The United Hates of America

Division, distrust, and disruption at home and abroad.

The United States of America was never meant to be a destination. It was always meant to be a direction: an ongoing experiment in whether human beings could choose each other over and over again, across difference, disagreement, and time.

Experiments don’t end. They evolve. And sometimes they fail. But the insights they surface, if you’re honest enough to look, are more valuable than anything the controlled conditions could have produced.

Right now, we’re looking at one of those moments.

Abroad, the United States finds itself in the strange company of estranged partners and former adversaries, not through diplomacy, but through its own aggression. NATO allies are quietly redrawing their futures, reconstituting their coalitions with a presumption of independence unseen in a generation. The world isn’t turning away from American ideals. It’s turning away from what America is currently doing with them.

At home, it’s worse. The country that held out tolerance, inclusion, and diversity as its defining promises, however convenient or expedient those promises may have been, is now defined by something else entirely: perpetual disruption, adversarialism, and a zero-sum contest over who deserves to exist here at all.

Call it what it is. The United Hates of America.

But here’s what I feel about pain at this scale: it doesn’t arrive to destroy. It arrives to reveal. The deep and dark motives now visible on the surface of American life, such as the scarcity thinking, the fear-based individualism, the willingness to extract from others to protect oneself, those weren’t born yesterday. They’ve been lurking beneath the surface for decades, dressed in better language. What’s changed is that the costume came off.

That’s not a crisis. That’s a diagnosis. Because you cannot heal what you cannot see. And for the first time in a long time, we can see everything.

Here’s what unsettles me most about this moment. At the exact point when America needs integrating forces, we are deploying the most powerful amplifying technology in human history.

AI doesn’t create division. It scales whatever is already there. If your operating system is scarcity and fear (and America’s currently is), AI will run that operating system faster, wider, and deeper than any political movement could on its own. Algorithmic feeds don’t just reflect tribal thinking. They industrialize it. Disinformation doesn’t just spread. It replicates at machine speed and targets with machine precision. The fractures we’re watching open up aren’t being caused by AI. But they are being widened by it, systematically, at a scale no previous era had to reckon with.

The choice this moment presents us isn’t subtle. It’s a stark binary: a future built on fear, scarcity, and zero-sum arithmetic, or a future built on abundance, connection, and what I’ll call, without apology, love. I know how that sounds. I know that in the current noise, words like those can feel soft, even naive. But look at the alternative being offered right now and tell me the soft words aren’t the urgent ones.

As poverty becomes pervasive and government dependency the only viable survival strategy for a growing majority, the architecture of what that produces is hard to ignore. When people’s livelihoods are held at the discretion of a narrowing few, that’s not freedom. That’s a subtle form of bondage for everyone on both sides of it. Those benefiting disproportionately will find themselves behind ever-higher walls, prisoners of the suffering they’ve either engineered or ignored. The prosperity equation only works if it’s shared. That’s not ideology. It’s mechanics. And AI, deployed without moral architecture, doesn’t rebalance that equation. It locks it in, automating the advantages of the few while eroding the economic floor beneath everyone else.

This isn’t the end of something. This is a birthing that’s necessarily painful and exposing. Every worthwhile transformation is. The question is not whether the labor will hurt. It will. The question is what we’re willing to bring into the world on the other side of it.

There are those, of course, who see this very differently, who look at the fractures and see opportunity rather than obligation. They are focused largely on themselves, with genuine indifference to everyone else. I don’t dismiss them. I’ve observed the psychology of scarcity long enough to know that fear is a powerful and self-perpetuating operating system. But I also know this: the planet doesn’t wait for consensus. The clock doesn’t pause for ideological standoffs. The viability of our shared home is not a partisan issue. It’s a physics problem. And AI, pointed at extraction rather than restoration, doesn’t buy us more time. It burns through what’s left faster.

My hope, the one I hold not softly but with urgency, is that we find our way back to each other. Not to agree on everything. That’s not the requirement. The requirement is a common love for the home we share, and enough shared will to defend it. Together.

We have made hard choices before as a country and as a species. We have surprised ourselves. We can do it again.

But we have to choose it. And we have to choose it now.

(Photo credit: Mattia on Unsplash)