NEW BOOK INTRODUCTION

The Lie We Lived

America was built on a promise. It was an audacious experiment, an idea so radical that it shook the foundations of the old world: that power could rest not in kings, aristocrats, or priests but in the hands of ordinary people. That government would be accountable to the governed. That law would apply equally to all. That truth and reason would guide our politics and that liberty, once secured, would endure.

We were raised to believe that democracy was not just an idea but an unbreakable reality. No matter how dark the days or how strong the opposition, the system would self-correct, the truth would win, and justice would prevail. We thought America had safeguards, laws, institutions, and elections that would make tyranny impossible. We assured ourselves that a demagogue could never take control here, that the people would always reject dictatorship, that the mistakes of history belonged to other nations, to other peoples, to a distant and less enlightened past.

It was all a lie.

Not a deliberate lie, perhaps, but a myth we told ourselves to avoid facing the fragility of our system. Because the truth is this: democracy was never permanent. It was never self-sustaining. It was an ongoing struggle that required constant vigilance, education, and a shared moral code. And America, lulled into arrogance and complacency, let all three slip away.

We let ignorance become a political force, no longer something to be corrected but something to be embraced and weaponized. We let wealth buy power so that laws became tools of the few rather than protections for the many. We let religious extremists creep into government, stripping away the barrier between church and state, replacing reason with dogma, and turning faith into a justification for oppression.

Worst of all, we ignored the warnings. We saw the signs: leaders who praised dictators, dismissed truth as inconvenient, encouraged violence, attacked the press, and dismantled the guardrails of democracy one by one, and we did nothing. We told ourselves the system would hold. We told ourselves the courts would stop them. We told ourselves that "it could never happen here."

But it has.

America is no longer a democracy. That is not a statement of fear but a statement of fact. The transition is complete. What we are witnessing now is not the destruction of democracy; it is what comes after. It is the entrenchment of a new order: an oligarchy ruled by billionaires, a theocracy dictated by religious fundamentalists, and an autocracy controlled by a man who views himself as above the law.

There is no cavalry coming, no institutional failsafe, no automatic correction. There is no next election that will fix this, and there is no Supreme Court ruling that will undo what has been done. The game has been rigged, the rules are rewritten, and those who hold power will not give it up willingly.

So, what do we do?

This book is not a warning. Warnings are for those who still have time to act. This is a reckoning, a reflection on what has already happened and what it means for those of us who now live under the reality of American fascism. Some will accept it, some will fight it, and some will flee.

But the lie is dead. The illusion has shattered.

The question now is not whether America can be saved. It is whether America, as we knew it, still exists at all.

William James Spriggs