Anxiety, Empire, and the Machinery of Anger: An Immigrant’s Reckoning with America

Prologue: Inventory in a Collapsing WorldIt has been a stressful year. Not just a stressful six months—a stressful year, and the year before that was no easier. It feels like every thread in American life has been drawn tighter and tighter, until even breathing is a kind of effort. Each morning is a negotiation with exhaustion. It’s not just political, not just economic. It’s spiritual—something closer to the bone.People talk about collapse as if it’s some remote historical event, a news headline, a foreign disaster. But collapse is local. Collapse is personal. Collapse is the feeling of loneliness in a city of millions, the numbness in a crowded elevator, the anger in a grocery store line, the quiet despair that settles in when you realize there’s no one left to call. If you want to know what decline feels like, look around at the people who are most afraid—look at their faces, their posture, the way they talk to each other. Listen for what is missing.I write these words as someone who has tried to make sense of collapse before. I was not born American, but I became American in my heart before I ever set foot here. I have lived in the ruins of empires, in places where history is an open wound, and I have learned that every collapsing society tries, at first, to pretend that things are normal. Denial is the first act. But eventually, the crisis comes home.There is a tradition in recovery, in Alcoholics Anonymous, that says: “You cannot change what you do not name.” You have to do an inventory—write down what is broken, what is missing, what you have lost, and what you have done to others. You have to confess the whole of it, not just the parts you can survive. If you don’t do this, you just repeat the same mistakes—sometimes louder, sometimes bloodier.America is overdue for an inventory. We are living through a time when our political life has become pure projection, pure machinery—anger searching for a target, anxiety dressing itself up as righteous certainty, fear pretending to be strength. It is a time of scapegoats, easy enemies, and rituals of exclusion.But the real story—the story that matters—begins at the point where we refuse to keep lying to ourselves. This essay is my inventory: of a country I love, of an empire in decline, of wounds both personal and national, and of the possibility, however remote, of mercy instead of violence.I want to speak to the sadness, the anger, the fear—not as a diagnosis, but as a kind of witness. Before we talk about politics, before we talk about economics, we have to talk about the soul.Chapter 1: Beyond Fascism: Naming the RealWhen people talk about the rise of fascism in America, the word comes loaded with history—Italy, Germany, swastikas, and blackshirts. But the word itself has become both weapon and shield, used so often that its meaning begins to dissolve. Say “fascist” to someone on the right, and they laugh, roll their eyes, or take it as a kind of badge. Say it to someone on the left, and it’s a ritual incantation, an all-purpose curse, a final line before total rupture.But fascism is not just a word for “the enemy.” It is not just a synonym for evil. If we use it that way, it loses all power—it becomes just another brick in the wall of mutual contempt. The real work is to look beneath the word, to see what is happening now, in the present, in the texture of daily life.What I saw in the Mehdi Hasan debate was not some rare, imported evil—it was anger, pure and close, alive in every face. You could feel it before anyone spoke. This anger was not about historical analogies; it wasn’t Mussolini, it wasn’t Hitler, it wasn’t about uniforms or parades. It was about fear. Animal fear. The kind that shows up in every home, every family, every old fight you remember from high school. The kind that grows whenever we sense a loss—of safety, of identity, of future.Fascism begins, not with an ideology, but with a refusal to face fear honestly. It begins with the desperate need to blame, to simplify, to find a scapegoat. And that impulse is everywhere. It is not foreign; it is native to all of us. It is how humans, when cornered by anxiety, reach for control.I am not interested in the word as a curse. I am interested in the process—how fear hardens into anger, how anger searches for an object, how exclusion becomes policy, and policy becomes violence. This process does not begin in a parliament or on the campaign trail. It begins at the level of ordinary life, in the way we talk to our neighbors, the way we teach our children, the way we react to strangers.So if I use the word “fascism,” I do so with care. Not as a cudgel, not as a punchline, but as a warning: when fear is not acknowledged, it grows. When anger is not understood, it seeks an enemy. When democracy becomes too complex, too fragile, too full of strangers, there is a temptation to burn it down—to replace it with something that feels simple, and safe, and pure.This is not history repeating itself in costume. This is the animal heart of anxiety, beating, always ready to become anger, always ready to search for a face to blame. And that, more than any label, is the danger I want to name.Chapter 2: The Animal Root: Fear, Anger, and the Ordinary HomeAnger is not a political doctrine. It is not a philosophy or a policy. It is something older, something deeper, something almost animal. At its root, anger is born from fear and anxiety. This is true not just on the debate stage, not just in the streets or the voting booth—it is true at home, in the private lives of people who will never appear on the news.Think of your own life. Think of your parents, your siblings, your friends. Think of every argument that ever turned into a fight. Beneath the words, beneath the accusations, there was always a background hum—a kind of dread, a fear of loss, a sense that something important was slipping away. We defend ourselves against this fear in the only way most of us know: we get angry. We shout. We fight. Sometimes we lash out at the people we love most.This is not unique to America. It is not unique to this era. But it is amplified now, electrified, piped into every home through screens and algorithms. Anger has become the most common language in the country—anger at the government, anger at immigrants, anger at the wealthy, anger at the poor, anger at our neighbors and at ourselves. Anger is the shortcut when fear finds no peace.If you strip away the labels and the headlines, what remains is the ordinary human experience: the terror of change, the anxiety of not belonging, the fear that something precious—some sense of safety, of meaning, of order—is slipping beyond our grasp. In a nation already wired for anxiety, with no trusted rituals of comfort or belonging, fear multiplies. And so does anger.We must be honest about this. Every political movement, every collective eruption, is made of individuals. And every individual, before they become a voter or a marcher or a commentator, is a person sitting at a table somewhere, arguing with a parent, or a partner, or a friend. If we cannot recognize the animal root of our anger, if we cannot admit to the fear underneath, we will spend our lives lashing out, always searching for someone else to blame.The rituals of scapegoating, the search for an enemy, do not begin with grand speeches or new laws. They begin in the most intimate spaces—at home, in the mirror, in the silent negotiations with our own anxiety. If we want to heal, if we want to interrupt the machinery of anger, we have to start here, with the animal truth we all share.Chapter 3: America’s Demographic Anxiety: Open Borders, Closed HeartsThe anxiety gripping America is not just economic, and it is not just about race. It is demographic anxiety—a fear born of shifting numbers, of who belongs and who does not. The question of the border is the question of who we are allowed to care about, and who we are allowed to blame.I have watched this anxiety build for years, as millions crossed into the country, not through embassies, not through visas, but through desperate hope. No country—no matter how rich or self-assured—can simply absorb twenty million new people without fear, without backlash. The fantasy that borders do not matter is not rooted in reality; it is a fantasy born of denial about human nature.Some say America is a nation of immigrants. But the truth is more complicated. The modern American state, the America that became the dream of the world, was built as a majority white country. That was its founding fact, whatever our later ideals. Black Americans, brought by slavery, have their own claim, their own trauma and history, and Native Americans their own original wound. Every other group—Jews, Italians, Irish, Asians—came later, fighting for a place, often policed and excluded in turn. This is the real American story: every new arrival is first a threat, then, sometimes, a neighbor.Today, Latinos are now the largest minority after whites, and their arrival reshapes the story. But the anxiety is not just white anxiety. Black Americans, who for so long have defined their American identity through the suffering and struggle of oppression, now see themselves displaced by the story of a “multicultural” America—a story that sometimes makes their original wound invisible.The pain is not abstract. It is the feeling of being replaced, of becoming one group among many, of losing what once made you central. This is why ethnic and economic anxieties so often move together: the fear of being replaced at work, and the fear of being replaced in the story of the nation. The wounds run deep, and they are not evenly distributed, but no one is immune. In a time of demographic change, all groups—old and new—feel the ground shift beneath their feet.I am not interested in condemning these anxieties, nor in indulging them. I am interested in naming them. The first sadness is not that people fear change—it is that we have not found a way to move beyond these categories at all. Despite all the talk of diversity, most people still huddle close to their own, suspicious of difference, wounded by imagined loss.America’s “open borders” policy did not spring from a place of generosity; it was an act of desperation. The economy needed workers. The government needed someone to quietly fill the gap left by a declining birthrate, a pyramid scheme running out of new participants. These immigrants were the unspeakable fix—the necessary but unloved bodies whose labor propped up a system that could no longer sustain itself.But when the fix itself becomes the source of new anxiety, the cycle intensifies. Closed hearts follow open borders. And so, the wound deepens. The country grows more crowded, but not more together. The numbers change, but the spirit contracts. And all the while, fear and anger grow.Chapter 4: Empire in Decline: Economics, Demography, and the Unspeakable FixTo understand the crisis in America, you have to understand that this is not just a nation. It is an empire—one that spans continents, posts soldiers across the globe, and spends more money than it collects year after year. Empires do not collapse the way ordinary nations do. They unravel from the inside, slowly, almost invisibly, while the machinery on the outside keeps turning.The truth that few dare to say is this: the American system no longer adds up. The demographic pyramid—too many old, not enough young; too many promises, not enough workers—has become unsustainable. Social Security and Medicare were designed for a growing, youthful country, not one that has lost its appetite for children and cannot persuade its young to build families. The economy depends on growth, and the empire depends on workers. When the growth ends, so does the empire.America’s answer, for years, was the unspeakable fix: open the borders, but do not say why. Let millions of new workers slip in to do the jobs others would not, to pay into programs they might never benefit from, to hold up a system that was never built for them. Do it quietly, out of view, so the rich could keep their tax cuts, the military could keep its budgets, and the old could keep their checks.This was not an act of liberal compassion. It was an act of elite self-preservation—a last-ditch attempt to prop up an unsustainable order. The cost was never honestly discussed, because to discuss it would have meant making real choices: higher taxes, fewer wars, a smaller global footprint. Instead, the sacrifice was hidden. The new arrivals became invisible cogs, tolerated so long as they kept the pyramid standing, resented the moment they became visible.Now, under the weight of backlash and a politics of anger, even this fix is failing. The borders are closing, deportations are up, and the “mercy” of quiet demographic replenishment is over. The reckoning can no longer be postponed. With no new workers, no honest willingness to tax the wealthy, and no end to imperial spending, the country faces a choice it has long refused to make: shrink the empire, or let the old and the vulnerable fall through the cracks.The most dangerous lie is the one the empire tells itself—that it can escape history, that some new trick or fix will always be found. But history does not care for denial. The reckoning will come, one way or another.This is not just policy. This is about fear—the collective fear of a society staring into its own exhaustion, desperate for anyone to blame but itself. The anxiety is real, but the fix is over. Now we will see what America is truly made of, and who, in the end, will be asked to pay the price for the dream.Chapter 5: The Ritual of the Enemy: Projection and Exclusion in American HistoryAnxiety rarely remains an internal matter. When a society is anxious—when it is wounded, afraid, or failing—it does not turn inward to heal. Instead, it turns outward to find an enemy. This is one of the oldest rituals in the West, a machinery perfected in both sacred and secular forms: the ritual of projection, the scapegoating of the other.You see it in every era of crisis: medieval Europe choking on violence and restlessness, transforming its pain into the sanctified violence of the Crusades. Export the wound. Make it holy. Gather the community by hunting the outsider. This ritual becomes the template: pogroms, witch hunts, lynchings, colonial wars, red scares. Each is a new version of the same machinery: cleanse the community by sacrificing a chosen enemy, and call it justice.America, for all its rhetoric of freedom and inclusion, has never escaped this machinery. The Founding Fathers, as soon as they claimed liberty, passed the Alien and Sedition Acts to punish dissent and target immigrants. Every wave of new arrivals—Irish, Italians, Chinese, Jews, Latinos—was first treated as a threat, a disease, a danger to be managed. Black Americans, the original scapegoat, have carried this weight longest, their exclusion and criminalization woven into the law itself.The ritual of the enemy is not always violent at first. It begins in language: the rumors, the slurs, the talk radio, the online posts. It moves to policy: exclusion, expulsion, banishment. Only in its final stage does it become violence—removal from life itself, the ultimate cleansing. The machinery has migrated now to new forms: the left polices language for heresy, the right invents traitors. Resentment is the only thing everyone seems to agree on.We live in an age where the rituals have become more bureaucratic, more digital, more invisible. Removal now happens with the click of a button: de-platforming, silencing, shadow-banning. But the root is the same as it was in the time of the Crusades. We cannot face our own wounds, so we invent an enemy to carry them for us.The lesson is as old as the Gospel and as ignored as prophecy. You cannot heal by sacrificing others. The only path out is confession—a real inventory, not just for individuals, but for nations. Until we break the ritual, the machinery of projection will grind on, fed by fear and loneliness, always promising purity and always delivering more violence.Chapter 6: The Vacuum of Meaning: God, Narcissism, and the Loss of GenerosityBeneath the machinery of anger and projection, beneath the rituals of exclusion and the language of enemies, there is a deeper crisis—a vacuum of meaning. America’s exhaustion is not only political or economic. It is spiritual. It is a hunger for something beyond self-preservation, a yearning for belonging and purpose that no amount of outrage or scapegoating can satisfy.Once, religion offered a kind of ground—an imperfect, sometimes cruel, but nevertheless real container for meaning. Today, even as millions claim to be Christian, the spirit has gone out of the words. “God” has become another tribal marker, a weapon in the culture war, invoked not for mercy but for victory. The self-proclaimed Christians wield their faith like a sword, not a balm. They preach exclusion, not love; conquest, not compassion. The story of Jesus—the story of the outsider, the scapegoat, the one who embraces the rejected—has been replaced by the spirit of the Crusades: us against them, purity through violence.But it is not only the religious who are lost. The secular world, too, has little to offer but the hollow pursuit of achievement, the gospel of the self. The American Dream, for all its promise, has become double-edged. Ambition and possibility—yes. But also a culture of narcissism, a ritualized selfishness, a doctrine of “me first, me against the world.” The result is not abundance, but isolation. Success has become its own prison.In this vacuum, generosity becomes dangerous. Vulnerability is mocked. Neighbors are strangers. Love, in the broad civic sense, is replaced by contracts, by transactions, by the quiet calculation of what can be extracted from others. The richest neighborhoods are often the coldest, the most defended, the most spiritually dead. Wealth has not brought more generosity; it has brought more gates, more distance, more anger.And so the collapse accelerates—not because we have run out of money or laws, but because we have run out of meaning. The country is full of people who are anxious, alone, and spiritually starved. Some turn to anger, others to addiction, others to ever more desperate forms of self-invention and spectacle.The wound is not just in policy. It is in the soul. Until we recover some sense of shared meaning—something larger than the self, something rooted in real community and real mercy—the machinery of projection will find new fuel, and the collapse will continue.Chapter 7: From Outrage to Mercy: A Personal ConfessionI am not writing this as a neutral observer. I am an immigrant to America—a legal immigrant, a permanent resident. But I loved this country long before I arrived. I was American in spirit before I ever crossed its border. I believed, and still believe, in the promise of what America could be.I have lived in many places: North America, Europe, the Middle East. I have seen the wounds that empires leave behind. I know what decline looks like, not as a theory but as a lived experience. When I write about collapse, I am not reciting someone else’s script. I have watched the Roman road break, watched the Persian dream dissolve into dust.I came here full of hope, full of love—and what I found was a country caught in the grip of anger and fear. I see the way people recoil from one another. The way wealth seems to breed not generosity, but narcissism. I live in a relatively affluent building, in a relatively affluent city, and I see neighbors who are closed, unfriendly, armored by their own comfort. I love the working class much more. I grieve the homelessness beneath the bridges. I grieve the indifference of the powerful, whether in the workplace or in government. I see my own company—like so many—turning into a performance stage, producing nothing of value, just going through the motions while real need grows outside.I open YouTube, and it’s all outrage. I look at our politics, and it’s all blame. I listen to debate, and it’s war. We seem to be rushing, headfirst, into some civil conflict, some breaking point. I want something different. I want peace. I want love. I want the kind of community where people can actually hold each other—literally, physically, spiritually.And yes, I’m gay. Every man on that Jubilee debate stage, I wanted to say: you are beautiful. You are strong. We are not enemies. Why so much anger? Why so much hate? Why is friendship so impossible? Why must we find a scapegoat for every problem? Why do we run from complexity and cling to blame?I am not above this wound. I am in it, wounded by it. My longing is for mercy, not victory—for the kind of understanding that can only begin when anger is put down and people actually see each other. I do not want to win the debate. I want, at the end, to stand up, hug my enemies, and say: we survived this conversation. We saw each other. We refused the ritual.If I have learned anything in America, it is that mercy is harder than outrage, but infinitely more sustaining. I am still learning how to offer it, even as I ask for it. This is my confession, my hope, and my prayer.Chapter 9: Tough and Kind: Concrete Proposals for a New Civic CultureMercy is not the same as naiveté. To move from outrage to something better, we need new habits of both heart and policy. The challenge is to be both tough and kind—realistic about what is broken, and radically honest about what we owe to each other. In an age of anxiety and projection, neither sentimentality nor cruelty will suffice.On Immigration:We can be strict at the borders, even closed, until we can honestly reckon with who we are and what kind of community we wish to be. This is not about ethnic engineering, nor about indulging fantasies of infinite openness. It is about pausing the endless churn of anxiety, so the interior can heal. But this toughness at the border must be paired with mercy inside. No more deportation squads, no more ICE raids, no more tearing families apart. Those who are here now are here. The answer is not an inquisition, but a period of stillness—an honest attempt to build a society that can include and integrate, not perpetually exclude and punish.On Demography:The demographic crisis will not be solved by importing millions or by ethnic panic. It will be solved, if at all, by making America a place where people actually want to have children again: where there is real childcare, real support for young families, and a sense of hope about the future. No one will have children in a nation haunted by fear, where the prospect of concentration camps or economic collapse hovers in the background. If we want birth, we need safety, community, and joy—not terror.On Work and the Economy:Bring back real manufacturing. Move away from a service-only economy. Revalue the dignity of labor—not just the labor that generates profit, but the labor that builds and sustains the actual fabric of daily life. Question the corporate machinery that produces nothing but performance and resentment. Demand an honest accounting from the wealthy: if the empire is to survive, it cannot be built on tax evasion, narcissism, and spectacle.On State Power:End this era of fear and terror: Reassign ICE personnel to the actual border, not the interior. End the militarization of ordinary life. Remove the military from the streets. Reign in the intelligence agencies and the forever-war lobbies—on this, even the populists have a point. Liberty is not a luxury; it is a precondition for the kind of civic trust we desperately need.On Community and Family:We need not just talk, but spaces where people can meet, share, and raise children together. Daycare, community centers, recovery groups—places where the rituals of care and confession are possible. Americans have always invented new forms of association in crisis. The time is now to invent again.On Spiritual and Sexual Minorities:Recognize, finally, that queer people have always been here, always contributed, always belonged. The gay uncle, the loyal friend, the outsider who serves the tribe in ways not always visible or honored—these are roles as old as humanity itself. We must honor the complexity and value of every member of the community, not return to rituals of suspicion or contempt.On Public Culture:Clamp down on the machinery of outrage—left, right, corporate, algorithmic. Refuse the endless cycle of scapegoating. Demand more from our leaders and more from ourselves: more honesty, more humility, more mercy. If we want a civic culture that can survive decline, it will be one that welcomes complexity and rejects the machinery of projection.To be tough and kind is not to live without boundaries. It is to live with boundaries rooted in truth and mercy, not fear and rage. This is the work of a new civic culture: one that repairs, includes, and heals—not just manages, excludes, and punishes.Epilogue: Refusing the Ritual, Beginning the InventoryThere is no single answer for what comes next. Empires do not heal with a manifesto. Wounds are not mended by a single speech or an act of Congress. The machinery of projection is ancient and resilient, and the habit of scapegoating—of looking outward instead of inward—will not disappear overnight.But there is another tradition, quieter and older than the ritual of the enemy. It is the tradition of inventory. Of stopping, breathing, and speaking honestly about what is broken, what is missing, and what is possible. AA calls this “cleaning your side of the street.” Faith calls it confession. Civic life, at its best, calls it citizenship.What would it mean, in America, to refuse the old ritual? To stop hunting for enemies and begin, instead, to take account of our own wounds—personal and collective? What would it look like to stand, for once, in the place of mercy: not to excuse, not to indulge, but to reckon honestly and forgive generously?Perhaps it starts with small things. With neighbors, not politicians. With a conversation that does not end in outrage, but in understanding. With a willingness to live inside complexity—to let go of simple stories, easy enemies, and the intoxication of blame. Perhaps it starts with naming our own wounds and honoring the wounds of others.This is the stubborn hope I have learned, not from history’s winners, but from those who survived its worst storms. The hope that, even as the machinery grinds on, enough people might step outside the ritual—long enough to remember what love actually feels like, what mercy actually requires, what community could yet be.America does not need a new enemy. It needs a new inventory.Let that be where we begin.—Elias WinterAuthor of Language Matters, a space for reflection on language, power, and decline.Thanks for reading Language Matters! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eliaswinter.substack.com