About halfway through the 2024 film “Civil War,” the actor Jesse Plemons appears in an unforgettable cameo. Playing a psychopathic militiaman of unknown allegiance in an anarchic conflict that has divided America, he stands next to a mass grave filled with bodies. He has just sprinkled them with powder, but somehow his candy-colored sunglasses and eerily still demeanor are even more menacing. Brandishing his rifle at a multiracial group of journalists, he asks a question.
“What kind of American are you?”
Plemons blithely executes two journalists he deems foreign; the others manage a narrow escape, rescued by a colleague who arrives not a moment too soon.
It isn’t surprising that this searing seven-minute scene from a movie released before Donald Trump’s return to the White House has become something of a viral meme over the past year. Masked paramilitaries roam the streets of American cities, asking anyone whose Americanness they deem insufficiently obvious to prove they belong here. Brown skin or the hint of an unfamiliar accent is often reason enough for these agents to demand that a person show their papers and answer a version of the question, “What kind of American are you?”
But I have been thinking these past few weeks about that scene, and the movie as a whole, for deeper reasons. In Minnesota, I saw scenes that reminded me of the chaos and violence in civil wars I’ve covered in other countries. Heavily armed agents have rampaged through the streets, assaulting, tear-gassing and arbitrarily detaining people. They have fired on civilians at close range, killing two of them.
If this is a war, it is one-sided: The forces Trump has unleashed face not military opponents to their authority but ordinary people equipped with cellphones and whistles. Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota has activated the National Guard under his command, it’s true. But so far, they have been deployed to do little more than deliver coffee, hot cocoa and doughnuts to Minnesotans who have taken to the streets. There hasn’t been the kind of state and federal standoff that would constitute a classic civil war, though Walz has worried such a confrontation could soon be in the offing.
Yet the clash in Minneapolis has revealed a cleavage over the meaning of citizenship and constitutional rights perhaps as profound as the one that split the nation in 1861. The fight, now as it was then, is over that simple question: What kind of America are we?
This week, we got some answers.
There were the bystanders and accommodationists. On the day federal officers gunned down Alex Pretti, a nurse who cared for critically ill veterans, they were on full display. Dressed in tuxedos and ball gowns, some of the country’s richest men and women streamed into the White House for a special private screening of a hagiographic documentary about Melania Trump, the first lady.
Along with the chief executives of Apple and Amazon — the latter company had paid the first lady’s production company $40 million for the rights to the film — grandees and celebrities filled out the guest list. Beneath a glittering chandelier, gloved waiters served popcorn in glossy, black-and-white commemorative buckets. As if to underscore the transformation of the people’s house into a Trumpian Versailles, guests were sent home with French cookies emblazoned with the first lady’s name.
Then there were the aggressors. Not content to be largely silent supplicants, these Americans actively supported what had happened. Top administration figures like Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem rushed to paint Pretti as a domestic terrorist bent on slaughtering officers of the law. Never mind that he was a former boy scout and choir boy with no criminal record, his legally owned gun safely holstered. Perhaps most odiously, the conservative media personality Megyn Kelly declared that Pretti had only himself to blame for his death.
But arrayed against these powerful figures were the resisters, embodied by the two Americans gunned down in Minneapolis this month: Renee Good, a poet and a mother who had just dropped her son off at school, shot through the head by an ICE agent who, it was baselessly claimed, she sought to run down with her car; and Pretti, who bravely placed himself between federal agents and a woman they shoved to the ground, paying for this valor with his life.
There are Americans like Stella Carlson, who happened to be driving through the Minneapolis neighborhood where federal officers killed Pretti. In a gripping interview on CNN, she described her terror as she stumbled into the tense confrontation between the officers and Pretti. After the killing of Good, she was well aware of the danger she faced in the simple act of pulling out her phone and recording what was unfolding in front of her.
“I was terrified, but I was more worried about this not being documented,” she said. “I was his backup.”
And then there are Americans like Representative Ilhan Omar, who came to Minnesota as a child refugee fleeing a gruesome civil war in Somalia. Despite being one of the most vilified and threatened members of Congress, she convened a community meeting with her constituents to discuss the violence unfolding on her state’s streets. When a crazed member of the audience lunged at her, spraying her with a syringe of liquid, she didn’t shrink away. She rushed toward the man, fists raised.
“I’m fortunate I didn’t get to him because I’d probably be catching charges as well,” she later quipped.
Many of her Republican colleagues in the House have stopped holding in-person town halls, too afraid to face their constituents. Yet despite the attack on her, Omar insisted the meeting continue. “We are Minnesota strong,” she declared as she returned to her lectern, “and we will stay resilient in the face of whatever they might throw at us.”
Carlson and Omar are just two of the tens of thousands of Minnesotans who have come together in an extraordinary display of community. Together, they have delivered meals to those too afraid of ICE to leave home, escorted children to school and families to doctors’ appointments to protect them from prowling agents and continued to film ICE operations despite the dangers involved. These brave Minnesotans are trying to save their idea of America.
Recent polling suggests that a clear majority of Americans are recoiling from the violent scenes playing out on their screens. The country, it seems, is looking at this situation and saying, “We are not this kind of America.”
But who we are is not just the idea we have of ourselves. It is also how others see us. The 19th-century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel elucidated this truth: The essence of our identity is not something we make on our own — it requires the recognition of others to be real. How we are perceived by others doesn’t just reflect who we are. It constitutes it.
Over the past year, Trump has enacted a sudden and savage remaking of America’s identity in the eyes of the world. He has sundered old alliances, shredded international law and wielded American power to intimidate friends and rivals alike. He has abducted the leader of a sovereign nation, threatened to seize land from a NATO ally and sought to usurp the institutions of the postwar order with new ones that he personally controls.
We’d like the world to think America looks like Pretti — a brave and selfless figure who intervened to protect a woman being menaced by armed men. But from the outside, America under Trump looks a lot more like the jittery officers in terrifying black masks who drew their weapons and unloaded their bullets into the body of an unarmed man on his knees.
So is it any wonder that the rest of the world is making other plans? In a speech heard around the world last week, Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada declared that “we are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition,” leaving no doubt that the source of this rupture was a newly rapacious America under Trump. If America was once the guarantor of an imperfect but functional global order, it is now an obstacle to be avoided, or even an outright antagonist.
Carney’s words came amid a frenzy of globe-shaking developments that pointedly seek to work around a newly volatile America: mega trade deals between the European Union and India and Latin America; chummy pilgrimages to China by once staunch American allies like Canada and Britain; and deepening trade links the world over.
For all Trump’s grandstanding efforts to fashion the world in his dark image of power, the world clearly has other ideas. The coming world order, whatever it may be, will be shaped by others — and America will need to negotiate its place in it. In a week of revelations, this is perhaps the most stark. No matter how selfless our Minnesota martyrs, no matter how valiant our resisters, the kind of America we will be won’t be of our choosing alone.
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