I am a Gen X refugee from Cambodia, a nation whose very displacement was rooted in the moral paradox of American power. My family and I fled the consequences of the U.S. bombing campaign during the Vietnam War—an escalation that destabilized my country and contributed directly to the rise of the murderous Khmer Rouge regime. Though I experienced the effects of America’s darker history, I found the United States to be defined by its commitment to democracy, liberty, free speech, and justice for all. We, who escaped regimes where words meant prison and ballots were mockeries, clung to this myth of America as the ultimate covenant—a self-correcting experiment in truth.

Now, years later, I stand dispossessed not of a homeland, but of a belief. My shock is not born of culture clash, but of political disillusionment. The country I was taught to admire, the one that stood as a beacon of principle, is now revealed to be a house built on selective memory, inhabited by those who often seem fundamentally uninterested in the mechanics of their own liberation.

The Arrogance of Inherited Freedom

When I first arrived and began to understand the contrast between war torn Cambodia and my new, stable country, I carried an arrogance I am now ashamed of. Growing up in a nation that seemingly enshrined democracy, free speech, and liberty—with its checks and balances, its robust press, and its civic rituals—I used to scoff at countries like Cambodia. I saw them as perpetually broken, struggling to rebuild a democratic framework I had taken for granted. I viewed their political struggles, their corruption, and their authoritarian impulses with the distant, superior judgment of someone who was lucky enough to grow up in America.

I was dumb. I was a fool to think I was inherently better, or that the system I was now part of possessed some kind of moral immunity. That judgment, rooted in the security of my inherited American freedom, was ignorant of how quickly civic health can decay, and how fragile the veneer of stability truly is. I assumed America’s principles were a permanent state of being, not a perpetual work requiring maintenance, defense, and confrontation. The intervening years have taught me that the moral high ground is not guaranteed by a document; it is lost one suppressed truth and one unchallenged power grab at a time.

The Shock of False Promises

The distance between the American promise and the American reality is vast and cruel. From afar, the First Amendment was a sacred text; up close, its defense is treated like a partisan commodity. Today, we live in a documented “Free Speech Recession.” It is not merely that speech is debated; it is that the powerful, both governmental and corporate, operate with brazen impunity to chill, punish, and retaliate against dissent. I have witnessed the slow erosion of a critical consciousness—a chilling effect that makes those of us who have lived without speech fear for the silence of those who merely inherited it.

This erosion is mirrored by a profound national amnesia regarding civic duty. The core institutions of this democracy—the judiciary, the presidency, the legislature—are losing the faith of the governed. As reports by groups like the ABA Task Force on American Democracy indicate, public trust in these institutions has reached alarming lows. Yet, for large swaths of the American-born population, this institutional decay is met not with civic repair, but with historical ignorance or, worse, willful political fantasy.

I watched, stunned, as natural-born Americans—those who possess the inheritance of these liberties—chose confusion over clarity, electing to forget the very governmental processes they swore allegiance to. The pursuit of happiness, which my forebears understood to be inextricably linked to justice and education, has devolved into a mere pursuit of self-interest, divorced from any collective responsibility. This is not true of every American-born citizen, but it is a crisis of scale.

The Earned Patriotism

This descent is doubly jarring because of the price we, the outsiders, have paid. Refugees and immigrants do not inherit the right to belong; we earn it, every day, in perpetuity. We carry the memory of what the absence of democracy feels like, and therefore, we cherish the idea of this Republic with a fervent, demanding love that few born here can grasp.

Our patriotism is not an accident of birth; it is a conscious choice. We studied civics not to pass a test, but to understand the rules of survival. This is why the paradox exists: studies by groups like the Cato Institute and the American Immigration Council have consistently found that immigrants often display higher levels of trust in U.S. government institutions and express comparable, or even higher, degrees of national pride than their native-born counterparts.

Why this inversion? Because we choose the ideal over the reality, hoping the ideal might still win. We are less critical because we are often too busy proving our loyalty to be seen as critically engaged. The American-born, particularly those who have held cultural and political power for generations, do not feel the need to justify their presence. Their patriotism is passive; ours is earned through documentation, vetting, and continuous cultural assimilation—a perpetual audition for a role we may never fully secure.

The Entitlement of Stolen Ground

Here lies a key driver of American civic failure: the inheritance of entitlement. The passive patriotism of many among American-born citizens is ultimately rooted in the foundational crime of this nation: stolen land and stolen labor.

For generations, white entitlement has been confused with American identity, allowing a blindness to historical debt to become a central feature of the national character. The failure to address or even acknowledge the brutal history of Indigenous land removal—sanctioned by concepts like the Doctrine of Discovery—and the enduring legacy of chattel slavery creates a structural historical vacuum. It is the original sin that makes the current generation susceptible to civic ignorance. They are taught to view this land as an unqualified inheritance, not a responsibility built atop generations of unpaid moral and physical debt.

This settler entitlement is the silent engine of modern political apathy and intellectual laziness. If you believe your place here is guaranteed, if you believe the land you stand on is unconditionally yours, why should you study the complex, difficult mechanisms required to maintain a democracy for everyone? The entitlement of those who have always belonged enables them to treat the principles of the Republic as a personal convenience rather than a collective obligation. While not the only factor, this historical amnesia allows other fractures to widen.

Conclusion: The Free Fall

I have come to understand that the true American struggle is not against foreign adversaries, but against the specter of its own history and the corrosion of its principles.

As a Cambodian-American, I criticized the strongman politics of leaders like Hun Sen in Cambodia—a regime that perfected the art of consolidating power by neutering opposition, weaponizing the judiciary, and using the levers of government to punish and chill dissent. Now, I see the frightening parallel: an American administration that threatens to unleash the justice system against political rivals, promises to weaponize the national government against critics, and systematically dismisses the rule of law is engaging in the very same authoritarian architecture I once looked down upon.

The difference is merely speed and polish. In Cambodia, the descent into autocracy was brutal and overt; here, it is smooth, insidious, and masked by the lingering mythology of freedom. This is not mere political friction. When a state actively seeks to silence critics, dismantle independent institutions, and treat constitutional limits as suggestions, it is time to call it what it is: America is experiencing a dangerous, insidious descent toward autocracy.

The greatest love is not blind acceptance; it is demanding confrontation. The patriotism of the refugee is a demanding love, one that forces America to face its own reflection. We stand in the gap, haunted by the memory of totalitarian darkness, urging the inheritors of this democracy to awaken to its vulnerability. The path to a genuine and lasting American ideal requires a painful, shared reckoning—an education that demands the dismantling of entitlement and the full payment of historical debt. Until then, the dream remains a covenant, fiercely held and tragically broken.