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.
Sicko was easily Moore's most effective film in terms of piercing the veil. It dealt a massive blow to any perception of American exceptionalism I might have had before.
American exceptionalism has two meanings right? I see some people use it in the "America is exceptional" way and some people use it in the "America is always the exception to the rule" way.
Like "America is an exceptional country that can do no wrong" versus "x country is doing y, America is also doing y, but that's okay because America gets an exception"
I guess they kinda have the same effect on discourse, the first one is more of the nationalist/jingoist interpretation and the second is more of the rulebook lib interpretation.
In this case it's more like "America is capable of doing XYZ and since the US is among the best, that is close to the best any country can do" but then it turns out other countries are also effortlessly doing W which seemed impossible before but would be even better since it demonstrably was (and therefore the US couldn't possibly rank among the best).
I was sitting there dumbfounded, seeing Moore visit France and Cuba, seeing what I was missing in terms of easy, low/no-cost access to healthcare here in Yankeeland. After being told by the Republicans that the tradeoff was fucking death panels - which I would later learn was ironically a tremendous projection on the part of the reactionaries, considering the health insurance company which denies a claim for live-saving care or whose denial leads to medical bankruptcy is nothing if not a death panel.