America Isn’t “The Free World.” It’s the World’s Loudest Brand.
- Shane Warren
- 14 hours ago
- 8 min read
There’s a particular kind of national myth that travels well. It fits on a bumper sticker. It sounds strong when shouted into a microphone. It also collapses the moment it touches reality. You know the one I mean...
“America is great.”
“That sort of thing doesn’t happen here.”
“We’re the liberal democratic gold standard.”
And then, like a bad sequel nobody asked for, middle-power democracies start importing the theatre: harsher immigration talk, “values” screening, suspicion masquerading as policy, and that exhausting insistence that the problem is outsiders rather than the structural failures we’ve refused to fix.
Australia is not immune to this. We’re watching it creep in again now, dressed up as seriousness, safety, and “common sense.” The Coalition’s (Liberal National Party, the opposition currently) proposal to create a migration screening taskforce and prioritise migration from “liberal democracies” is being sold as a policy upgrade; it reads, to many, like values-wash for selective belonging; the kind where people who look like us get framed as “compatible,” and people who don’t get framed as “risk.”
This is where I want to take the gloves off, not because nuance isn’t needed, but because we’re being trained to accept cruelty with a PowerPoint.
The trick: “liberal democracy” as a costume word
When politicians say, “we’ll prioritise migrants from liberal democracies,” it sounds like a values statement. It’s meant to sound like civilisation protecting itself.
But watch what happens when you translate it into plain language:
“We will select migrants who feel familiar.”
“We will treat difference as a suspicion.”
“We’ll call it safety, so you don’t notice it’s prejudice.”
And yes, you can dress that up in security language. You can sell it as “screening,” “integrity,” “Australian values.” But if the policy logic quietly tracks race, religion, and cultural comfort, then it isn’t liberalism. It’s tribalism with better tailoring.
The irony is that this move is often justified by pointing at the United States as the lodestar, the strong ally, the free world, the model of democratic virtue, while the actual American story is not “liberal democracy as moral project.” It’s frequently money, power, and spectacle with democracy as a contested operating system.
Stop worshipping a country that can’t keep its own democracy calm
Here’s one of the most inconvenient facts we keep stepping around: the United States has an unusually lethal relationship with political violence compared with peer democracies. That’s not an insult. It’s a description.
Both history and more recent events spell it out plainly: political violence is generally rare, but the US has the highest fatality rates from political violence among Western countries (with Greece noted as an exception), and its history contains repeated, high-profile political and ideologically motivated killings and attacks.
It is important to note here that this article is about something deeper than “bad people doing bad things.” The US has a political anomaly: where many modern democracies consolidated what Max Weber called the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force, the US was born in opposition to an existing state (imperial Britain), carrying a deep historical distrust of government force and then coded a tolerance for non-state violence into its political culture through the Second Amendment; i.e. ‘The Right to Bear Arms.’
That’s not culture-war commentary. That’s political sociology 101. Weber’s definition is blunt: the modern state is the human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a territory.
When a society treats private weaponry not just as permissible but as identity; when “armed citizenship” becomes an emotional religion, you are not simply debating policy. You are debating the structure of authority itself. And if your political identity is built on the refusal to let the state be the state, then political conflict is always one bad week away from becoming physical.
So, when Australian politicians import the American posture - the swagger, the suspicion, the “strongman realism” - we should be asking: which America are you importing? The one that sells freedom like a brand? Or the one that lives with the consequences of a fractured social contract and a heavily armed civic culture?
The “no place for this in America” line is the lie that keeps getting people killed
One of the most nauseating rituals after each American episode of political violence is the line: “There’s no place for this in America.” Leaders keep saying it, yet American history shows the opposite…
Assassinated presidents. Civil rights leaders murdered. Politicians shot dead when they answer the front door. Partners of Speakers of House attacked with a hammer in their lounge room. Domestic terrorism. Mass shootings with ideological motives. The list is not a glitch, it’s a pattern.
If you want an evidence-aware public discussion of how political violence emerges, the Union of Concerned Scientists’ summary ‘What Research Tells Us about Political Violence’ is worth reading precisely because it refuses to treat violence as random madness. It points to what research has explored for decades: grievances, polarisation, institutional distrust, and the ways elites and systems can either de-escalate or inflame risk.
That connects directly to my point about contemporary drivers: polarisation and a crisis of democratic representation create fertile ground for violence. When people feel unheard, when institutions feel captured, when wealth concentrates and daily life becomes unaffordable, some people stop believing politics is a process and start believing politics is a threat.
Let’s be clear, that does not justify violence, but it explains the conditions in which it grows.
Here’s what Australia’s “values” migration talk is really doing
Now let’s drag this back to our own backyard.
The values-screening posture sells a story: migrants are the risk; “Australian values” are the fix; control is strength; suspicion is prudence. But the deeper social effect is always the same: it teaches the public to look for enemies. And when societies start rehearsing enemy-making, they rarely stop at migrants.
The target list expands: activists, academics, journalists, queer communities, “elites,” unions, “woke councils,” “inner-city types,” students, anyone who makes the world feel less simple. Meanwhile, the real drivers of public pain such as housing scarcity, stagnant wages, insecure work, collapsing public services, the long slow theft of the commons all remain conveniently untouched.
It’s not that migrants “cause nothing.” It’s that scapegoating migrants is the oldest political trick on earth: redirect anger away from power and toward the nearest visible difference.
And if we want to be honest, “liberal democracies only” is often less about democracy and more about aesthetic comfort - the quiet belief that some people are naturally easier to absorb because they mirror the dominant culture. That’s not values. That’s preference masquerading as principle.
The US isn’t a moral model, it’s a warning label about what happens when money eats democracy
I know this will sting some American friends and to be clear, I’m not speaking about Americans as individuals. I’m speaking about a system and a mythology that the rest of the world keeps romanticising.
In too many domains, the US is not “liberal democracy in its pure form.” It is a democracy in constant negotiation with capital.
If you want the simplest observation: when money can buy political outcomes at scale, democracy becomes performance art. And when democracy becomes performance art, people either disengage… or radicalise.
That’s not me being dramatic. That’s the downstream logic of a society where healthcare can bankrupt you, housing can exile you, education can chain you to debt, and politics can feel like an auction.
So, when Australian conservatives import the American script… migrants are the problem, defence spending is salvation, strongman posture is maturity, empathy is weakness; they’re not importing “liberal democracy.” They’re importing an ideology of hierarchy dressed in democratic language. And they’re selling it to Australians as if it’s sophistication.
“We’re a better democracy than them” is how prejudice learns to speak politely
One of the slickest moves in modern politics is using the language of “democracy” to justify discrimination.
It sounds like this:
“We are not racist, we are selective.”
“We are not exclusionary, we are protecting values.”
“We are not fearful, we are realistic.”
But if your selection criteria consistently prefers “people like us,” then it is simply prejudice with a clipboard.
If you need proof that this kind of logic is combustible, look again at the US: a society saturated in “freedom” language while struggling with civic trust, political polarisation, and a recurring relationship with ideological violence that other peer democracies do not tolerate at the same scale.
The throat-hit truth: you don’t get to call yourself a liberal democracy while rehearsing dehumanisation
Here’s the line I want Australia to keep in its mouth like a lozenge: You cannot build social cohesion by teaching people to fear each other. And you cannot claim the moral high ground of “liberal democracy” while using “values” as a proxy for racial comfort.
If you want a stable democracy, you invest in the boring stuff:
housing supply that people can afford
public services that work
wages that match the cost of living
institutions people trust
civics education that teaches complexity rather than slogans
a political class that stops feeding the public junk narratives for short-term advantage
And yes: you enforce law fairly. You screen sensibly. You take genuine security risks seriously. But you do not turn migration into a theatre of suspicion, because the theatre doesn’t end at the airport. It spills into the streets.
Oaky, then what does “strength” actually look like?
If we’re going to talk about strength, and let’s be honest conservatives love that word, let’s define it properly.
Strength is not suspicion.
Strength is not brutality.
Strength is not choosing the easiest target and calling it leadership.
Strength is a democracy that can tell the truth about itself without collapsing into either self-hatred or propaganda.
Strength is being able to say:
“America is our ally, but it is not our blueprint.”
“Security matters, and so does human dignity.”
“Migration is complex, and scapegoating is lazy.”
“Difference is not a threat; fragility is.”
Strength is refusing to import another country’s political psychosis because it plays well on social media.
A Closing Thought
As someone who has spent a lot of time the USA. I have studied there, holidayed there, earned a living from it. So, I understand why “America is great” is seductive. It’s a story with a soundtrack. It’s a mythology that feels like certainty. And in uncertain times, certainty sells.
But we are not children shopping for heroes. We’re a middle power democracy trying to live together on purpose. If our leaders want to talk about “values,” let’s start with this one:
A liberal democracy is not defined by who it excludes.
It is defined by how it protects dignity while managing complexity.
And if we keep importing the American culture-war model - migrants as menace, strongmen as saviours, cruelty as realism - we will find ourselves living in a colder country, with a louder politics, and a weaker social fabric. Not because migrants broke us. Because we did, by choosing fear over competence.
Footnote: In this article I reference Greece as an exemption when I speak of political violence. Why? Greece is often noted as an “exception” in comparative discussions of political-violence fatalities across Western democracies because it experienced prolonged periods of ideologically motivated domestic violence and terrorism in the late 20th century, which can lift its figures in certain datasets. This is not a moral judgement about Greece (or the Greek people), and it is not unique: Ireland’s troubles with IRA and Spain’s ETA-era violence are also reminders that political violence has appeared in multiple European democracies. The point here is narrower: the United States remains unusually exposed to lethal political violence among peer democracies, in part because of the scale of civilian gun availability and the way political polarisation plays out in a heavily armed society.
References and Sources:
ABC News reporting on the Coalition migration proposal and “screening taskforce” framing. (ABC News)
Lecture summary: U.S. Political Violence, State Monopoly on Force, and the Second Amendment (2026-04-29) — key claims on US anomaly, Second Amendment as tolerance of non-state violence, and representation/polarisation drivers.
Max Weber, Politics as a Vocation (state as monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force). (Balliol College, University of Oxford)
Union of Concerned Scientists: “What Research Tells Us about Political Violence” (overview of research findings and risk factors). (The Equation)
PBS NewsHour analysis on extremist violence trends and the need for evidence-based understanding. (PBS)
Journal of Democracy: “The Rise of Political Violence in the United States” (historical/political dynamics and mobilisation). (Journal of Democracy)
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