Freedom Isn't Free
It takes more than eternal vigilance.
The militants who stormed the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 like to tell each other — and the rest of us — that “freedom isn’t free.” It’s the kind of compact, pithy slogan that is often used to justify antisocial behavior, and as is so often true it ignores plain meanings of words to try to warp public opinion. The freedoms we enjoy require vigilance, sure: but that’s what our military and our domestic police forces are for. And those things — the armed forces — cost money. Free speech, after all, is a right; free beer is a gift. And freedom, indeed, isn’t free.
One of the problems we face in every election cycle — and in 2024 especially — is the common perception that the president “runs the government” — that is, that his hand is and should be on everything. That, in essence, is the theory of the “unitary executive” so popular with conservatives, especially at least three members of the Supreme Court. Chief Justice Roberts, in particular, has been working towards the demolition of the administrative state since he was in the White House Counsel’s office during the Reagan Administration. That administrative state — the well-established, independent executive agencies where experts in their fields work to solve the various problems of government (conducting, in other words, the People’s business) — is portrayed by MAGA as the dreaded Deep State™, committed to taking away your freedoms and controlling your life.
Of course it’s a lie; the administrative agencies developed as a practical solution to a significant problem of government: how to expedite decision-making, while ensuring that those decisions are not — as the lawyers like to say — arbitrary and capricious. (Arbitrary and capricious is very much where we are now, with the whipsaw of tariffs, the “emergency” immigration of White “refugees” from South Africa, the attempts to “purify” both academic speech and racial composition…. the list goes on and on.) The structures and strictures that so chafe at John Roberts and his SCOTUS brethren are hardly arbitrary; rather, they are born of hard experience over decades. For example: civil service rules that protect government employees are designed to prevent exactly the excesses of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (which is neither a department, nor interested in actual efficiency). Many reforms were enacted after Teapot Dome exposed the sale of patronage positions; many more came after Watergate, a response to Nixon’s weaponization of the FBI and the Justice Department.
It all sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Everything old is new again. This time, not only jobs but pardons, government secrets, and the personal data of millions of Americans are for sale; dissent is suppressed, and the dissenters threatened with prosecution, deportation, or life in a South Sudan gulag.
The poet Andrei Codrescu, commenting on the collapse of the nascent democracy in Russia, remarked: “Give the people a choice between free speech and free sausage, they will choose the sausages every time.” I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, because it neatly describes the box the American people have put themselves in: free speech, our most precious right and the one without which democracy perishes, doesn’t put food on the table. It doesn’t provide jobs (except to those journalist elites), it doesn’t educate our children (except that it does), it doesn’t help with the housework or the mortgage payments. Put another way: you can eat your words, but you can’t eat free speech. That doesn’t mean it’s unimportant, or that the “anti-oligarchy tour” doesn’t have a point. It especially doesn’t mean that we should all just go about our business and hope — hope! — that Fearless Leader will eventually lower the price of eggs and coffee, as he promised. (Instead, his ill-conceived and even more poorly-executed trade war is driving us straight to paying $3,000 for a new phone.)
Freedom isn’t free: the price is vigilance, and protest, and voting. Use it or lose it: exercise that precious right, and keep exercising it in the face of a corrupted government that would prefer people not hear unpleasant truths. Exercise it, speak out, talk to everyone you can; because actually doing that is the cost of keeping it. It’s a small price to pay.
You can find a way to speak out near you at this link. Please attend, and make your voice heard. Silence, after all, is acquiescence.