Liam Rue ‘21
January 2021
When France refused to join the U.S. in the Iraq War in 2003, there was a national campaign to change the name of french fries to “freedom fries”. In his 2020 campaign, Andrew Yang named his universal basic income proposal the “Freedom Dividend”. In one way or another, freedom has become a shorthand for America.
From the Mayflower to 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. The first settlers came for the freedom of religion (and also the freedom to exploit local Native Americans). It defined our struggle for independence 250 years ago, when a bunch of old white men were tired of paying a little extra for tea. So the story goes, this constant struggle for freedom has slowly but surely brought us closer to a more perfect society: the City Upon a Hill, American Exceptionalism, and so on. 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.
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 others, it is the very opposite; at least for the fetuses that are aborted.
With the right amount of mental gymnastics, anything can be characterized as either freedom or utter tyranny. Even slavery could be considered a freedom: not for the slaves, of course, but for their owners. That is, 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, likewise, was the freedom of whites to have their own communities while African Americans had theirs. Ironically, this freedom for one group was systemic oppression for another. Except for African Americans, though -- the oppressed -- hardly anyone thought of it this way. Similarly, patriarchy is for women a loss of freedoms, but for men construed as the fundamental freedom to control the opposite gender.
The newest incarnation of this distortion of freedom is the idea of “religious liberty”. Ever since LGBT Americans have won basic rights, the very idea that these people now have to be treated as human beings is seen as oppression to those who have oppressed them. To them, the right of a bakery to refuse to serve a gay couple is a fundamental freedom. Though for the LGBT community, the victims of this “freedom”, it is the very opposite. Once again, freedom is falsely conflated with having power over someone else.
This is what makes 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 capitalist, consumer-driven society, is basically the same as comfort. As long as you are comfortable, you might as well be free. This is why having to wear a mask in a deadly pandemic is called a communist plot, but snatching up innocent protesters in Portland, Seattle and New York in unmarked 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? 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?
The absence of certain civil liberties doesn’t matter for young people in China, for instance. Sure, censorship runs high, and especially in the Uyghur region of Xinjiang, the country is developing a surveillance state of Orwellian proportions. But recent reports have found that the Chinese love their government. As long as they are loyal to the Communist Party, Chinese youths are all but guaranteed upward mobility. In Nazi Germany, people with blond hair and blue eyes probably thought they were quite free themselves.
The reality is that Americans are not that different. Most of us are probably fine with losing our freedoms -- or others’ -- as long as we can keep our cul-de-sacs and picket fences. After all, we have already accepted the emergence of our country’s post-9/11 surveillance state. We have accepted racial profiling of other groups, because it supposedly 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 have 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 in their home country.
Women are losing their reproductive rights; transgender people are barred from the military (and can be denied healthcare by their employer); African-Americans are being murdered left and right by trigger-happy white supremacists; minorities’ votes are mysteriously disappearing or being thrown out on the grounds of fraud; and immigrants who just came here for a better life are being rounded up and treated as less than human.
These events -- and the excuses for them -- show how easily freedom could be taken away in the country that is supposed to be its greatest champion. Americans’ faith in politics -- and in turn interest therein -- has steadily fallen for almost a century. Almost half of all voting-age Americans don’t even vote. And the powerful want to keep it that way, because it brings them that much closer to total domination.
These attacks on freedom in America did not just appear out of thin air. 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. All an aspiring dictator needs is a few people to not vote; a few people who, after waiting hours in line, say, “that’s it, I’m going home”; a few people who stay quiet as long as they’re unbothered in their gated community. Because democracy is not lost: it is given up.