Innocence Is a Lie We Pay For: National Myth and the Road to Unfreedom
Every nation tells itself a story about who it is. The story begins long before we’re born and outlives us. It shapes how we see ourselves, how we justify our choices, and even how we sleep at night. But what happens when that story is a lie? What happens when the nation’s most cherished belief about itself is not really the truth, but a carefully constructed fiction designed to absolve power and enable cruelty?
The story of an innocent nation is both a political technology and a weapon. It’s a demand made of you, the citizen, to accept a sanitised, airbrushed history scrubbed clean of its sins. It’s the comforting bedtime story that whispers, we are the good guys, and we have always been the good guys. The problem isn’t the story itself, but what it’s used to justify.
Paired with its partner in crime, magical thinking, the demand for innocence becomes something far more dangerous. Magical thinking is the belief that history can be undone without consequence, that complex problems have simple, painless solutions, and that with enough willpower, we can simply wish away the inconvenient truths of the world. It’s the core of every snake-oil salesman’s pitch, scaled up to the level of the nation-state.
More than optimism and patriotism, national myth uses denial as a form of governance. And when a nation is governed by denial, democracy becomes a staging ground for cruelty. This is the story of how the West, from the plains of America to the shores of the United Kingdom and across the European continent, fell for the oldest lie in the book: the lie of its own innocence.
The Politics of Denial
National innocence is the refusal to accept that a nation’s actions have consequences, that history has weight, and that some problems are hard. It is the belief that a nation can be pure and blameless, that its motives are always good, and that any negative outcomes are the fault of external enemies or internal traitors. It is the conviction that you can tear up a complex, 40-year-old economic and political partnership and, with a slogan, ‘take back control’ and restore a lost prosperity that never really existed for most people.
This politics of denial is the defining political pathology of our time. It is the collapse of the distinction between rhetoric and reality, the belief that if you say something forcefully enough, it becomes true. It is the logic of the toddler who closes his eyes and believes he is invisible, or of the cargo cult, which sees the planes land and assumes that building a bamboo replica will make them land again. It is also the logic of the authoritarian who believes that if he says something forcefully enough, it becomes true.
Ideology, for all its faults, at least makes an argument. It has a theory of the world, however flawed. The politics of innocence doesn’t argue. It asserts. It declares that the economy isn’t a complex system, but a morality play of betrayal by disloyal elites. Climate change isn’t a product of industrial capitalism, but a conspiracy hatched in a lab. National decline isn’t the result of policy choices and structural forces; it was stolen. The appeal is obvious: if the problem is theft rather than structural, then the solution is simple. Find the thief. Punish them. Restore what was taken. No need to grapple with complexity or accept that some problems have no easy answers. Just find someone to blame, and the world snaps back into focus.
When Donald Trump announced reciprocal tariffs in May 2025, he declared: “Jobs in factories will come roaring back into our country” (NPR, 2025). Not might come back. Will come roaring back. The certainty is absolute; the denial of reality is complete. He was promising that sheer force of will, expressed through tariffs, could reverse four decades of deindustrialisation, as if the global supply chains that have been built over generations could be unwound by executive order. As if the economics of labour costs and automation could be suspended by presidential directive. This is the core of the politics of innocence: the belief that rhetoric and sheer will can override material reality. By December 2025, manufacturing employment had declined by approximately 59,000 jobs since the April tariffs were implemeted (ORF America, 2025). The exact opposite of the promised “roaring back.”
This kind of thinking flourishes in the ruins of failed promises. When the post-Cold War dream of endless progress and liberal democratic triumph curdled into economic stagnation, institutional decay, and a loss of any coherent story about who we are, the stage was set for the political conjurers (Fukuyama, 1992; Piketty, 2013). In the UK, Boris Johnson toured the country in 2016 promising that leaving the EU would allow Britain to “take back control of its money, its laws and its borders.” (BBC, 2016). The phrase was simple, powerful, and completely divorced from the actual mechanics of how a complex economic and political union works. It offered the fantasy of restoration without the work of transformation. Across Europe, from Rome to Warsaw, populist movements promised national revival without the messy, difficult work of actual reform. They were all selling the same miracle cure, and we were all buying it.
The reality tells a different story. By 2025, Brexit had reduced UK GDP by 6 to 8 percent compared to what it would have been without leaving the EU (The Economist, 2025). Investment fell by 12 to 18 percent, and employment by 3 to 4 percent (The Guardian, 2025). UK goods exports are estimated to be 30 percent lower than they would have been inside the single market and customs union (The Economist, 2025). Yet the voters who backed this catastrophe insist it was worth it because they’ve reframed the costs as irrelevant compared to the symbolic victory of “taking back control.” That’s the politics of innocence in its purest form: the belief that symbolic victories can erase material losses. The promise was never about economics. It was about feeling. It was about the restoration of a sense of national agency, even if that agency was being exercised in ways that actively harmed the people exercising it.
The Invention of a Blameless Past
To sell a magical future, you first need a magical past. This is where national innocence concept comes in. It’s the essential ingredient, the clean slate upon which the fantasy of restoration can be written. It is a refusal of historical responsibility, and it works through a simple trick: selective memory, moral asymmetry, and externalised blame.
But here’s the crucial thing: national innocence is not just historically inaccurate. It is actively ahistorical. It is hostile to factuality itself. It doesn’t engage with history; it replaces history with feeling. It doesn’t argue with evidence; it dismisses evidence as the bias of enemies. The myth of innocence is a feeling about who we are, and feelings don’t need facts. They need only to feel true. This is the emotional fuel for the politics of innocence: the belief that if you feel innocent, you are innocent, and any evidence to the contrary is a lie.
This is how Nigel Farage’s “Breaking Point” poster worked in 2016. It took the complex reality of migration, labour markets, and demographic change and reduced it to a single image of brown-skinned people at a border. The message was simple: they are the problem. They are stealing your future. Not policy choices. Not structural economic forces.Them. The poster didn’t make an argument; it created a feeling, and the feeling was enough (Pascale, 2019).
First, you remember only the good parts. You celebrate the pioneers, not the genocide they committed. You praise the empire, not the famines and massacres that sustained it. You mythologise the post-war boom, conveniently forgetting that for millions of Black Americans, it was a boom they were locked out of. The post-war economic expansion of the 1950s was built on systematic racial exclusion. Black Americans were barred from the housing programs and suburban development that created generational wealth for white families (Rothstein, 2017). The racial wealth gap, which had narrowed from 60-to-1 immediately after Emancipation to 7-to-1 by 1950, remained stubbornly high precisely because the prosperity of the boom was racially segregated (Derenoncourt et al., 2022). It was policy. These are not matters of interpretation or perspective. They are documented historical facts. But the myth of innocence doesn’t care. Facts are irrelevant when the goal is feeling, not understanding. This is the core mechanism of what scholars call the “post-truth” era: not the absence of facts, but the subordination of facts to emotional and tribal narratives (McIntyre, 2018).
This is the golden age that Nigel Farage and the Brexit movement invoked when they spoke of “taking back control.” They weren’t talking about economic policy. They were talking about a Britain that existed in the imagination: a Britain where immigration was controlled, where national identity was uncomplicated, where the working class had secure jobs and clear futures. That Britain never existed, or existed only for a narrow slice of the population. But the myth was powerful enough to win a referendum.
In America, Donald Trump built his entire political movement on the same mythology (The Guardian, 2025). “Make America Great Again” is not a policy platform, but a promise to restore a golden age that exists only in the collective imagination of his supporters. The 1950s they invoke were decades of segregation, nuclear anxiety, and rigid social hierarchy. The post-war prosperity they celebrate was built on racial exclusion and the systematic denial of opportunity to millions. Yet the myth persists because it offers something more powerful than facts: it offers the restoration of a sense of national dominance, of unchallenged American supremacy, of a world where America’s position at the top was natural and inevitable. That world never existed, but the believers don’t care because the myth is the point.
Second, you apply a double standard. Our violence is always defensive, reluctant, a necessary evil. Their violence is barbaric, inherent, a sign of their irredeemable nature.
Third, and most importantly, you blame someone else. The nation, in this telling, is a fundamentally good and pure entity, constantly under assault from corrupting outside forces. For the American right, it’s immigrants and globalists. For the British nationalist, it’s immigrants and Brussels bureaucrats. For the European populist, it’s immigrants and a shadowy cabal of foreign powers. The story is always the same: we were perfect until they came along.
This is the great trick. Innocence doesn’t absolve the people. It absolves power. It allows the systems that created the problems to escape scrutiny. If your problems are all caused by outsiders, you never have to look in the mirror. You never have to ask the hard questions about your own history, your own choices, your own complicity.
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The Golden Age That Never Was
The promise is always a return. “Make America Great Again.” “Take Back Control.” The language is one of restoration, of reclaiming a lost paradise. But the paradise they’re selling is a fantasy. The “greatness” they invoke is a carefully constructed fiction, a golden age that only existed for a select few, built on the backs of the many.
The MAGA nostalgia for the 1950s is a longing for a world where white men were firmly in charge, where women knew their place, and where racial hierarchies were brutally enforced. It’s a nostalgia for an economy that relied on the exclusion of Black Americans from the prosperity of the post-war boom. The wealth gap between white and Black families in 1950 was 7-to-1; today, it remains at approximately 10-to-1 (Wealth of Two Nations, 2020). The promised return to 1950s prosperity would require a return to 1950s segregation and exclusion.
The Brexit dream of a pre-EU Britain, a swashbuckling, independent trading nation, conveniently ignores the fact that this “independence” was built on the violent subjugation of a global empire. Pre-EU Britain was not independent; it was dependent on colonial extraction. Post-EU Britain is not independent; it is isolated and economically diminished. Services exports are estimated to be 4 to 5 percent lower than they would have been without Brexit, with no offsetting gains from increased trade with non-EU countries (British Chambers of Commerce, 2025).
This is a distortion, a weaponised nostalgia that erases the inconvenient truths of the past to justify the power grabs of the present. The golden age is indeed a lie, but it’s a powerful one. It gives people a sense of purpose, a story to cling to in a world that feels chaotic and out of control. It tells them that their problems are not their fault, that they are the rightful heirs to a stolen kingdom, and that all they need to do is believe.
“It Was Stolen from You”
Once you’ve established the myth of a golden past, the next step is to explain why it’s gone. The answer is always the same: it was stolen. Your job, your culture, your sovereignty, your very identity: all were taken from you by a cast of villains.
This is the political genius of the grievance narrative. It eliminates the need for policy. You don’t have to explain complexities if you can just point to an immigrant and say, “He took your job.” You don’t have to debate the trade-offs of EU membership if you can just cast Brussels as a tyrannical overlord stealing your sovereignty. The theft narrative is a cognitive shortcut, a way to bypass the messy, unsatisfying work of understanding an intricate world and skip straight to the catharsis of blame.
This narrative clearly produces enemies and licenses retaliation. It transforms politics from a process of negotiation and compromise into a holy war against the forces of darkness. And that is so much easier to sell than complexity. It’s a simple, powerful story that offers a clear target for your anger and a moral justification for your resentment. It tells you that you are not a participant in a complex system, but a victim of a simple conspiracy. In a world that feels increasingly out of control, the story of theft is a story that gives you back a sense of agency, even if it’s only the agency of the avenger.
The Sweet Poison of Sado-Populism
This is where the story takes its darkest turn. When a political movement is built on grievance and a lust for retaliation, it inevitably slides from populism into something much uglier: sado-populism.
Sado-populism is a politics where the infliction of pain on your enemies becomes the entire point. It’s a politics where your own suffering is reframed as a badge of honour, a sign of your virtue and your willingness to sacrifice for the cause. The cruelty is the point. It is a public performance of dominance, a spectacle of humiliation that serves to bond the leader and his followers in a shared act of transgression.
We saw it in the Trump voters who cheered on healthcare cuts that would gut their own communities, as long as those cuts also hurt the ‘undeserving’ poor and the liberal elites they despised. We see it in the Brexit supporters who insist that the economic damage — the lost trade, the shrinking GDP, the shuttered businesses — is a price worth paying to be free of the imaginary shackles of the EU. The pain is proof of their commitment. It’s a form of political masochism, where self-harm is transformed into a moral victory. The shared endurance of a self-inflicted wound becomes the ultimate proof of collective loyalty.
Under sado-populism, the leader’s primary function is not to improve the lives of his followers, but to hurt the people they hate. He demonstrates his power by his willingness to be cruel. And his followers, in turn, accept their own suffering as a necessary sacrifice in this grand struggle. The punishment of the enemy has become more important than their own well-being. This is the logic of the cult, not the logic of the republic.
Follow the Money
But while the followers are basking in the warm glow of righteous indignation, who is actually benefiting from all this? If you strip away the culture-war rhetoric and the manufactured grievances, and you follow the money, the picture becomes brutally clear.
Magical thinking and national innocence are the perfect cover for a good old-fashioned heist. While the nation is distracted by the spectacle of cruelty, the architects of this new politics are busy dismantling the state, deregulating industries, and redistributing wealth upward.
The Trump years have been a masterclass in this. While the headlines were filled with inflammatory tweets and culture-war battles, the real action was in the quiet dismantling of environmental regulations, the massive tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, and the appointment of industry lobbyists to run the very agencies that were supposed to regulate them. In 2025, the Trump administration’s tax cuts and spending megabill would decrease federal tax revenue by $4.5 trillion from 2025 through 2034 (Tax Foundation, 2025). Despite promises that corporate rate cuts would boost household incomes by $4,000, studies by economists from the Joint Committee on Taxation found that the tax provisions were skewed heavily toward the wealthy, with the vast majority of benefits accruing to corporations and high earners (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 2025). Meanwhile, the EPA under Trump cut federal pollution limits on air and water while promoting fossil fuels, reversing environmental protections built over decades (Los Angeles Times, 2025).
Post-Brexit Britain tells a similar story. While the nation was tearing itself apart over fishing rights and the colour of passports, a cabal of disaster capitalists and well-connected insiders were making a killing by shorting the pound and snapping up assets on the cheap. The promise of “taking back control” was a smokescreen for a massive transfer of wealth and power into the hands of a select few.
This is the core of the con. These movements don’t restore national greatness. They redistribute wealth upward while redistributing pain downward. They are a vessel for state theft, wrapped in the flag and sold as a patriotic crusade.
The Bonfire of the Institutions
The final stage of this process is the assault on the institutions that might hold power to account. When your entire political project is based on a lie, the truth becomes your mortal enemy. And the institutions that deal in truth, the courts, the media, the civil service, the scientific community, must be destroyed.
Responsibility is replaced by loyalty. The only question that matters is not ‘Is it true?’ or ‘Is it legal?’ but ‘Are you with us or against us?’ Institutions that challenge the narrative are not just wrong; they are illegitimate, enemies of the people. The courts are not impartial arbiters of the law; they are deep-state conspirators. The media is not a watchdog; it’s fake news. The civil servants are not professionals; they are a permanent opposition.
This pattern is not unique to the United States. Across Europe, judicial independence has been systematically eroded under nationalist governments. In Hungary and Poland, ruling parties have packed courts with loyalists, restricted judicial review, and attacked judges who ruled against government interests (Carnegie Endowment, 2025). In the US, Trump appointees to the judiciary have been systematically used to overturn environmental protections and voting rights legislation. The assault on institutions is central to these movements.
This is how democracy dies. Not in a hail of gunfire, but in a slow, grinding erosion of the norms and institutions that sustain it. It dies when truth becomes a partisan commodity, when loyalty becomes the only currency that matters, and when the very idea of a shared reality is abandoned in favour of competing, irreconcilable narratives.
The Freedom to Lie
The final and most audacious act of institutional sabotage is the capture of language itself. And no concept has been more thoroughly inverted than freedom of speech.
In the hands of these new authoritarians, the call for ‘free speech’ is not a defence of democratic discourse; it is a demand for the freedom to lie without consequence. It is the weaponisation of a liberal value to destroy a liberal society. They don’t want a level playing field for ideas. They want a monopoly on the truth, and they use the rhetoric of free speech to dismantle the very institutions — a free press, an independent academy, a trusted scientific community — that make a shared, fact-based conversation possible.
Historically, freedom of speech was conceived as a tool for the powerless to speak truth to power. It was a shield for dissent, a mechanism to hold the powerful to account. What we are seeing now is its inversion: the powerful claiming the right to speak lies to the powerless. They cry ‘censorship’ when a news organisation fact-checks their falsehoods, or when a social media platform removes verifiably false information that is actively causing harm. They are not defending a principle. They are demanding a right to pollute the information ecosystem with impunity (Pascale, 2019).
This is not a debate about the limits of acceptable speech. It is a struggle over the nature of reality itself. When a political movement’s core strategy is the creation and dissemination of disinformation, then any institution that stands in the way of that disinformation is, by definition, an enemy of ‘free speech’ as they have redefined it. The goal is not to win the argument, but to make argument impossible. The real goal is to create a world where there are no facts, only competing narratives, and where the most powerful narrative wins.
This inversion is the capstone of the entire project. It is the final turn of the screw, where the language of freedom is used to pave the road to unfreedom.
The Seductive Power of the Lie
Why do these myths persist, even when the facts so clearly contradict them? Because they are sources of meaning. They offer emotional coherence in a world that feels increasingly chaotic. They simplify the moral landscape into a comforting story of good versus evil. They give people a sense of identity and purpose in an age of decline.
Fact-checking a myth is like trying to put out a forest fire with a water pistol. It’s not that the facts are wrong; it’s that they are irrelevant. The myth isn’t appealing because it’s true. It’s appealing because it feels true. It speaks to a deeper emotional need, a longing for certainty and belonging in a world that offers neither.
This is the terrifying reality of our situation. By the time the lies are exposed, the damage is already done. The institutions have been hollowed out. The social fabric has been torn. The very possibility of a shared conversation has been destroyed. You can’t rebuild a democracy with a population that has lost the ability to agree on basic facts.
Freedom Without Illusions
So, what is the alternative? It is certainly not a return to a different set of comforting illusions. It is instead the embrace of a freedom without illusions, one that is not about purity or restoration, but about accepting the messy, complicated, and often tragic reality of our histories.
Real freedom requires accepting historical responsibility. It requires acknowledging that our nations are not, and have never been, innocent. It requires understanding that our prosperity has often been built on the suffering of others. We have to abandon the fantasy of a golden age and deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it were. This means trading the sugar high of the myth for the sustaining nourishment of the truth. It means finding a basis for national pride not in a fictional past, but in the ongoing, difficult, and often-failing struggle to live up to our highest ideals.
This is a call for democratic maturity. It is a call to reject the false hope of magical thinking and to embrace the hard work of building institutions that can withstand the pressures of our time. It is a call to create new narratives, grounded in reality and in a clear-eyed understanding of our past, that can offer a more honest and sustainable source of meaning and solidarity. Democratic renewal requires acknowledging that we are all implicated in systems of power and complicity, and that the work of building a more just society is ongoing, difficult, and never finished. It means, in short, growing up.
Conclusion: Innocence Is the Most Expensive Lie
Let’s end where we began. National innocence is a lie, and it is the most expensive lie in the world because it is always paid for, sooner or later. It is never paid for by the people who tell it, though. The bill always comes due, and it is always paid by the vulnerable, the marginalised, and the powerless.
The cost of national innocence is material and is measured in real suffering. It is measured in the lives of asylum seekers left to drown in the Mediterranean because Europe insists on its innocence while building walls. It is measured in the wages of workers whose jobs were destroyed by policies sold on the promise of restoration. It is measured in the health outcomes of communities poisoned by environmental deregulation justified by the claim that the nation must come first. It is measured in the erosion of rights, the hollowing of institutions, the slow death of democratic norms, all justified by the insistence that we are the good guys, that our motives are pure, that any harm we cause is either necessary or the fault of our enemies.
The people who benefit from this lie are not hard to identify. They are the politicians who use the rhetoric of innocence to consolidate power. They are the oligarchs and billionaires who shape the authoritarian state, supporting it and validating it. They are the media figures and intellectuals who launder these ideas, giving them the veneer of respectability. They are the institutions that have been captured or corrupted to serve the lie. They profit from the chaos, from the erosion of democratic norms, from the suspension of the rule of law. For them, innocence is not a burden, but a tool.
But for everyone else, it is a catastrophe. The lie of innocence is the anaesthetic that allows the surgeon of disaster capitalism to do his work without the patient screaming. It is the permission structure for cruelty, the justification for abandonment, the excuse for complicity. When a nation insists on its innocence, it has already decided who will suffer for that lie. It has already chosen its scapegoats, its internal enemies, the people who will bear the cost of its refusal to face the truth.
And here is the final horror: once you have told yourself these lies long enough, you begin to actually believe it. The myth becomes indistinguishable from reality. The nation that insists on its innocence genuinely cannot see its own complicity. It cannot acknowledge the systems of power it has built and maintained. It cannot face the historical record. It can only see enemies, traitors, and the eternal victimhood of the innocent. This is the endpoint of the politics of innocence: a nation that has lost the capacity for self-reflection, that is incapable of moral reckoning, that has surrendered the possibility of genuine democratic renewal.
The demand for innocence is a declaration of war on reality. And in a war on reality, the first casualty is always the truth. The second is freedom. The third is democracy itself. We are watching this war unfold in real time. The question is whether we will continue to fight for a different vision, one based not on the fantasy of innocence, but on the hard, difficult, necessary work of facing our history, accepting our complicity, and building something better. That work begins with a simple act of honesty: admitting that we are not innocent, that our nations are not innocent, and that the bill for that innocence is always paid by someone else.
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Superb analysis of how selective memory obscures structural inequality. The bit about the racial wealth gap staying at 7-to-1 during the post-war boom is so telling because it shows prosperity wasn't broadly shared even when everyyone talks about that era as the good old days. I've been tracking similar patterns in housing wealth transfers, and the policy choices that created this weren't accidents or oversight but deliberate exclusions baked into federal programs.