The United States of America is a truck that has driven into a ditch, a program that has been hacked, and a nation of countless contradictions as it nears its quarter-millennium mark, writes Rebecca Solnit. It is a country where guns outnumber people, yet it produced nonviolent resistance's most lyrical advocate, Martin Luther King Jr.
A Country of Extremes
The US is the masked ICE agent shooting Renee Good as she stood up for immigrants, but it is also Good herself and the immigrants, and the streets of Minneapolis with their Dakota and Ojibwe Indigenous past, present, and future. Before 1865, it was slaveowners, but also the enslaved and the abolitionists. It is the KKK and the ACLU and the NAACP, right-to-life terrorists and Planned Parenthood security guards. It is Chevron and Exxon and the Sierra Club, founded in San Francisco in 1892, and thousands of environmental groups today.
Population and Prisons
The US is 340 million people, including almost 2 million prisoners—a population larger than 12 US states. Solnit suggests that prison can be imagined as the 51st state, one with virtually no representation. It is the country that gave the world jazz, blue jeans, atom bombs, and the birth control pill; it is its best and worst people and products.
The Current Political Landscape
At its heart, the US has always been an experiment, an argument, and a question with countless answers. Currently, one-third of the White House built under Roosevelt has been wrecked and carted away, its rose garden paved over, and its lawn covered with a glitzy Thunderdome arena. But the current president is not the country. The US is the 77 million adult citizens who voted for him, the 75 million who voted for Harris, and the nearly 90 million who didn't vote, plus children, noncitizens, prisoners, and former prisoners.
Land and Future
The US is the land itself—from maple and birch forests of the northeast to Alaska's glaciers to Hawaii's tropical rainforests, with prairie, swamp, and desert in between. That land existed billions of years before 1776 and will exist long after the US ceases to exist. The US is also the desert tortoises that have ambled through the Mojave for 60 million years and the people who created protected lands for them.
Demographic Shifts and Young Leaders
The US will become a non-white majority country in a couple of decades, despite white nationalists' efforts. Solnit highlights young leaders: Renee Good, 37, shot on 7 January, and Alex Pretti, also 37, shot on 24 January, who faced death for their beliefs. Zohran Mamdani, age 34, became New York City's first Muslim mayor on New Year's Day 2026, beating Andrew Cuomo. On 8 February, Bad Bunny, 32, performed a Super Bowl halftime show celebrating Puerto Rico in Spanish. On 19 February, Alysa Liu, daughter of a Chinese refugee, won Olympic figure-skating gold, shouting, 'That's what I'm fucking talking about.'
Protests and Hope
The No Kings demonstration on 28 March saw 8 million people protest in every congressional district. Solnit concludes with Lincoln at Gettysburg: 'It is for us the living to be dedicated here to the unfinished work... that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.' She believes Trump has badly broken the US, but not destroyed it, and that what comes after must include consequences for criminals and a massive cleanup operation.
