Who Will Survive in America™?

"America is not a country. It’s just a business. Now fuckin pay me."

Killing Them Softly

The Christmas fury unleashed over American immigration reminded me of one of my favorite pulp movies, Killing Them Softly. For those who haven’t seen it (you should), Brad Pitt plays Jackie Coogan, a hitman who cleans up a sordid situation for the Mafia in the run-up to Obama’s first election. The name of the film comes from Cogan's preferred method of murder - clean, professional, and without unnecessary pain. Despite this small mercy, the movie is deeply cynical, and its ending perhaps the greatest indictment of the American dream I have ever seen.

It’s worth quoting the final few lines, just for full measure. Watch the clip as well.

Barack Obama (on TV): [delivering his election victory speech] ... to reclaim the American dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth that out of many, we are one.

Driver: You hear that line? Line's for you.

Jackie : Don't make me laugh. We're one people. It's a myth created by Thomas Jefferson.

Driver: Oh, now you're gonna have a go at Jefferson, huh?

Jackie : My friend, Jefferson's an American saint because he wrote the words, "All men are created equal." Words he clearly didn't believe, since he allowed his own children to live in slavery. He was a rich wine snob who was sick of paying taxes to the Brits. So yeah, he wrote some lovely words and aroused the rabble, and they went out and died for those words, while he sat back and drank his wine and fucked his slave girl. This guy wants to tell me we're living in a community. Don't make me laugh. I'm living in America, and in America, you're on your own. America's not a country. It's just a business. Now fucking pay me.

Perhaps a line that could only have been uttered in the wake of the financial crash (the film came out in 2012). Perhaps it takes someone from a place that’s even less of a country than America (the soon-to-be-a-state of Canada) to say this, but I can’t help but shake the feeling that Jackie is right.

America is not a country. It used to be, I’d like it to be, but those days are, rightly or wrongly, long gone. It’s now a business. Not just a business, as Coogan says; it’s easily the best business in human history, but it’s just not a country. Not in the same way that Greece and China are countries—bad news for the last of the remaining Americans - a founding nation facing not replacement but incorporation.

More on that later. A quick reminder of the relevant definitions.

Country (noun): a nation with its own government, occupying a particular territory.

Nation (noun): a large body of people united by common descent, history, culture, or language, inhabiting a particular country or territory.

Buisness (noun): A business is defined as an organization or enterprising entity engaged in commercial, industrial, or professional activities.

America™ and the Americans

The people whose ancestors fought at Lexington and Concord, who manifested their destiny, who turned a colonial backwater into a superpower - are experiencing what every founder does when their startup scales beyond their wildest dreams: dilution. Truth be told, they have been for some time. Those people belonged to a nation and still exist in increasingly smaller numbers. These are our Americans, though they would perhaps characterize themselves differently than I have. Possibly more akin to Eduardo Saverin after finding out there are new investors in a dream he once had much more control of. Of course, successful companies rarely stay true to their founders' original vision. Facebook wasn't meant to be a global advertising platform filled with bizzaro AI slop. Amazon wasn't supposed to be running half the internet's infrastructure. And America? America wasn't originally supposed to become the new colossus, one with conquering limbs astride from land to land.

Yet here they are. Or should I say we? I have an admission that must be made: I am a naturalized American who gained citizenship as a dependent on my father’s H1-B visa. I was born in Canada but grew up in Williamsburg, Virginia, next to Jamestown, the birthplace of the American experiment. My dad sells seafood, though, not software, and I am also well aware that Canadians are not considered immigrants in the same way as those from Cambodia or Kashmir, but still—exact same process, exact same costs. Perhaps some will say I need to go back, having read this far, but read on! You’ll find out I already have, for better or for worse. If you’re still living in the USA, you are a part of America™. This applies to citizens and non-citizens alike. It even applies, though more loosely, to expats like me, who thought they could leave and then learned that no, you can only check out of one form of America™and into another. So we then. We are living under the umbrella of the American trademark.

And here is the first place where the “America is a country” argument begins to break down. It doesn’t occupy a particular fixed place. It occupies a great and growing swath of this world. Some of these places are geographical. America occupies Ukraine much as it occupies the Taiwan Strait and the borders of Israel, and many military bases all across the globe. It occupies the McDonald's in Malaysia and the Starbucks in Spain. Can we say the same for Spanish cultural conquest because you can find the Spanish clothing chain Zara in Boston and Birmingham? Of course not; Zara itself belongs to America™ (be honest, did you know Zara was Spanish? Is anything about Zara remotely Spanish?) by virtue of being a soulless, interchangeable multinational chain. No other country can claim anywhere near the same reach of totalizing turbo-empire, one that also occupies the hearts and minds of many, from the slums of Chennai to the no-longer-quite-slums of China to the stultifying red sands of PEI that my father was so determined to leave behind. America™ is everywhere now.

Country (noun): a nation with its own government, occupying a particular territory.

Regardless of where they are from, people can become Americans™ in a way that works in no other country. I could not become Irish, no matter how hard I may try. Genetically, I am pretty Irish. But even if I were to move to Galway, gain citizenship, integrate into the community, and even talk up step-dancing, I would never become Irish. The Irish can become Americans, though, and many have in the nearly 200 years since the potato famine first drove them west, just like the Germans before them and the Jews, Italians, Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, and many more ethnicities since. That Americans who can trace their lineage back to Gettysburg or even earlier cannot do the same and fully inhabit somewhere else to even a remotely similar degree should they choose to emigrate is not fair, is not necessarily anyone’s fault, and yet remains a fact that can’t be restrained, only reconciled with. As I wrote about the British back in March, the Americans “don't have the option of saying they are proud to be an immigrant, they are not, they are home. But they don't have the option of being proud of that either.”

Another fact is that America™’s headquarters, the contiguous USA, is comprised of many nations. Of course, there are the literal First Nations (note the plural) who were around before the Americans showed up and are still, in some ways, self-governing. Then there are the African Americans, who the soon-to-be-Americans brought and bonded into their new country. Despite 400 years of cohabitation, these three groups are still meaningfully distinct from each other - in what sense are they a part of the same nation in the same way that Mongolians are, who have maintained cultural continuity since before Genghis Khan? Then you have the waves of successive European migrations across the 1800s and the newer waves of even farther-flung newcomers seeking the New American Dream, the one invented in 1958 and codified in 1965. When Irish Catholics were spat on as they got off of boats and into the ghettos, when the Eastern European Jews were barred from Protestant civic institutions, or when the Japanese were barred into camps, were they just as American as the WASPs? Are they now?

Or, did they recognize the truth in a way that modern Americans cannot reconcile them to? The truth is that America™ has always been what it is now— an engine for capturing the competition between different people and turning that energy into technological, cultural, and occasionally even moral progress. If they could come to terms with this, those last remaining Americans might discover that their competitive advantage within America™ lies not in their founding stake upon the lower 48 but in their deep understanding of how the set of ideas that originated from it operates. After all, they built it. But they didn’t build it alone; they did it through fierce and often cruel competition with everyone else who tried to claim a piece of the American identity.

Like all businesses, America™ is competitive.

Nation (noun) : a large body of people united by common descent, history, culture, or language, inhabiting a particular country or territory.

Country (noun) : a nation with its own government, occupying a particular territory.

(I leave the question of whether any of the nations that make up America actually have “their own government” to the libertarians.)

Memes > Genes

Long before Silicon Valley's code began consuming the world, America™ had already shipped its cultural operating system globally. From Liberia's constitution to Germany and Japan's post-war democracies, modern governments and economies run on American™ software. Democratic institutions, market capitalism, presidential systems—these were America's first viral exports, spreading from mind to mind, nation to nation, rewriting the global order in America™’s image. This is because, at its core, a business is a meme - an idea replicating itself through minds and markets, unconstrained by the biological limitations that bind traditional human organizations. Whether America™’s software update is compatible with the world is for others to argue. What matters to us is that the world's source code has been rewritten in America™’s image.

Humans are unique among Earth's creatures in their ability to operate outside family units and build trust and cooperative networks with perfect strangers. We can create abstractions (such as LLCs) that enable coordination at scales that would make even the most complex ant colony seem quaint. Put simply, our memes are more potent than our genes. A nation is really just an extended family unit, bound together by shared blood, soil, and story (and in that order). In that frame, a country is a family home, shared genes on shared land. But America™ broke that model. It became something else entirely: a platform for human coordination that transcends genetic ties, including those of the Americans. Capital benefits from cooperation and the inter-ethnic battles that helped forge America™ were subsumed by economic self-interest. And then it began to subsume everywhere else - successful code consuming the world.

This transformation wasn't an accident—it was the price of total victory. American dominance created its own gravitational pull, drawing in talent and ambition from every corner of the globe. The success of the America™ experiment (and each great start-up is an experiment) made traditional American nationhood untenable. How could the winners of history's greatest game expect to keep their playground exclusive? They wanted to enjoy their victory, and others would do whatever it took for the chance to play the same game. The spoils of success inevitably included the dilution of the very thing that made it possible.

I am afraid that this is where the Americans must be killed softly. If it's any consolation, it's nothing personal, just physics. But someone must deliver the hard truth: the pre-1965 nation they pine for was always destined to become America™, not because of any policy or political decision but because of their own success. Simple inertia did the rest. They built something too beautiful, created something too compelling, too powerful to remain merely a country. Each victory, from the Marshall Plan to the Moon landing to the creation of the internet, inevitably created more would-be Americans™. To wish it were otherwise is to wish their ancestors had failed at their outset. Unfortunately, victory defeated them all the same; all they won was the chance to push the costs off for a few decades. Their descendants face the ultimate founder's dilemma: adapt to the entity they created or be left behind by it. They can't preserve their equity stake; dilution is inevitable when running the world's most successful enterprise. At best, they might leverage their founder status into a meaningful role in America's next phase. Will they be like Jobs, ousted but eventually returning to guide a new renaissance? Or will they be like Yahoo's founders, watching from the sidelines as their creation becomes unrecognizable?

Who Will Survive In America™?

A synthesis of the emerging right-wing coalition, with figures like J.D. Vance straddling old and new America™, represents one possible future for the American™ enterprise. But as the Christmas immigration meltdown demonstrated, it's unstable right now, with two different versions of the American dream fighting a civil war. As Republicans, new and old, are learning, you can't simultaneously be the party of American heritage and the party of global talent optimization. The attempt to maintain both inevitably collapses into contradiction. Like trying to run a family business on a global scale, the imperatives of growth eventually overwhelm the founders' original vision. Some Americans seem to understand this intuitively; they sense that to preserve what they value, they might need to look elsewhere.

Those Americans seeking a return to homogeneity and cultural stasis might find what they're looking for—just not in that place that used to be America. Smaller European nations might offer more demographic stability and cultural continuity they yearn for. In the traditional sense, these are still real countries in a way that America™'s ruthless arena is not. Perhaps there's a grand bargain to be struck: Europe could maintain its cultural continuity by redirecting its newcomers toward the great American™ frontier, while America's heritage-seekers could return to their ancestral homelands. "Go back to England" becomes less an insult than a solution - though not the one either side might have expected. Diaspora, returning home at last. Rather than trying to change New York, move to (Old) York - its population is 93% proto-American.

Of course, this solution is impossible. That the Americans don't even suggest it reveals their preference for the frontier and the quiet acceptance of the true situation the entire world now finds itself in. No one can escape what the Americans built - even Europe's most homogeneous corners are being inexorably pulled into America™'s orbit. The cruel irony is that while Europe grapples with integration challenges after assuming it could assimilate newcomers in the same way as America™ did, forgetting they were actual countries and not corporations. American™ software ate the old world, and now there’s nowhere to go. I have discovered that there is no longer any "outside" to America™'s operating system. The only way out is through. Inertia brought us to this moment and will have to carry us out.

This was never about politics but physics—the gravitational pull of success and the inevitable transformation of a nation into a global network. America™ isn't failing to be a stable, unified country - it was never stable, never unified, and as for being a country? It has evolved beyond that form entirely. The Americans built something more enduring than an empire. They built a platform, an operating system, and a new way of organizing human ambition and ability. Now, like all founders, they must face the consequences of their success.

The question is not whether America will survive the challenges of immigration and integration; that country is gone. The question is: who will survive in America™?