The corpses piled in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, and Gaza are monuments to collectivism. American imperialism, which has murdered millions in the name of democracy and freedom, is among the most sophisticated collectivist projects in human history. It mobilizes public support for the Pentagon, CIA, and Wall Street by wrapping domination in the language of freedom and patriotism. It demands we surrender moral autonomy to the religion of the flag. It blinds us to the terror and war crimes committed in our name.
Christian nationalism is another form of authoritarian collectivism. It organizes congregations into political machines, mobilizing voters to impose a narrow vision of "biblical" morality on everyone else through state power.
Historically, Christianity has provided ideological cover for some of humanity's greatest atrocities: the genocide of Indigenous peoples across the Americas, the transatlantic slave trade, European colonialism's "civilizing missions," the Crusades, and the Inquisition. In each case, collective Christian identity was mobilized to justify domination, extraction, and mass death.
The parallels to Islamic fundamentalism today are striking—both movements seek to encode religious law into state power, restrict women's reproductive autonomy, control education to enforce a fundamentalist orthodoxy, and punish those who deviate from prescribed gender and sexual norms. Yet Christian nationalists who warn of "Sharia law" fail to recognize they're building the same structure with a crucifix instead of a crescent. The same logic seeking to impose a "one right way" onto others undergirds both.
But while citizens of Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Syria battle religious authoritarianism imposed on them by their governments, it is Christian nationalism that most threatens U.S. citizens and democracy at home.
During campus protests over Gaza, Christian Nationalists demanded mass arrests, visa revocations, and police suppression of encampments. They back hardline immigration enforcement, invoking Christian language to justify militarized borders, expanded detention, and cooperation with ICE—sanctifying mass incarceration, deportation, and military dominance while subordinating the radical message of Jesus—who stood with the marginalized and condemned wealth—to state control.
Yet we are told the enemy is collectivism itself.
We've been trained to recognize it only when it wears a hammer and sickle—Stalinism gutting worker control of factories and executing dissidents while concentrating power in a party elite. But by branding American empire and Christian nationalism as defenders of liberty rather than as collective projects, the propaganda renders today's most powerful authoritarian structures invisible. We're taught to fear collective action only to the extent that it challenges imperial rule.
This is the core lie of corporate capitalism: that we are free only when unencumbered by collective obligation, that solidarity itself is the path to serfdom.
It would be laughable if it weren't so effective.
The titans of capital who preach individualism run collectivist empires.
Corporations are not associations of free individuals—they are hierarchical, authoritarian structures that command resources dwarfing most nations. They colonize governments through lobbying. They benefit from CIA coups and wars that grant access to resources. They shape consciousness through media monopolies. Jeff Bezos does not succeed alone—he succeeds through the exploitation of hundreds of thousands of workers organized into a vast, disciplined machine.
The difference between Amazon and a union is not that one is individualist and the other collectivist. Both are collectivist. The difference is whom the collective serves.
Democratic collectivism—the kind that built the eight-hour workday, public libraries, Social Security, the Civil Rights Movement—distributes power. It creates structures accountable to ordinary people. It says: we pool our resources not to dominate, but to ensure no one falls through the cracks.
This is what they fear. Collectivism that serves the powerless rather than the powerful. This is why beneficiaries of this system have spent decades poisoning the very idea of solidarity.
They tell us government healthcare is tyranny while insurance companies ration our medicine for profit. They tell us unions destroy freedom while Amazon monitors warehouse workers' every movement and fires them for bathroom breaks.
The propaganda works because it exploits a truth: collective power can destroy. It destroyed Hiroshima. It ran the gulags and concentration camps. It operates the prisons where America cages more human beings than any society in history. To organize collectively is indeed to wield dangerous force.
But here is what they will never tell you: the alternative to democratic collective power is not individual freedom. It is undemocratic collective power.
It is power concentrated in corporations, in empire, in oligarchy—collective structures where you have no voice, no vote, no dignity, and are expected to subvert your own individual aspirations to the will of the state.
Those who push a false choice between collective and individual are grifters. We survive only through cooperation. The only choice is whether our cooperation will be structured democratically or autocratically—whether the collective institutions that govern our lives will answer to us or to capital and the military industrial complex.
Public libraries, fire departments, teachers unions and Medicare are all collectivism in action. So is Raytheon, Goldman Sachs, the Pentagon and Project 2025.
The real question is: collective power for whom, and to what end?
Do we organize to ensure every child can read, or to rain missiles on children in Gaza? Do we pool resources to guarantee healthcare, or to maximize profit for pharmaceutical and insurance industries? Do we coordinate our labor to build communities, or to enrich shareholders?
The corporate state has already answered. It has built the most sophisticated collectivist apparatus in history—one that surveils, exploits, incarcerates, and bombs with terrifying efficiency. It did not ask your permission. It does not seek your input. It is profoundly collective and profoundly undemocratic.
Our task is not to reject collectivism—that is impossible. Our task is to democratize it. To take the human capacity for solidarity and cooperation and wrest it from those who have weaponized it into empire. To build collective institutions that serve life rather than death.
This is the task before us. Because the individual, left alone to face Amazon, the Pentagon, Project 2025, ICE and ExxonMobil, has no chance at all.
Tim Hjersted is the director and co-founder of Films For Action, a library dedicated to the people building a more free, regenerative and democratic society.