The Anger of Realizing America Isn’t Free
Photo by Judeus Samson on Unsplash
Over and over again, the one “truth” told to me as a child was that America was free. It would be something spoken during official commencements by school administrators and local politicians. Candidates for office would begin their debates by extolling how American freedom allowed them to be where they are today. Teachers would take time during lessons to discuss the uniqueness of the American experiment, highlighting all the rights and opportunities given to all of its citizens.
America is fixated on the idea of freedom. Liberty is asserted as a right in the Declaration of Independence and as a founding aim within the US Constitution. “The policy of American government is to leave its citizens free, neither restraining them nor aiding them in their pursuits,” writes Thomas Jefferson in 1787. “Freedom and the dignity of the individual have been more available and assured [in the US] than in any other place on earth,” Ronald Reagan said in a speech in 1981. This certainty of American freedom is seen as a universal constant. We have so many politicians regaling Americans about how free we are that rarely do we stop to question if this is true.
While America has worked towards many admirable goals, it has not achieved the level of freedom that it thinks it has. This certainty is an illusion. America does not let its citizens be free in any classical sense of the word. We are told that we are free by nearly everyone, yet that is not what many of us experience in our day-to-day lives. We are constrained by our laws, norms, jobs, and so many other factors that it can be dizzying to contemplate.
For some, this awakening can lead to exhaustion and depression — neither of which are mutually exclusive — but for many others, it swells into anger. The gaslighting of freedom has many Americans furious over something they thought was their birthright but always somehow remains just out of reach.
As a child, I remember not wanting to say the pledge of allegiance. I had become disillusioned with America (see my previous article here). I asked to be able to opt-out of the salute to the flag during homeroom. My teacher acquiesced after getting a signed note from my parents but still insisted that I face the flag every morning, saying that I was free to stand there and say nothing.
However, I sure didn’t feel free. If you were a philosopher, you could say that my teacher was interfering with my “negative freedom” or the right to do something absent from coercion or restraint. The teacher was an authority figure preventing me from doing what I wanted, which was to not participate in the pledge of allegiance. This example is small and arguably inconsequential, but it filled me with so much rage. I would glare at my homeroom teacher — my lips unmoved.
There are so many times in America where I have felt this way. I was legally only able to marry my partner six years ago (see Obergefell v. Hodges), and I could not change the gender marker on my state ID to the right one until three years ago. I felt grateful when these changes finally happened, but legal recognition also brought with it so much anger at the lost time others had stolen. I wanted to throttle all those responsible by the neck, and I don’t think that resentment will ever go away completely.
Flash forward years later from that classroom where I refused to say the pledge of allegiance: I had started to develop gender dysphoria. I was unaware of my dysphoria, and I did not have the resources — neither in terms of money nor social support — to transition even if I had been aware. This gap severely impacted my well-being and prevented me from participating in “normal” society. It took a long time to come to terms with my transness and begin to live comfortably.
Here, you could say that my “positive freedom” was denied, or the ability to do or enjoy certain things I want free from externalities such as social stigma and money. The thing I wanted as a child was the ability to know myself. I needed to have the education to learn that I was trans and then be given the resources to transition. The society I existed in, however, did not materially make allowances for that to happen. And so, from this perspective, I was less free, even though no one was telling me directly that I couldn’t be trans (at least not initially).
The anger over this reality was not immediate. It took a while for this injustice to seep into my person — for me to truly internalize that others thought I was a lesser being not deserving of recognition. I don’t think people who have acceptance — an admittedly small and increasingly out of touch minority — can understand that feeling: how could they? They have never had their humanity debated and scrutinized. It makes me so angry that some people get to drift through life unexamined, while I have to endure debates on my very existence.
When I look at my America, I see so many individuals who have had their time taken from them by others. If and when they manage to claw those moments back from their oppressors, relief does not always follow. When former police officer Derek Chauvin was finally convicted for the murder of George Floyd, many commentators did not feel happy about the conviction. I instead saw a lot of justified anger: anger that it took so long; anger that similar injustices are still happening; anger that justice could happen if people truly cared to enact it. “It’s not justice because justice is George Floyd going home tonight to be with his family,” politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said of the verdict.
We have a society that takes people from us, and it’s not always just at the end of a gun. Positive and negative freedoms are usually not distinct spheres, and it’s truthfully a fantasy that you can separate them at all. Oppressed people will almost always experience both problems at once. The transgender community, for example, is not only at the forefront of battles for negative freedoms (e.g., the right to change their government documents, the right to use any bathroom free from discrimination, etc.), but positive freedoms such as fighting for better healthcare so that medically transitioning is possible for more people. If you are dealing with coercion at the hands of a state or business, you are most likely facing systemic barriers to employment, housing, or health care.
There are many nuances to this framework (e.g., Hobbesian, Lockean, natural liberty, civil liberty, etc.). If you would like to learn more, there are great resources out there to break this stuff down further (see Plato Stanford, Tanner R. Layton’s essay A Theory of Freedom, and Isaiah Berlin’s essay Two Concepts of Liberty). Generally speaking, conservatives claim to fight for greater negative freedom (e.g., “get big government out of my life”), and liberals claim to fight for greater positive freedom (e.g., “let’s give people greater opportunities so that they can participate in America”), but reality often fails to live up to either expectation.
When it comes to all aspects of freedom (e.g., positive, negative, etc.), our country does very badly in both respects, and having to pretend otherwise is infuriating.
Conservatives like to pretend we are the freest country in the world. The mythical concept of negative freedom advocated for by conservatives is that “all we need to do is stay out of people’s way.” To reiterate Thomas Jefferson: “The policy of American government is to leave its citizens free, neither restraining them nor aiding them in their pursuits.”
This position, however, is naive. America never stayed out of everyone’s way. Jefferson enslaved over 600 people throughout the course of his life. Coercion existed from the start of this country — in fact, our country was built by it. There has never been equal enforcement of negative rights for all people. This country has enslaved, jailed, and beaten people for no other reason than for them living their lives.
While many laws have improved over time for some, the circumstances of countless people have only done so marginally or not at all. We live in an America where people can “theoretically” do many things on paper but can’t do much in practice unless they are obscenely wealthy or privileged. Any adult American outside of prison can vote (a big caveat), but millions of Americans are prevented from voting due to regressive voter suppression laws. Anyone has the right to a public education, but the quality of those schools varies greatly depending on where you live. Elon Musk may be able to launch a car into space, but wealth inequality and white supremacy ensure that many people are one bad bill away from homelessness.
It turns out, that when you don’t give people the resources to have a good life, and you don’t rein in individuals from being able to do whatever awful thing that they want, it creates a society that is pretty fucking awful. While billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos fight over dead rocks like the Moon, tens of millions of Americans are starving. Musk has launched over 1,000 satellites into orbit with plans to launch many more, and I cannot help but think of all the homes those resources could have built instead. Many people will die from those increased emissions because one rich man wants to build a paradise 206.19 million miles away, and it makes me furious.
Where is the freedom here? How does this massive injustice ensure that our lives are materially better?
This inequity makes a lot of otherwise nonviolent people like myself very, very angry. A recent wave of “eat the rich” memes has emerged because our society gives a few people everything and everyone else too little. The hatred of the rich is everywhere. Watch as a majority of Americans get behind the idea of a wealth tax. Buy an “Eat The Rich” shirt on Etsy. Read a breakdown about how the rich are hoarding all of our wealth. Skim through a diatribe of an American ranting about the rich on Reddit. “I get tired of working my ass off to get a degree and hold a job,” begins the post, “while some assholes get to live the lives that 90% of people will never see.” Another one goes: “The rich want to be assholes and hoard their money, fuck 'em, and I hope they all burn in hell.”
The rich are beyond hated at this point. I don’t think privileged people truly understand the rage that comes from being denied your humanity. When a Wendy’s is burned to the ground, a window is smashed, or a trash can is lit on fire, it does not come out of nowhere.
It’s because we condemn countless Americans to live in poverty with no chance of upward mobility. It’s because cops keep shooting people of color. It’s because we keep incarcerating Black Americans at higher rates. It’s a status quo that’s infuriating. That anger will not go away because the injustices never go away. The rage simmers at the back of your mind, waiting for the chance to spread to the surface and burn everything down.
Staying out of someone’s way is a nice thought, but when you don’t focus on an equal playing field, those rights end up being all but meaningless to those who need them the most.
This realization naturally brings us to positive freedom, which theoretically accounts for these differences because it’s all about reducing the divide between what people want to do, and what limits them. As Isaiah Berlin wrote in their essay Two Concepts of Liberty: “The ‘positive’ sense of the word ‘liberty’ derives from the wish on the part of the individual to be his own master. I wish my life and decisions to depend on myself, not on external forces of whatever kind.” It’s all about reducing externalities so we can act.
The issue here is one of implementation. America not only lacks the positive rights of many other developed countries (e.g., paid maternity and paternity leave, greater unemployment benefits, universal healthcare, etc.), but the way we try to achieve those gains is predominantly through inefficient market forces. Social Security is all about providing benefits to people in retirement, as long as you or a partner pay into it as a worker for at least 10 years. The Affordable Care Act sought to expand healthcare coverage to millions of Americans by making private insurers more competitive and cheaper. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is devoted to more stringently regulating financial entities like banks and lenders so that they can treat the US consumer more fairly. These classic policy achievements focus on ensuring that we have as much autonomy in that marketplace as workers and consumers as possible.
However, is that real freedom? I spend some 40 hours a week on my job, and it’s not something I would choose to do if I had more resources. My work commitments are on the low end of the spectrum too. The majority of full-time workers spend an average of 7 hours more per week, and some professions take get much longer. Amazon warehouse workers can pull 10 or even 12-hour days, 5 or 6 days a week.
Americans also take fewer breaks. One 2019 study found that 51% of Americans had not taken a vacation in a year. When people do take time off, they report feeling guilty for not being at work. “There’s always a part of me that has a bit of a toe in the water on work, even when I’m vacationing, just making sure nothing urgent is going on that I need to be responding to,” told one Silicon Valley worker to Marketplace. I am literally writing this article while on vacation.
If you have to spend a large number of your waking hours — an estimated 30% or more of your conscious life — at a job to subsist, how can that be real freedom in a positive sense? You are literally being constrained by your work, and although that improves with a better welfare state, it doesn’t go away. Even countries with more robust safety nets still have workers spending a sizeable chunk of their lives working for others.
We have to question why this is necessary. If technology can provide for most of our basic needs (e.g., healthcare, food, housing, etc.) more quickly and efficiently than ever before, why does it not feel that way? We have become more productive over time, but the larger population has not felt those gains. Instead, they have been concentrated in the hands of a hundred or so people who have more wealth than what can be reasonably spent in hundreds of lifetimes. Technology is supposed to free us from the drudgery of life, but at this point, I’d rather give up my iPhone forever if it meant I didn’t have to work all the time just to eat.
Not only do most of us not choose the amount of time we spend working, but most of us also do not choose what work we do. A solid majority of workers do not feel good about their jobs (a finding felt globally, not just inside the United States). When this finding is probed more seriously, as anthropologist David Graeber did for their book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, many people admit that their jobs provide no worthwhile utility either. “A lot of bullshit jobs,” Graeber told Vox, “are just manufactured middle-management positions with no real utility in the world, but they exist anyway in order to justify the careers of the people performing them. But if they went away tomorrow, it would make no difference at all.” This last point has been proved viscerally by the pandemic as many of us realized rather quickly that most of our jobs have not been necessary to keep society moving.
Contrary to the popular meme, most of us are working to survive, not to find profound meaning. We are there to eat, which means there is an obvious power imbalance between our bosses and us. Since we are all forced to work for the sake of subsistence, those who control our labor can dictate a lot of what we do. As long as a work-related case can be made for it, we can be directed to change our hair, clothing, weight, and so much more — on top of, of course, how long our hours are, and if we will be able to eat that week. We may be “free” to try our luck elsewhere, but the same dynamic can be found in bad workplaces across America.
I have had my fair share of these experiences. I remember one boss calling me often in the middle of the night demanding that I look over old work or even just reassure them emotionally about their divorce. I would try to politely establish boundaries; however, they still called many nights, asking me to work later and later and to console them more and more. This bled into holidays where I was “highly encouraged” to spend one New Years' Eve poring over invoices. I was young and depressed and didn’t have many options career-wise, so I stayed for months longer at that job than I wanted to. And I was privileged enough to have a partner who supported my transition to a new career. Many are not so lucky.
None of this feels like freedom to me.
We do not have the luxury of freedom with work — either in a negative or a positive sense — and the few slivers of autonomy workers do manage to obtain reveal the rage simmering underneath. Once stimulus money started coming in, many workers flat out refused to work during the pandemic because the health risks were not worth the low pay and hectic hours. “We all quit!!,” reads one viral sign posted inside a Wendy’s. “If you don’t pay people enough to live their lives, why should they slave away for you?” reads another set of signs outside a Dollar General, notifying customers that the store had “closed indefinitely.”
Those in power are so accustomed to assuming the world should be this way that they don’t realize many of us are here by force, not by choice, and their ignorance of this status quo is maddening.
I have been angry for a long time. As I learned that I was trans, my rage only grew. I kept flashing back to all the time I lost in this “free” society. Whenever I saw a politician arguing against helping trans kids in schools, it was they who I blamed for all those stolen moments. They were the ones making it materially difficult for trans people to have a good life, and although they were not always the same people who made my life difficult, I grew to hate them all the same. This problem was not just happening to me, but to millions of trans people around the globe, and billions more were ignoring it.
In an interview, the writer James Baldwin famously said that to be Black in America was: “to be in a state of rage…almost all of the time — and in one’s work. And part of the rage is this: It isn’t only what is happening to you. But it’s what’s happening all around you and all of the time in the face of the most extraordinary and criminal indifference….”
This quote hits me every time I hear it because its words are so true that they hurt. The injustices of America have always been more than what they do to one person. The weight of them is felt individually and collectively all at once.
I am an angry person because life has taught me to be angry. I started as a disobedient tween refusing to say the pledge of allegiance. Since then, this rage has continuously been validated by a society that uses its monopoly on violence to punish people for merely existing. This punishment sometimes comes in the form of the wrong end of a gun, but more likely than not, a lack of freedom is far more nuanced than direct coercion. It is experienced as a lack of opportunity, the hoarding of wealth, and often both.
America loves to think it's the freest country in the world, but nothing this dysfunctional can ever be considered free. We should be angry about the lie of American freedom and pissed off enough to want to change it.