America: A Fake News

Brands are born not from what they are, but from what they promise.

A promise creates expectation, expectation invites investment, and investment demands return. The greater the promise, the greater the expectation, and in this equation, the promisor must speak with such unwavering certainty that the claim often floats a few centimeters above reality.

Nearly 250 years ago, the brand “America” was registered.The promise? “All men are created equal… endowed with unalienable rights… life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

This sentence from the Declaration of Independence remains one of the most powerful in the English language. In the context of British rule, with its king, its court, and its privileges, the promise offered by Jefferson and his colleagues could not have been more precisely aimed.

But the equation of the brand was already at work. On one side, the newly liberated colonies invested enormously in the construction of a nation built on freedom. On the other, shackled in the damp darkness of a plantation cellar, a man in chains might have closed his eyes and asked himself: If liberty and happiness are the birthright of all men, what kind of creature am I, that I possess neither?

Thus, in the lament of the enslaved, lay the primary falsehood, almost the primal lie, of the American promise. If Jefferson and the other signatories wrestled with this contradiction, history offers no compelling evidence. And because the enslaved had no power even to define their own existence, the brand prospered, grew, and exported its gospel of liberty to the world while quietly denying it at home.

And the contradiction did not take long to reveal its violence. In a country where one in seven men belonged to another, the confusion of the shackled black man, bewildered by a freedom shouted from every church and taverna, also marked the prelude to the deadliest massacre ever carried out on American soil.

Seventy years after independence, Mexicans became the first foreigners to taste the flavor of liberty that America distributed internally: losing 55 percent of their territory, land that would become six U.S. states, including all of California. Fifteen years later, America found itself facing an enemy far more dangerous than any foreign army, and to this day the only one truly capable of threatening its narrative: the mirror.

Young America had not yet turned ninety when it was forced to confront its own ideals. Liberty for whom? asked one American. For us, replied another. And who are we? was the devastating question neither could escape, answered at the cost of a war that devoured more American lives than all others combined. On the battlefield, someone who had once been property now wielded a musket: the black man, once chained, fighting, finally free, not to live the promise, but to die for it.

The war ended. America survived. The peace did not. Reconstruction, that brief attempt to turn former slaves into citizens, was dismantled as the nation grew weary of its own conscience. And so, without fanfare and without shame, Jim Crow emerged. Not as a rupture, but as a quiet continuation of what already existed. If slavery was a chain of iron, Jim Crow was its legal version: laws that separated, courts that upheld, police that enforced, churches that blessed, and a society determined to prove that the South’s military defeat had not required a moral one.

Unable to deliver the liberty it proclaimed, America settled into something easier: cynicism. Jim Crow structured the nation internally while the Caribbean and Latin America tasted the same bitter freedom once served to Mexico. The myth of “America” entered the 20th century triumphant, and Woodrow Wilson found in the World War I the perfect stage to elevate this cynicism into doctrine. While its courts segregated schools and buses, while its women could not vote, while its neighbors wondered when their turn for humiliation would come, the United States presented itself as an exporter of democracy it had not yet mastered at home.

The distance between a product and its mythology is rarely short, and never steady. Exhausted after World War I, Europe shortened that distance itself. While rebuilding, it sought American loans, American wheat, American machinery, and, perhaps most importantly, American reassurance. The rise of Hitler only accelerated the process: a perfect villain who both fertilized America’s rhetorical soil and shattered its European competitors in a single blow. Before the century’s midpoint, “America” had become the Coca-Cola of nations, omnipresent, refreshing in theory, consumed voraciously enough that the side effects went largely unnoticed.

After Hitler, American propaganda received an even greater gift: a permanent storyline. Against communism, nuance evaporated. If Moscow pointed a finger, Washington raised its voice. The American promise, once oscillating between domestic contradiction and external advertising, finally became an instrument of power. In practice, democracy meant alignment; liberty meant market access; and the “defense of free peoples” became a convenient euphemism for toppling governments that dared choose a different path. America discovered that its brand was more valuable than its arguments. It did not need to be the greatest democracy, only the most plausible one. For nearly half a century, plausibility sufficed, not because the world believed the myth, but because it lacked alternatives.

In Latin America, the doctrine found its ideal laboratory. Nations poor enough to depend, rich enough to interest, fragile enough to bend, and close enough for Washington to supervise without effort. There the promise became method, and the method became routine: elected governments labeled threats, social reforms called infiltration, sovereignty recast as disobedience. Guatemala learned this in 1954, Brazil in 1964, Chile in 1973. A simple trick, almost advertising: label a government “anti-American,” and intervention became self-justifying.

Somewhere between the Cold War’s end and the dawn of the digital age, America stopped selling its myth to the world and began believing it. The doctrine, once a geopolitical tool, became a national identity. The idea of being the last bastion of liberty became so deeply internalized that truth no longer mattered, repetition did. Hollywood supplied the aesthetics, universities the theory, and politics the liturgy. While the world saw contradictions, America saw coherence, while others saw intervention, it saw protection, while neighbors recalled coups and dictatorships, America looked in the mirror and saw only what it wished to see. The narrative eclipsed reality, and reality, resigned, circulated like a footnote. In this moment, when belief mattered more than verification, America pioneered what we now call the post-truth era: the ability to make a story overpower fact, provided it is spoken confidently enough.

The 21st century demanded from America what it had never needed to deliver: coherence. After 9/11, George W. Bush launched the War on Terror using the old mythology of democratic guardianship, now outfitted with drones, secret prisons, and legal exceptions. Torture became “procedure,” surveillance became “security,” and preemptive invasions were sold as freedom’s defense. The crack in the myth was visible: the nation that claimed to uphold the world’s moral architecture faltered when finally asked to uphold its own.

Then came Barack Obama, the last great advertisement of American exceptionalism. Son of an African father, raised without privilege, elected as a living emblem of the myth’s promise. Yet in office, he preserved the entire framework of the War on Terror: expanded drone strikes, endorsed mass surveillance, kept Guantánamo open, and followed the same interventionist doctrine he inherited. His rise restored faith in the myth, not its truth. The crack widened.

When Donald Trump emerged, many assumed America faced an anomaly, a deviation, a historical hiccup. But Trump was not the accident: he was the mirror. The country that spent a century exporting a narrative of virtue was forced, again, to confront its reflection, and it was neither democratic nor exceptional. It was built on the same contradictions it had long refused to acknowledge. The myth met its limit when the nation’s most fervent believers discovered that the promise of freedom did not include acceptance of defeat. The insurrection of January 6 did not inaugurate the crisis, it merely revealed it. America, long presenting itself as democracy’s guardian, had neglected to construct democracy robustly at home. The most dangerous enemy had never lived in Moscow, Beijing, or Tehran. He lived inside the house.

For a century, America subjected the world to institutional stress tests: overthrowing governments, sustaining dictatorships, financing rebellions, redesigning constitutions, always in the name of a democracy it claimed to understand better than those it disciplined. But it never tested itself. American stability, celebrated as virtue, was merely the absence of trials. Its institutional confidence was habit, not resilience. When Trump strained the system, the country discovered something unsettling: it did not know how to respond. Not for lack of laws or history, but for lack of practice.

The irony is exquisite. As America stumbled through its first real democratic stress test, South America, the region long dismissed as unstable, exotic, ungovernable, displayed institutional maturity precisely because it had faced what the United States never had (including what the United States once helped create). Coups, juntas, dictatorships, contested elections, impeachments, insurgencies, precarious transitions, the Southern continent wrote its democratic musculature in blood and contradiction. It is not perfect, it is practiced. And in this practice lies a kind of clarity.

In the end, America did not fall. It merely discovered it was human. And nothing is more dangerous to a brand built on divine promises than the recognition of its own humanity. Standing before the mirror it avoided for centuries, the country saw not the predestined nation it imagined, but one as fallible as those it spent a century judging. South America did not triumph, it endured. Its scars became strength. And in a rare moment of historical symmetry, it was we, the underestimated, the overruled, the repeatedly tested, who watched the guardian tremble before its own reflection.

No nation is grand enough to fool the mirror forever.