“We Can’t Live With Them”: The Endless Search for an Enemy in American History
Every generation in America seems to rediscover the same grim refrain: we can’t live with them.
The pronoun changes—Native Americans, Black people, immigrants, feminists, Muslims, liberals—but the underlying fear never does. Each time a new group demands equality, a familiar faction of Americans insists coexistence is impossible. And in 2025, with right-wing commentators warning that the nation is “on the brink of civil war,” it’s clear we’re watching this old story play out again.
The Oldest American Story
From the start, the United States has balanced two opposing ideals: freedom and hierarchy.
The mythology says we were founded on liberty, but in practice that liberty was reserved for white, property-owning men. The project of American democracy has always been to expand the circle of “We the People.” Each expansion—ending slavery, enfranchising women, protecting immigrants, recognizing LGBTQ+ rights—has been met by those who insist that inclusion itself is a threat.
The words change with the era. Nineteenth-century settlers spoke of “savage tribes.” Segregationists warned of “racial mixing.” Cold War politicians warned of “un-American elements.” Today’s far-right pundits talk about “globalists,” “woke mobs,” or “liberal elites.” But the emotional core remains the same: a conviction that someone else’s freedom endangers our own.
The Politics of Status Threat
Social psychologists call it status threat: when members of a dominant group perceive their cultural or demographic supremacy slipping, they experience equality as loss. That loss feels existential, even when their material conditions improve.
You can hear it in the comment threads under any polarizing article: a tone of aggrieved nostalgia, of people convinced that the country “used to be theirs” and has now been stolen. When a white Christian majority is no longer absolute, when gender roles blur, when the rich are criticized, the instinct isn’t to adapt—it’s to declare that coexistence is impossible.
The cry of “we can’t live with them” becomes both a lament and a battle plan.
The Right’s Latest Target: Liberals Themselves
In earlier generations, the enemies were racial or religious outsiders. Today, the target has shifted inward: liberals, urbanites, educators, journalists—in short, Americans who reject authoritarian moral order.
That shift is crucial. It means the “enemy” is no longer a foreign other but a domestic rival, a neighbor. The modern right has framed coexistence not as diversity but as surrender. Media personalities warn that compromise is weakness, that tolerance is corruption, that multiculturalism is a plot to erase “real Americans.”
So when an article like the recent Fox News piece amplifies talk of civil war, it doesn’t just reflect polarization—it deepens it. The comments under that story, filled with calls for readiness, vengeance, and purification, aren’t aberrations. They’re evidence of a movement that now defines itself by who it cannot live with.
Projection and the Politics of Fear
There’s an irony running through these reactions. While accusing liberals of celebrating violence, many right-wing commenters openly fantasize about using it.
They frame themselves as victims—besieged, persecuted, pushed too far—but their language drips with the logic of dominance: we’ll take the country back, we’ll teach them a lesson, we’ll cleanse the rot.
This is projection in its purest political form. When a movement believes it’s losing control, it externalizes that anxiety as moral panic. The right’s current obsession with “wokeness” is less about policy than about power: the fear that long-standing hierarchies—of race, gender, wealth, and belief—are dissolving.
To those who built their identity atop those hierarchies, equality feels like erasure.
And so they search for a new out-group to blame.
A Historical Through-Line
From the Trail of Tears to Jim Crow, from the Red Scare to the Moral Majority, from the War on Terror to Trump’s “Make America Great Again,” the pattern is unbroken. Each era finds a new version of “the other,” and each insists that this time the danger is existential.
But the truth is simpler and darker: what unites these panics is not fear of others—it’s fear of equality itself.
When America’s promise of pluralism advances, a portion of the population sees it not as fulfillment but as betrayal. That impulse has been remarkably durable, surviving centuries of social progress. It’s why the same rhetoric of grievance—once aimed at Native peoples, then Black Americans, then immigrants—now targets liberals and anyone perceived as “unpatriotic.”
The Illusion of Moral Superiority
The right’s language of moral decay is seductive because it flatters its audience. It tells people they’re not angry—they’re righteous. They’re not intolerant—they’re defending civilization. That moral framing allows political violence to masquerade as virtue.
But moral superiority built on exclusion is hollow. It produces not unity, but endless division; not faith, but fear. When every decade brings a new group we supposedly can’t live with, maybe the problem isn’t them. Maybe it’s the national myth that someone must always be beneath us for America to stand tall.
The Real American Project
The challenge now is not simply to survive polarization but to outgrow the story that sustains it.
Democracy was never meant to be comfortable. It demands that we share the nation with people we don’t like, can’t understand, and may never agree with. The alternative—the fantasy of purity, of “taking our country back”—has always led to repression and ruin.
The truth is we can live together. We always have, even if uneasily. The real question is whether we have the courage to keep expanding the circle of “us,” or whether we’ll let fear shrink it until only the powerful remain inside.
In the End
The right’s latest insistence that coexistence is impossible is not new—it’s the oldest American reflex.
But history also shows that every time that reflex flares up, it eventually fails. The nation endures not because we agree, but because enough people refuse to believe that disagreement makes others unworthy of life, liberty, or belonging.
If there’s hope for America, it lies there—in rejecting the comfort of enemies and embracing the discomfort of democracy.