I know it isn't a single a-ha! moment for most people, but there must have been something that flipped the switch that informed your views into coming to understand that this country is the barbarism route of Luxemburg's Socialism or Barbarism.
For me it was the Iraq War, and the Michael Moore documentary Sicko that pushed me onto that intellectual and emotional understanding.
I had a friend in high school whose church sent a group regularly to protest at The School of the Americas. I did some research into why and couldn't believe what I found. I think that what really did it for me was how long it had been going on--there was no room to try to make excuses for "isolated incidents" or whatever, the unfathomable inhumanity WAS the plan.
That led to realizing that the genocide and dispossession of the Native Americans was part of the same pattern, along with the enslavement of African Americans--there was no time or philosophy from the past to return to. The US was doing what it was built to do.