inherited. Banks, insurance companies and real estate empires grew from this logic. When slavery officially ended, the system did not disappear. It simply changed form.
Jim Crow followed.
Then redlining.
Then mass incarceration.
Then voter suppression.
Each era promised reform. Each preserved the hierarchy. Europe often asks why race still dominates American politics. Because race was the organizing principle of American inequality. Once a system learns that method, it does not let it go without a fight.
Why this is happening now
This moment is not nostalgia. It is panic. The United States is approaching a demographic reality it has resisted since its founding: a future in which white Americans are no longer the uncontested majority. For a country built on ownership — of land, labor and power — that shift feels existential. So the response is not persuasion. It is retrenchment.
Rights are being rolled back not because they failed, but because they worked. Women gained autonomy. Black Americans gained political leverage. Indigenous voices became harder to erase. The reaction to all of this is force, dressed up as “order.” This is why comparisons to the early mechanics of Nazi Germany matter — not as moral theater, but as structural warning. Different actors. Less discipline. More chaos. The same instinct: define enemies, hollow institutions, normalize violence, call it necessity. History does not always advance methodically. Sometimes it accelerates recklessly.
The crisis seen from the bodies it hits first
For people of color, this moment is not theoretical. Democratic backsliding always reaches us first — through policing, courts, voting access and bodily autonomy. That has been true for four hundred years. When Black Americans pull back politically today, it is not apathy. It is exhaustion. After centuries of fighting for rights that are now being stripped away again, while being recast — once more — as the threat itself.
The world sees the chaos. What it often misses is the continuity. The continual comeback or rebirth of the same, branded differently each time.
Reparations: The Unfinished Business Behind the Panic
There is another reason the backlash is so fierce. Reparations are no longer unthinkable.
Indigenous nations have received partial reparations — incomplete and insufficient, but acknowledged.
Japanese Americans received reparations for internment. Jewish survivors received reparations after the Holocaust — first from the United States, and then from Germany. Chinese communities have received compensation and state acknowledgments in multiple countries. Only one group is still told to wait indefinitely: Black Americans.
After four centuries of unpaid labor, legalized terror and exclusion from wealth-building, calling reparations “divisive” is not serious. It is avoidance. Everyone else was paid. Yet this specific bill is way overdue. And accountability — more than diversity, more than symbolism — is what truly terrifies the current political movement as well as those in America’s past.
Why this movement will not work
There is a final reason this authoritarian surge will fail. It is not only ideological. It is desperate.
A significant part of its leadership and financial ecosystem is entangled in documented criminality — corruption, abuse, and long-standing systems of protection that relied on silence. Recent releases of suppressed records related to elite sexual exploitation did not create this crisis; they exposed it. Without that exposure, the desperation driving this movement would not have reached its current intensity.
Desperation turns fear into ideology. It turns loyalty into cult behavior. It turns ordinary people into accomplices. But the truth is harsher: many of the figures driving this movement were never misled. They were protected. For decades. What we are seeing now is not strength, but pre-emptive aggression — the behavior of people who know accountability is no longer hypothetical. Authoritarian movements can survive hypocrisy. They cannot survive exposure.
A project built on moral panic collapses once its own crimes become visible. What follows is not order, but implosion. That is why this movement feels frantic, loud, and accelerating.
It is not marching toward the future. It is running from the past.
What Europe needs to understand
Europe needs to stop treating the United States as a democracy that lost its way and start recognizing it as what it has always been: an empire built on extraction, racial hierarchy and myth-making — now confronting the consequences of its own design.
American power shaped global capitalism, global militarism and global inequality. When the center convulses, the world feels it. The voices that understand this best are not in think tanks. They are in bodies that have been surviving it since the beginning.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the writer and not necessarily those of the AFRO.