Comment by dragonwriter

12 hours ago

> the US government is generally benign in that it historically has not abused its power over citizens

To the extent this is maybe remotely arguably defensible, it is only so because the US has historically defined internal subjects who it wished to abuse most intently as non-citizens (or even legal non-persons), including chattel slavery of much of the Black population until the Civil War, and the largely genocidal American Indian wars up through 1924. But even in those cases you still have to ignore a lot of abuse in the period after nominal citizenship was granted (for Black Americans, especially, but very much not exclusively, in the first century after abolition of slavery).