Liam Rue ‘21
October 2020
Freedom. It’s a synonym for America. Freedom this or freedom that. That’s all we talk about in America these days. We see it as the foundation of our very collective existence: when, 250 years ago, a bunch of old white men were tired of paying a little extra for tea.
Our war for independence was defined by the struggle for freedom. Our subsequent form of government (or, initially, the lack thereof) was defined by it: separation of powers, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, the freedom to have as many guns as you want, and so on.
The arrival of the first English colonists was about freedom, be it the freedom to worship in peace, the freedom of a whole new world waiting for you to explore it, freedom to slaughter the natives who had no idea what smallpox was… you get the idea. From Manifest Destiny to the Civil Rights Movement, every major event in our country’s history has been framed as part of the struggle for freedom.
We pride ourselves in being the freest place in the world, and by extension we are the leader of every other place that is remotely as free as us. When you think about it, it is a beautiful story arc: a constant struggle for freedom that has slowly but surely brought us closer to a more perfect society: the city upon a hill, American Exceptionalism, whatever you want to call it.
But what exactly is freedom? It seems that we make so many things about freedom in America that freedom has lost its meaning. In its most basic sense, freedom is being able to do something uninhibited whenever you want to. In this way, freedom is all about perspective. Freedom for one person to do one thing may be slavery for another. The right to abortion is considered by some to be a fundamental freedom for women to choose what they do with their bodies. To others, it is the very opposite: at least for the unborn fetuses that are aborted.
With the right amount of mental gymnastics, anything can be characterized as either freedom or an act of utter tyranny. Slavery itself could be considered a freedom: not for the slaves, of course, but for their owners. That is to say, slavery was the freedom of rich white plantation owners to take away the freedom of other men -- which involved severe physical abuse and trauma in the form of whippings, rape, terrible living conditions and backbreaking labor. Segregation, similarly, was the freedom of whites to have their own communities while African Americans had theirs. Of course, the irony of this is that this freedom for one group was really systemic oppression for another, but no one thought of it that way at the time (except for African-Americans, the oppressed).
The newest incarnation of this distortion of the idea of freedom is the idea of “religious liberty”. Ever since LGBT+ people have won basic rights, the very idea that these people now have to be treated as human beings is seen as oppression to the people who oppressed them. To them, being able to refuse service at a bakery is a fundamental freedom. Though for LGBT people, the victims of this “freedom”, it is the very opposite. This is another example of how the idea of freedom is very arbitrary, and often just means power over someone else. Before women gained rights such as the right to vote and, even later, the right to own a credit card or get a mortgage, their oppression was a freedom for men -- the freedom to keep women down and subordinate.
This is what makes talking about freedom -- and defending freedom -- so tricky. Anything can be freedom. Most Americans have lived so comfortably and free that they wouldn’t even know when they weren’t free anymore. Even worse, most probably wouldn’t care. Freedom, in our capitalistic, consumer driven society, is basically the same as comfort. As long as you are comfortable, you might as well be perfectly free. That is why suddenly having to cover your face with a mask to prevent the spread of a deadly disease is big government obtrusively intervening in our lives; but innocent protesters in Portland, Seattle and New York being snatched up in unidentified vans is perfectly fine.
If the government suddenly took away the right to free speech and started imprisoning anyone who spoke out against the government, would people really care if they never really voiced their opinions about things in the first place? As Jyn Erso said in the Star Wars: Rogue One movie, tyranny isn’t so bad as long as you keep your head down. And is she wrong? If all I did every day was commute to my 9-5 desk job and then go home to spend time with my family, would government censorship really matter? Would a ban on gun ownership really matter if nothing would happen to you as long as you were loyal to Big Brother? I don’t think so. It doesn’t matter for young people in China. Sure, there’s a lot you can’t say in China, and it is becoming the very type of Big-Brother-type surveillance state that Orwell warned us about. But surprisingly, recent reports have found that they love their government, because they are guaranteed upward mobility as long as they are loyal to the Communist Party. In Hitler’s Nazi Germany, people with blond hair and blue eyes probably thought they were quite free themselves.
Freedom, in this way, is a choice. If you don’t use it, you lose it. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing for many people. Many Americans would be perfectly fine with a dictatorship. After all, we have already accepted the emergence of our own post-9/11 surveillance state. We have accepted racial profiling of other groups, because it doesn’t affect us. Oh, you say your black friend was stopped and frisked by police for no reason? Well, he probably did something to provoke them. After all, the police are supposed to protect us, so they probably wouldn’t’ve done that if he just cooperated. Oh, migrant children are dying in detention centers? That’s too bad. They should’ve known what they were getting themselves into, even if the alternative was being murdered by a violent gang in their home country.
The reality is that most Americans are probably fine with getting their freedoms taken away -- or others’ -- as long as they can keep their three-bedroom house and picket fence. It just goes to show how easily freedom in America -- where freedom is seen as the very essence of our nation -- could go away. People’s faith in politics -- and in turn their interest -- has steadily fallen for almost a century. Most Americans don’t even vote. And the powerful want to keep it that way, because it brings them that much closer to total domination.
Women are losing their reproductive rights; transgender people can’t even join the military, and can be denied healthcare by their employer; African-Americans are being killed left and right by trigger-happy white supremacists; people’s votes are mysteriously disappearing or being thrown out on the grounds of fraud; there is massive wealth inequality and a decrease in social mobility; and immigrants who just came here for a better life are being rounded up like dogs and treated like they’re less than human.
It’s not as if the plot to destroy American democracy just appeared out of thin air. No. The powers that be are always testing the people to see how far they can go, whether through the machinery of government or from the outside, in opposition to its democratic institutions. All an aspiring dictator needs is a few people to not vote; a few people who, after waiting hours in line to vote say, “you know what? I can’t wait this long. I give up”; a few people stay quiet as long as they’re unbothered in their gated community. Because democracy is not lost: it is given up.