Law Professor Aziz Rana writes in the Boston Review
Throughout the world the word “freedom” is strongly associated with the politics of the left.
This is not the case. It is associated with neo-Liberalism. Communism is not associated with Freedom.
It brings to mind the great anticolonial struggles of the twentieth century,
which generally resulted in less freedom
revolutionary battles against feudalism and aristocracy,
ditto
movements for women’s and LGBTQ+ liberation,
which the Liberals were for. Raising the productivity and tapping the consumer power of any and every identity class is good for Capitalism.
as well as labor’s fight to organize and to overcome workplace misery and economic oppression.
Again, this was good for Capitalism. Raising productivity also means raising elasticities of demand and supply. That's how you defeat market failure.
These associations are certainly present in the United States too. Many conceive of the civil rights movement as a pivotal part of a long Black freedom struggle, for example.
Whereas, like Feminism, the thing was about raising productivity and consumption power. Also, since African-Americans were super-patriots and did well in the Army and Diplomacy, National Security received a boost.
But a curious thing has happened within American culture. The language of freedom has been claimed almost entirely by the political right, from the absurd (the renaming of French fries as “freedom fries” during the Iraq War) to the dangerous (reactionary House Republicans organize as the “Freedom Caucus”).
This happened long ago. The 'Free World' was the Capitalist West led by the US which had Jim Crow till 1965.
Today, when many Americans, across the political spectrum, think of freedom, they connect it to extreme individualism, market fundamentalism, bellicosity, and deep suspicion of social programs and government provision.
Because the free market is synonymous with Capitalism.
Even worse, the right’s capture of freedom has linked the word to resurgent white nationalism, in which proponents routinely present freedom as under attack from racial outsiders at the border or in the cities—and as requiring militarized violence to keep threats at bay.
This has always been the case. If the Whites hadn't kept America White, Rana's people would scarcely have paid good money to emigrate there.
One response to this development is to treat it as a matter of Democratic Party messaging.
Their message is that the only electable Presidential candidate they have is 82 years ago.
If liberal and left politicians better communicate their ideas, one might think, the language of freedom might be reclaimed. But the U.S. right’s distinctive appropriation of freedom talk has deeper roots than political rhetoric.
The US was created by WASPs for European settlement. Rana's people knew this when they decided to run away from a place ruled by their own kind to America.
It is tied to persistent and structural features of this society
smart White peeps run things
—features made evident by placing the U.S. domestic context in a global perspective.
The global perspective is that it pays to imitate what smart White peeps do. Try to dress like them and do the things they do. Sadly, smart White peeps are no longer Professors of shite subjects. So don't go down that road.
Specifically, the particular role that U.S. imperial power
The US decided it didn't pay to be 'imperial'. It didn't want to rule over darker skinned folk. It decided to cut the Philippines loose in the Thirties.
has played in collective life—both in the practices of settler conquest and in the terms of today’s global primacy—has repeatedly emboldened exclusionary and highly individualistic versions of domestic freedom. This underappreciated context has shaped cultural environments in which it is almost second nature to link freedom to accounts of self-assertive and unencumbered individuals (coded as “white”).
Why are Whites so goddamn white? Why couldn't they have black stripes- like zebras?
We need a sustained political effort that would make left emancipatory accounts of freedom as culturally resonant as the ones they contest.
Does it involve compulsory gender re-assignment surgery or would Rana settle for unstinting support for Hamas?
. And critically, such a project is not chiefly about communication strategy or political messaging. It is a matter of institution building, reshaping the everyday worlds people inhabit—their workplaces, neighborhoods, and schools—in ways that would naturally tie experiences of freedom to democratic values of inclusive solidarity, mutual respect, and common concern.
Braiding each other's hair while undergoing compulsory gender reassignment surgery- unless you have a note from your Doctor testifying that you are on active service with the Hamas Rape and Decapitation Squad.
U.S. history may have corroded notions of freedom, but that same history also indicates the conditions under which emancipatory language can be genuinely liberating.
for e.g. during compulsory gender reassignment surgery while being sodomized by disabled goats so as to protest neo-liberalism.
Anglo-European settlers carried to North America a vision of liberty that in many ways remains resonant today.
Fuck off! They wanted the right to pray in their own Churches rather than face legal penalties and disabilities in consequence of failure to attend Anglican worship. But such disabilities soon disappeared in England itself. They are wholly irrelevant now.
In particular, they argued that to be free entailed more than simply not having your immediate desires thwarted by others, or being subject to someone else’s arbitrary whims. It required actually experiencing independence and control over the basic conditions of one’s life.
Initially, they just wanted more religious freedom than they had back home. Then their grievances were economic in nature. But, other than that, the Englishman had as much or more 'independence and control' as his American cousin.
In the economic domain, this meant both directing the terms of one’s own work and enjoying security from worries regarding financial ruin or dependence. In the political domain, free citizenship carried with it the experience of participating meaningfully in the governance of society.
America had the 'spoils system'. After an election, all Government jobs were reallocated. Is that what this silly man means?
Above all, to be free was to enjoy a robust experience of self-rule—an experience that combined a mastery over one’s own life and a central role in shaping the direction of collective arrangements and institutions.
To be free meant being responsible for one's own safety. But this meant banding together to have professional gunfighters to keep the peace, catch the runaway slave, or exterminate the Injun.
There are two ways this self-rule can be provided.
There is only way. Freedom means a set of Hohfeldian immunities which are upheld or enforced by a coercive mechanism which costs money. What matters is if there is enough money and enforcement is 'incentive compatible'.
First, a society can seek to elevate democracy to a universal and governing ideal across the institutional landscape of collective life.
Ukrainians could have done that instead of fighting Putin's goons. But then they would now be his slaves.
Members can appreciate the extent to which the profound connectedness of modern conditions means that no one can be free on their own.
You can appreciate that while being held hostage by Hamas. It won't help you any.
In the sphere of labor, independence requires the embrace of interdependence, in which all those that do the work—regardless of their wealth or status—enjoy shared control over the decisions that shape the workplace.
Go work for a cooperative and quietly starve to death. Why is this guy working for Boston College instead? Does he believe the janitor has equal control over what he decides to say in his lectures?
Such an account does more than join freedom and inclusion together: it treats the struggle for a free society as only achievable through an ethical commitment to solidarity.
Sadly, commitments don't achieve shit.
A second path, however, understands freedom as zero-sum and the world as marked by scarce resources.
No. Economics sees scarcity but it doesn't see freedom as zero-sum. On the contrary, maximizing freedom improves resource allocation and gets us closer to the 'Pareto Frontier'. That's 'positive sum'.
On the other hand, to reassure others or so as to keep a check on one's own myopic impulsiveness, one may make 'commitments' of various sorts. The problem is that those commitments or the institutions which enforce them may be as stupid as shit. So the rational thing to do is to hedge your bets and limit your exposure to such beasties.
Under such conditions, my pursuit of material prosperity and my fulfilment of personal wants necessarily competes with that of others. For that reason, how I would like institutions to be run may well diverge from those around me.
Everybody wants institutions to be run the way they want. Nobody wants the guys who run institutions we pay for to fuck us over. Yet, if we don't pay attention, that's what ends up happening. The solution is that, depending on our capability, we hedge by gaining a countervailing or disintermediating power over those institutions.
And if this is the case, then only those I view as similar to myself should have the power to make relevant decisions—or barring that, I should be exempt from collective strictures and common responsibilities.
This is foolish. Institutions solve coordination problems. A 'Schelling focal' institution is one we think others think everybody thinks would be picked by all. But, that focal institution might be dysfunctional. So everybody would limit their exposure to it. Thus, even if the Bench or the Legislature or the Academy is captured by stupid nutters, everybody with any capability has a way to disintermediate the cunts or, at least limit their own exposure to them.
Both paths have real roots in the United States. But the zero-sum account, more often than not, has won out, aided by the long-term nature of American expansionism.
It stopped with the admission of Hawaii in 1959 the only state with a non White voting majority.
Even worse, empire framed these zero-sum competitions in explicitly racial terms.
The fact that there was no empire increased the return on outward expansion and applications to join the Federal Union.
Land, for the early American settlers, was an essential precondition of economic independence and broader self-rule:
No. Land was more or less a free good. Labour and working capital were the scarce resources.
in agricultural society, to own land was to be free.
No it wasn't. The grandest subjects of the Tzar or the Celestial Emperor had less freedom than a London publican or a Boston baker.
The great bounty of North America was a seemingly inexhaustible land base for economic prosperity. But in order for it to be used, it first had to be taken.
It had to be used sensibly in order to generate the resources to protect and expand holdings of it. This guy has shit for brains. He thinks the Whites first exterminated the natives and only then exploited the land commercially.
Indigenous conquest and Native expropriation, then, became the basic engine of liberty.
No. It pre-existed the defeat of the Plains Indian Confederacies. The economic base of White power depended on its more productive hinterland and oceanic trade. The Indians had started their military rise dealing in furs and pelts. This simply wasn't sustainable. Also European immigration was increasing at least partly because of a desire for American style liberty. Demography is itself a function of economics.
Settlers’ legal and political institutions were meant to do two things simultaneously.
They were meant to do only one thing- viz reduce internecine conflict. That failed- there was a Civil War- but the overall objective- viz. to make the Union more productive and thus more powerful- was achieved.
First, they were supposed to provide insiders with a robust experience of freedom.
Nothing can provide you with something you have to create for yourself.
And second, to support this overarching project, these institutions were designed to extract much-needed land and labor from Native and then from other excluded groups, particularly enslaved Black people and their descendants.
Labour was already being extracted from slaves. There was no need for any additional institutions in this regard. On the other hand, it is true that without the machinery of State and Federal Government no dick could have entered any pussy. This is because but for institutional 'manufactured consent', no man would ever let his penis anywhere near a vagina. For thousands of years, men have been brain-washed and coerced into donating their precious sperm to greedy cunts. Once Capitalism is abolished, men will suck each other off with vim and vigour while turning a deaf ear to the piteous queefs of neglected vaginas.
Thus, for most of American history, the dominant account of freedom was
given by guys who wrote well or who spoke well or who sang well or who made movies which made lots and lots of money. Nobody gave a fuck about accounts given by shitty Professors of worthless subjects.
organized around two distinct and rigid views of governance—one for insiders and one for outsiders. Insiders enjoyed the benefits of political participation, the rule of law, and market prerogatives. Outsiders could face near limitless discretion and violence, whether from the state or from employers, landowners, and business.
Justice is a service industry. If it is a monopoly, there will be price and service provision discrimination regardless of the ideological orientation of the regime. That's one reason, those who have a degree of capability will try to ensure they have access to an alternative provider.
These conditions linked freedom and domination together in racist and destructive ways.
In the case of the US, racism was constructive. It created the country this guy's family wanted to move to.
But critically, this settler story of freedom proved resonant because its beneficiaries enjoyed real material benefits.
As did immigrants and their descendants.
Thomas Piketty notes in Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014) that throughout the 1800s—indeed even during the Gilded Age—wealth inequality in the United States was “markedly lower than in Europe.” He does not provide a proper explanation for why, but the answer is fairly evident. Across the century, the project of expansion provided white settlers with easy access to property. It cut against oligarchic tendencies within society, and facilitated a prosperous and small-scale brand of white capitalism. Settler society had its persistent class inequalities. But empire
there was no emperor and no empire which is why wealth did not pool in the cities where the Imperial government was based only to be siphoned off by the aristocracy back home.
smoothed them over, making the experience of independence and self-mastery it promised genuine for countless white laborers.
There was a competitive process whereby the capable, or lucky, farmer or artisan or entrepreneur expanded at the expense of the less capable or lucky. Internal migration meant there were plenty of 'second acts' and 'third acts' and 'fourth acts' in American lives. But what it all came down to was increased specialization and division of labour and the tapping of economies of scope and scale.
The imperial backdrop
Russia had an 'imperial backdrop'. America did not.
fed a very specific and individualistic relationship to liberty.
Pretty much the same one as the Canadians- who were part of an Empire- had.
One did not necessarily need to embrace interdependence and collective solidarity to enjoy self-rule.
Frontier town Americans embraced interdependence and collective solidarity much more than any Englishman had to. The American posse comitatus is the opposite of the British one- which is an exercise of royal prerogative. The Sheriff of a small town is obliged to 'deputize' enough local citizens to form a posse large enough to put down any threat to public order. The Army can't be brought in without Congressional approval.
If faced with land forfeiture or burdensome taxes, white Americans in theory (and often in practice) could simply move farther west and expand the edge of settlement.
White Europeans were welcome to come and do the same in America.
In effect, the idea that freedom could be entirely in one’s own hands did not seem far-fetched. Government action to regulate settler society, then—whether enforcing debts or even seeking to contain, however marginally, white theft or violence toward Indigenous and Black people—was an unwanted intrusion.
No. Government was what local communities provided for themselves. These communities could come together to form States which could petition for admission to the Union. What this silly man is getting at is 'dual sovereignty', States' rights, and suspicion of the Federal Government. The safety valve for those who didn't like their own State, was that they could move West or South.
Today we misunderstand this relationship to government as one that was antistatist or libertarian.
Whereas actually it was about how White males be totes against biracial butt sex. They killed all the good and decent biracial butt sex advocates because Neo-Liberalism is totes evil.
Settler freedom far from opposed all government practices. Instead, the prevailing approach saw the apparatus of the state as a sword: one wielded by empowered Americans toward outsiders, meant to ensure insiders with unfettered control over private property and the enjoyment of self-rule.
This could only be achieved by prising apart all the biracial butt sex practitioners and then shooting them in the head. If this is not done, neo-liberalism can't take hold.
It was properly directed at Indigenous, Black, or Mexican people:
who were, quite properly, sodomizing each other unceasingly while protesting cruelty to penguins by slightly more Fascist penguins.
never to be used against “true” citizens. Indeed, for white settlers, any internal exercise of state authority was nothing less than an attempt to reduce them to the condition of nonwhite outsiders—to treat free Americans as if they were colonial subjects.
Professor Rana's next book will show that Adolf Hitler didn't really like Jews. There was also some subtle discrimination against Gypsies and Homosexuals.
Generations of settlers thus came to see any constraint on their capacity to exercise power—including over the marginalized—as a dangerous threat to their liberty.
Rana thinks General Custer tried to stop some Whites from saying rude things to bisexual Red Indians.
During the twentieth century the United States shifted roles dramatically,
It defeated Hitler and then kept Stalin in check. How very wicked!
moving from a settler expansionist state with local ambitions to a hegemonic global superpower with far wider ones.
Which is why Rana's people decided to spend good money settling there.
American power was no longer organized around the idea that it had the right to claim new territory. Now, the narrative was that the United States rightly enjoyed military and economic primacy.
Whereas Rana's people came from a shithole whose narrative that it wasn't a shithole did not enjoy primacy.
Its interests were the world’s interests, and therefore, the country had the right to intervene wherever anyone threatened to undermine the American-led liberal and capitalist global order. And, precisely because American power was exceptional, the United States—unlike other states—could legitimately move in and out of international legal constraints in the name of securing this order.
As did any country powerful enough to do so.
By the 1960s this vision of American dominance had rejected the explicit racism of the long settler experience.
Not in South Africa or with respect to Portuguese possessions.
It now presumed that the United States was legally respectful of state sovereignty, regardless of the underlying racial makeup of the foreign nation. But in key ways, the terms of U.S. primacy still fed the same old domestic cultural resonance of freedom: one belligerent, zero-sum, and individualistic.
Nonsense! America propped up plenty of Dictators and absolute Monarchs. But it also gave a lot of aid to Pakistan and India.
Abroad, the dynamics of U.S. power reinforced classic settler dismissals of what freedom actually meant for those on the global margins.
Yet, once Reagan and Bush did a deal with the Soviets and the Cubans left Angola, the US pulled the rug from under apartheid South Africa.
With European powers decimated in the wake of World War II, the United States shifted from being one among a variety of global players to the dominant economic force in the world. Its currency emerged as the global reserve currency, and through the carrot of development assistance and the stick of military intervention and violent coups, it reconstructed foreign states in its image, opening markets for U.S. goods in the process.
Very true. The Shah of Iran wasn't a monarch. He was an elected President- right?
All of this often went hand in hand with an account of racialized threat
LBJ often alleged that Dr. King was planning to anally rape him with his ginormous dong.
—just one that had been updated to fit within the new, more universalistic, narratives of nationhood and belonging at play. The new American global order continued to assume that the United States could exercise violence to fulfill its security objectives (read now as the world’s objectives) to contain outside threats.
Why did Rana's family decide to emigrate to this evil country? Is Rana himself being held prisoner there?
And, as with the past, the threats primarily came from communities presented as less culturally and politically attuned to freedom—especially ones in the postcolonial Asian, African, and Latin American worlds.
Russia, China and Iran were never colonized.
This settler story of freedom proved resonant because its beneficiaries enjoyed real material benefits.
Which is why Rana's family settled there.
In truth, the tension between the United States and decolonizing nations was often over substantive disagreements about what freedom itself entailed.
Nonsense! The US would happily prop up an absolute monarchy or tyrannical dictatorship.
Leaders like Michael Manley in Jamaica and Julius Nyerere in Tanzania conceived of liberation and self-rule as requiring a new system of “worldmaking after empire,” as Adom Getachew has explored, in which all peoples had the genuine ability to shape economic and political terms.
So what? Their economic policies were shitty. The US was not greatly concerned with either of them though they did send Clint Eastwood to invade Grenada.
For instance, this meant bringing together a global majority around initiatives like the New International Economic Order (NIEO).
A majority of losers is still just a bunch of fucking losers.
Such efforts aimed to replace Cold War rivalry, and thus U.S. dominance, with a multipolar and solidaristic regionalism committed to
begging for money from the West and then biting the proverbial hand
overcoming exploitation and dependencies
though 'free money'
throughout the global economy. Yet time and again, U.S. officials read alternative frameworks—along with opposition on the ground to American interventions—through its own narrow security lens.
as opposed to the broad lens of seeking sodomy from hobos.
Anticolonial understandings of freedom, when in conflict with U.S. objectives, were routinely dismissed as simply stalking-horses for Soviet power or evincing a racialized lack of “maturity.”
Rana's family ran away from some such anti-colonial understanding of freedom. He may be a fool but he won't relocate anywhere such understandings prevail.
At home, these developments promoted white middle-class prosperity,
which is why this nutter remains ensconced in the Great Satan.
but in ways that reaffirmed the ties between external power and an atomized account of internal liberty. The rents the country was able to extract from the global arena—rents contested by Manley or Nyerere
who were utterly useless
—meant that for many newly middle-class Americans, corporate well-being was equivalent to public well-being.
This was certainly the case for Rana's parents- indeed, for Rana himself. He likes his i-phone and flat screen TV just as much as the next guy.
This also meant that, unlike in other parts of the world, key elements of the American social safety net were ultimately left to what individuals could demand from the market.
A State- like Massachusetts which is where Rana lives- is welcome to provide universal coverage.
Jobs, pensions,
The US has generous Social Security pensions to which almost everybody is entitled.
and health insurance were all private entitlements for workers to negotiate from employers, not public goods entrenched through collective action and government provision.
America has dual sovereignty and so some States have more Government provision than others in these matters.
In this sense, as in the Jacksonian period of settler expansion, the nature of the mid-twentieth-century boom reinforced the idea that economic independence and material success rested primarily on individual hard work and entrepreneurial ingenuity.
Whereas, in reality, material success rests primarily on being lazy and whining incessantly.
In his wonderful history of labor in the 1970s, Stayin’ Alive (2010), Jefferson Cowie quotes the son of a white steelworker, who recalled the dramatic material improvements and sense of independence and self-mastery his family enjoyed following World War II: “If what we lived through in the 1950s was not liberation . . . then liberation never happens in real human lives.” This experience was real, meaningful, and in its own way worth celebrating. But at the same time, it was also the case that empire had effectively buttressed a cultural experience that one could be free on one’s own.
Very true. Steel workers are solitary figures who dig up iron ore and then smelt it in a backyard furnace.
To this day American empire pushes domestic conversations about freedom down a corrosive path.
Rana's Mummy says to him 'Darling are you free on Tuesday evening? I need some help moving the furniture.' He replies 'America's decision to colonize Pakistan has totes corroded my freedom to help you in any way.' That good lady sighs and wishes once again that her boy had studied plumbing at Trade School instead of paranoid Leftie nonsense.
But that path is not the only one. Indeed, the competing vision of freedom—the inclusive and solidaristic path—has at times gained the upper hand in American life, if only under very specific structural circumstances.
For example, Americans came together to control the inflow of migrants.
For starters, these ideas have tended to be strongest among those marginalized in settler society. A driving feature of the civil rights movement, for instance, was an exhortation to reconceive what freedom as self-rule meant.
No. Those guys really did want equal voting rights and the ending of Jim Crow segregation.
For those like Martin Luther King, Jr., the call for civil rights entailed more than simply ending legal discrimination and providing upwardly mobile Black Americans with an equal opportunity to achieve professional status and power. King saw American society as wracked by the “evils of racism, poverty and militarism,” in which freedom for some entailed deep violence and injustice toward others. He argued that the country required a “revolution of values” and “a radical restructuring of the architecture of American society.”
Dr. King was a Christian Minister and Theologian. Christianity is against evils of various kinds- including Rana-style stupidity.
This restructuring conceived of society as inherently interdependent: freedom rested on everyone’s equal and effective ability to participate in the central decisions of collective life.
But those decisions might involve ejecting or suppressing a minority. It would be nice if freedom could only used to do nice things but such is not the case.
Such a view demanded basic democratic changes to both political and economic systems.
Only till it was realized that those 'democratic changes' would tank the economy leaving everybody worse off.
King was not alone in these commitments. They circulated widely, from Fannie Lou Hamer’s
a woman of extraordinary courage.
cofounding of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and organizing of Freedom Summer to register Black voters across the South, to King, A. Philip Randolph,
a great man helped by the great women in his life
and Bayard Rustin’s
Later an advocate for Gay Rights praised by Ronald Reagan
“A Freedom Budget for All Americans,” and even to the more recent vision statements of the Movement for Black Lives. It is no coincidence that Black reform movements have often—although not always, it should be noted—emphasized more inclusive and solidaristic accounts of freedom. More often than not, Black communities found themselves at the wrong end of the exclusionary version: the outsiders at the point of the sword. Racial structures in society subjected Black communities to state and private violence, and denied them access to individualized and market-driven benefits. The reality of being a minority in a majority-white society fostered the political need to link Black freedom to the freedom of all.
Sadly, coloured immigration after 1965 probably hurt African Americans disproportionately. It is unfair that people never subjected to slavery or Jim Crow get to avail of affirmative action or pass themselves off as victims.
Jefferson Cowie says:
“Freedom has been wielded too often in opposition to democracy to be of central value moving forward.”
Cowie wants America to move backward- at least relative to China.
As for white American society? The most sustained period in which its inclusive and solidaristic accounts of freedom spread were in the early twentieth century in the years leading up to the New Deal—a period where the basic terms of settler life had collapsed.
The Census Board said the Frontier had closed by 1890.
The frontier was closed; a hierarchical and extreme brand of American corporate consolidation had systematically replaced small-scale and more internally egalitarian brands of settler capitalism.
Nonsense! Half the biggest companies in the US were tiny or didn't exist at all 50 years ago.
More and more white Americans found their desires for independence and self-mastery thwarted by the unfree work of wage labor and tenancy.
More and more human beings found the same thing because there were more and more human beings and being a hunter gatherer sucks ass big time.
The political system further fueled this dependence, with a small coterie of corporate elites dominating public decision-making.
Nope. They dominated corporate decision making.
With this breakdown came an opening: new cultural and political space to infuse ideas of freedom with a universalistic, democratic ethos.
By telling stupid paranoid lies- e.g. if big business didn't exist we wouldn't have to do boring jobs or get degrees in boring shite.
The loss of their old privileges underscored to increasing numbers of working-class white Americans that freedom as self-rule required a sense of shared responsibility as well as common investment in democratic institutions like unions.
Jimmy Hoffa discovered that it was the Mafia who had invested in Unions. During the Second World War, the Feds had to rely on Lucky Luciano to keep the docks free of strikes. Arthur Miller tells the story of a labour agitator whose income dried up as a result of this. He went to see an old pal in the rag trade. The fellow said 'You are too late. I'm bankrupt. I invested everything in a new style of raincoat but the thing isn't selling. You are welcome to go organize my workers and get them to go on strike. They aren't going to get paid in any case.' The agitator took a look at the new product and decided his persuasive powers were sufficient to sell the thing. He did a deal with the entrepreneur and went on to become very rich selling haberdashery. The workers kept their jobs and received pay increments. But the agitator felt bitter and cheated. Thus he set up a fund for promoting Leftie shite on College Campuses. He hadn't been able to destroy Capitalism because his own desire to live well had gotten in the way. Hopefully, the younger generation could be brainwashed into desiring everybody to starve to death while babbling about Diversity, Inclusion and Equity.
The collapse of settler expectations drove a growing willingness to push back against the worst excesses of its racism and exclusion, too.
When? In 1890?
White laborers were more open to seeing themselves as having the same interests as Black, Mexican, and Asian workers: if their material interests were now bound together, then injustices to those communities imperiled white workers’ freedoms as well.
White males were aware that both Unions and Employers were pricing them out of the market. During the Second World War black females took a lot of well paid White semi-skilled work at places like GM. The genie was out of the bottle. Even with Jim Crow, wage differentials were collapsing. However, rising affluence meant that Whites could flee to the suburbs. They didn't want to pay to police the ghettos.
These new realities further cut against that natural association of American power abroad with domestic well-being.
America was Isolationist because the Old World sucked ass. Also their currencies were depreciating which meant their products were competitive on American markets. Cue Smoot-Hawley.
In a world where the United States’ global position had become uncertain—there were no new colonies to settle and the United States was not yet hegemonic—empire’s relationship to domestic prosperity was less clear than ever. Some labor and socialist activists, like Eugene Debs or those in the Industrial Workers of the World, could convince supporters that whatever the benefits had been in the past, American imperialism now promoted plutocracy—not democracy—and enriched a wealthy few at the cost of freedom for most laborers.
Laborers won't have to labour because Socialism has magic powers. Look at Bolshevik Russia! Everybody lives like a millionaire thanks to Comrade Lenin.
These views eventually declined in resonance. After both World War II and the Cold War, American empire, and capital, were able to reconsolidate themselves, setting the terms for what counted as “freedom” in the process.
At least that is what Rana's people thought. They paid good money to get to Racist, Capitalist, America. Rana himself actually lives in Gaza. He commutes to Boston to deliver his lectures.
This is not to say that they absolutely eliminated the cultural power of more inclusive and solidaristic ideals: indeed, the Black freedom struggle’s great achievements came during the Cold War period.
Because of the Cold War. The State Department and the Pentagon saw that Jim Crow was damaging America's diplomatic and military position.
But the overarching structural context placed wind at the back of one path, just as it made promoting the other far more difficult.
Capitalism is not concerned with colour or gender. It cares only about productivity.
Where does this leave us today? Freedom talk may, at present, be most associated with the politics of the right. But its account of freedom is actually less compelling to Americans generally than perhaps at any time since that early twentieth century.
Americans are interested in accounts which feature shape shifting lizards and flying saucers where good ol' boys are subjected to anal probes. Why should paranoid Lefties too not make a little money peddling their fantasies?
At present, there is a wide sense that most Americans experience nothing like freedom as self-rule.
Coz they got jobs or kids who demand nice things to eat and subscriptions to various streaming services.
They are instead subject to the whims of massive and hierarchical institutions, at work and in politics.
Abolish work. Without tax revenue, politics will disappear on its own.
The conservative response is deeply familiar. But the energy it used to carry with it is waning.
Trump is ahead of Biden with Union voters in Michigan. Younger suburban women too have turned against him. Why? It's the economy, stupid.
More than ever, it feels like the right is falling back nostalgically on the same set of worn-out tropes that worked for them in the past.
Vivek Ramaswamy doesn't know the 'worn out tropes'. He also doesn't know how to mute his phone while taking a pee.
It continues to tie individualistic self-mastery to dismantling state programs and deregulating the economy.
As opposed to Boston's Mayor holding a Christmas Party from which White peeps are banned.
But even its own base now sees that corporate interests are not the same as the public interest.
The public interest, in Boston, appears to require tax payers paying for a non-White Christmas.
The mid-twentieth-century bargain with business, so good at the time at promoting an entrepreneurial, individualistic freedom, ultimately proved self-defeating,
which is why Rana is going to emigrate from a poor and defeated country- right?
leading to much of today’s precarity. As global economic conditions changed in the following decades, American corporations squeezed workers, abroad and then at home, and steadily eviscerated what remained of midcentury job, pension, and health care achievements.
Also American corporations failed to ban White people from holding any other than custodial positions. What about dicks? Dicks cause RAPE! Ban them immediately.
Lorna Bracewell
who may have a dick- it is difficult to tell.
says:
“We cannot content ourselves with dismissing the right’s freedom politics as a disingenuous and purely rhetorical sideshow.”
We must ban dicks. They cause RAPE!
In addition, nativist and white nationalist calls for more violence against perceived outsiders—whether detaining and deporting immigrants or backing police actions against Black and brown communities—appear to be little more than reveling in domination for its own sake.
Dicks are causing RAPE! Only homosexuals should be allowed to revel in them.
Such reveling has always been a psychic element of settler freedom, of course.
Many settlers had dicks. That's just wrong.
But the present-tense embrace of domination is increasingly far afield from its historical twin: a guarantee that that domination would give genuine control to the majority of white Americans over the large structuring terms of their lives. As Robin D. G. Kelley has commented, Trumpism and the politics of the right today are notably “fragile.” It rests on “ideological foundations” premised on the control of others but is now unable to make good on its slogans.
Trump is very afraid of this Professor- thinks nobody at all.
All of this is yet further underscored by the shift in the relationship between U.S. global power and domestic well-being. Today, fewer Americans than ever enjoy actual material benefits from the United States’ dominant position in the world economy.
No. More of them do because there are more Americans. It is also the reason that so many people are trying to cross the border.
And the projection of American military authority has, in recent years, gone hand in hand with disastrous wars in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. These wars were often framed by officials as centrally about the preservation of freedom at home and its spread abroad (hence “Operation Enduring Freedom”).
Why spend tax dollars on slaughtering Muslims when they will slaughter each other for free?
But just as during the era of decolonization, interventions were routinely experienced by local communities as external impositions in deep violation of meaningful self-rule.
But 'meaningful self-rule' is the reason millions are fleeing Afghanistan and Iraq.
And at home, trillions plowed into overseas conflict stood in sharp contrast to decades of disinvestment, a reality made even starker by unfolding health and economic crises.
Not to mention the continued existence of dicks. They cause RAPE! Ban them immediately.
The American experience shows us that any domestic vision of freedom rests on global conditions.
Global conditions are bad due to the existence of dicks. Ban them immediately otherwise the Environment will get raped. You'd get hot under the collar too if everybody kept sodomizing you. Why do think the Globe is warming up so much?
Seen from the outside, the disconnect between what the United States considers its global security objectives and how many in Asia, Africa, and Latin America understand the ongoing legacy of colonialism remains a persistent tension.
White peeps must be banned. Many of them have dicks. This causes RAPE!
This dynamic is at play yet again in the Biden administration’s actions following Hamas’s October 7 atrocities against civilians in Israel. As many across the Global South see it, the United States is backstopping the Israeli government’s devastating and punitive bombing campaign in Gaza, along with intense crackdowns in the West Bank and elsewhere—aiding another catastrophic war, while ignoring underlying Palestinian grievances and popular desires for freedom and equal dignity.
Which Hamas was providing them- right?
As difficult as these times are, this unsettled reality does again open, however partially, space for more inclusive and solidaristic ideas of freedom.
Based on banning dicks.
Younger Americans’ growing embrace of the once-forbidden label of “socialism” and the broader political revival of social democratic politics
led to Trump getting into the White House. Hamas may have ensured he gets a second term.
underline the disenchantment both with American-style capitalism
which is evil coz it permits the existence of dicks
and with the political truisms about U.S. power promoted during and after the Cold War.
Rana's parents were deceived into emigrating to a stinky shithole of a country. Americans were starving slaves of Big Corporations who kept sodomizing their weak and feeble employees.
But this moment differs in crucial ways from those earlier periods of left-wing vibrancy.
Americans have a choice between two elderly white men just as they did 4 years ago.
Activists today operate on a political terrain dramatically altered by neoliberal ascendance and decades of Reaganite cultural and political dominance. These changes have fundamentally eroded both the vitality and everyday presence of the institutions, chief among them unions, that once brought working people into the left.
Nixon brought in the ' hard hats' of the Teamsters to beat anti-War hippies. When Reagan broke the Air Traffic controllers strike he actually increased his blue collar vote even though there had been a cascade in 'Union-busting' by Corporates. Workers realized that Bosses wanted strikes so as to fire them and bring in non-Union workers.
Why is this significant?
The lesson from Mondale's disastrous campaign was that white workers reject things like racial quotas and much of the liberal agenda. Obama kept warning the Dems that 'wokeness' would be their undoing. Biden's choice of comatose Kamala turned out to be a very bad idea. He should have gone for someone who could whip the Senate.
Because if a left freedom project assumes that self-rule is a continuous exercise in participation and collective power,
i.e. sitting on committees and having to listen to people who want to talk about the rain-forest or Gaza or the plight of Lesbian goats in Guatemalan Academia.
there are vanishingly few sites in American life—at work or in politics—where these experiences actually exist.
Few work-places would be able to maintain productivity if the staff spend half their time passing resolutions to condemn Guatemalan Academia for its discriminatory attitude to LGBTQYX goats- more particularly those suspected of being of Nicaraguan heritage.
We are simply not raised in cultural worlds in which collective agency is a meaningful reality.
Because the thing is a fantasy. It really isn't true that passing a resolution that my dick ought to be bigger causes the thing to happen.
The result, unsurprisingly, is that when invoked by left activists, solidaristic and democratic accounts of freedom can often seem theoretical and abstract; they do not connect to the daily features of one’s life.
It is difficult for me to connect to my penis because it is so small.
Indeed, it is telling that today, the most potent left invocations of freedom overwhelmingly involve activists within marginalized communities who are referencing actual direct, immediate, and ongoing threats, whether in the context of racial justice protests against policing following George Floyd’s murder,
Police shootings have gone down but African Americans are still disproportionately the victims.
calls for abortion and reproductive rights in the wake of Roe’s overturning, or responses to reactionary attacks on LGBTQ+ identity and safety.
Roe-rage did help the Dems in the mid-terms. The problem is that this may be seen as an issue for the State legislature. It may not help Biden. Did comatose Kamala rise to the occasion? The polls suggest otherwise.
But despite these movement examples, the larger sense that collective self-rule and agency is not something regularly experienced can promote a pessimistic relationship to any language of freedom or emancipation.
More particular if the Job Agency suggests you need to do stricter self-rule w.r.t not playing with yourself during interviews. I'm not saying that's what happened to me. It's the sort of thing which could happen to anybody.
In fact, today’s environment can leave some left-liberals wondering whether the longstanding and specific American relationship between settler freedom and racial domination is proof that all related narratives should be abandoned.
Stop telling Whites they are not welcome to City Hall Christmas parties.
Freedom in the United States as a discursive language, they warn, will inevitably collapse into exclusionary violence and subjugation.
Not to mention RAPE! Ban dicks immediately.
At the most extreme, this sensibility can generate a suspicion of the very utility of collective agency and even of political struggle.
These guys' 'political struggle' is a gift to Trump.
But this sentiment must be resisted. It abandons to the right what has been a powerful and global language of social transformation: a language embraced, too, by many of those excluded from the dominant, reactionary narrative of freedom.
Like Lincoln with his so called 'Emancipation Act'. Why didn't he ban dicks when he had the chance?
And it fails to appreciate how in practice, ideas of freedom are always connected to those of subordination.
Not to mention sodomization by self-ruling dicks. Dicks must be banned!
Throughout the world, communities have come to understand the meaning of freedom in relation to the very modes of oppression—like slavery, colonialism, economic exploitation, or patriarchy—that are prevalent on the ground.
African Americans were wrong to think the Emancipation Act meant they didn't have to pluck cotton under the lash. Real freedom involves cutting off your own dick.
Even successful projects of emancipation do not overcome practices of domination once and for all.
Which is why this fool advocates projects of emancipation which are bound to be completely unsuccessful. Also, they will develop a meth addiction and end up giving beejays at truck stops.
They generate new legal and political orders that knit together secured liberties with emerging hierarchies. Freedom struggles are thus forever ongoing.
So are struggles to find the fucking TV remote.
They may carry with them transformative, even revolutionary aspirations.
Or aspirations to have a bigger dick.
But these aspirations are never completely redeemed in history.
Napoleon had a tiny todger.
The American story of freedom and domination, then, is simply one way that knitting together can take concrete form. Rather than suggesting the need to reject such frames and narratives entirely, the complex U.S. experience highlights how we must grapple with our own particular histories and resulting combinations of freedom and subordination.
I suppose this grappling involves holding your dick while watching S&M videos on the dark web.
Doing so yields two main implications. First, it clarifies that the primary battle for the left is less about communications strategy and more about institution building.
Talking bollocks doesn't matter. Getting Soros to give you money is what we must focus on.
This means strengthening sites
Porn sites
where individuals can enjoy collective agency
orgies
and so would organically
orgasmically
experience freedom as an inclusive and solidaristic practice.
of jizzing on each other's tits- right?
Such efforts start with the political system, whose antidemocratic perversions
jizzing in people's ear holes instead of on their tits
feed pessimism in the very utility of collective solidarity and action.
More particularly if the only female who turns up your orgy is your granny.
Expanding and equalizing voting rights—as well as reforming our distorted, state-based, and gerrymandered framework—all stitch together freedom and democracy in ways that cut against ingrained skepticisms.
But which generate general hilarity because you ended up stitching your dick to your tighty whities.
So too do fundamental changes to the nature of the American workplace.
Working from home means you end up leaving skid marks on the expensive ergonomic chair you bought yourself while drunkenly watching infomercials.
Precisely because most people spend most of their time at work, the workplace is an essential pillar for reconstituting prevalent cultural narratives.
Unless your boss fires you for reconstituting cultural narratives when you were supposed to be mopping the floors.
Whether through bills like the Protecting the Right to Organize Act or other, more far-reaching endeavors, the legal terrain must be altered to expand the capacity of workers to join unions and strike.
Cool! Employers should be encouraged to move to 'Right to Work' States. If the tax base doesn't collapse how can you dream of rivalling Detroit?
These workplace transformations should be properly understood as experiments in the linking of freedom and democracy: they make the institutions people inhabit on a daily basis far more amenable to collective self-rule and promote a continuous exercise in shared decision-making.
I recall a Council funded cafe which was owned and run by the workers themselves. At first things went well. The boycotted South African produce and this was popular. They served every dish with a lump of coal on the side to show solidarity with Scargil's strike. This too was acceptable. Then they took to shutting down for breakfast, lunch and dinner so that the workers could be fed properly. We sympathized. Cafe workers should have proper meal breaks just like everybody else. The problem was that we now had to go to McDonald's on our meal breaks. The Council then ran out of money. The Cafe closed down. Nobody noticed. We had developed a taste for McDonalds even though their food literally has no taste. But it was very efficient and the staff smiled at you and said 'Have a nice Day' instead of 'Free Tibet you fucking Fascist!'
The success of these efforts would create a fundamentally different ecosystem for political discourse and argument.
Successful efforts do change things. But the efforts this nutter recommends are bound to be unsuccessful.
And second, the American experience shows us that any domestic vision of freedom rests on global conditions.
Free Tibet you fucking Fascists! How dare you demand a bacon sarnie when millions in Gaza are starving? Not till every citizen of the Globe gets paid a basic income and has a personal valet can any single person get any fucking breakfast!'
What is often treated as foreign policy is not a sideshow: it necessarily influences cultural and political orientations in the United States. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have taught us that we cannot expect an inclusive and solidaristic version of freedom at home if our government pursues projects of expropriation and expansion—whether over Native nations, still-colonized territories like Puerto Rico,
whose people reject independence
or overseas societies.
America must close its bases in Qatar and Iraq. Seriously, let the A-rabs stew in their own juice.
This underscores the need to focus on reforms that integrate an anti-imperial ethic into how Americans understand their own everyday goals and interests. As with past efforts like the Freedom Budget, one key intersection is security spending. At a time when antiwar activism is cresting again at home and globally, the United States accounts for nearly half of all worldwide defense expenditures, with recent annual defense outlays of upwards of $900 billion. This is a fundamental misallocation of the public treasure, one that bankrolls corporate militarism. It limits the funds available for the broad provision of economic security and independence—not to mention redistributive and reparative policies that commit to Indigenous freedom alongside genuine global well-being and equality.
American military expenditure is broadly 'progressive' in that there is a net transfer from richer to poorer States. Still, as China rises, America may retreat to isolationism. Also a lot of its military tech may simply become obsolete or too expensive. Israel may benefit by giving up American military aid and buying and selling on the international market. China is already a good customer.
Immigration is another central space. Whereas those like Trump link the foreign and domestic through racial demonization and a focus on the imperative of the border, the challenge for the left is precisely to invert and repudiate this framing.
No great challenge is involved in repeating stupid lies.
Immigrant workers provide essential labor sustaining American life, yet enjoy minimal legal and political protections.
Taxpayers should shoulder the burden of housing millions more refugees from around the world.
Transforming immigrant status would therefore go hand in hand with a profound reimagining of how economic and political self-rule can spread in American life.
Demographic replacement puts an end to 'self-rule'. Ask the First Nations.
It would entail conceiving of economic independence and opportunity as divorced from the old settler duality between internal freedom and external power.
The Brits had 'internal freedom' and 'external power'. They weren't settlers. They were indigenous to the British isles.
This approach rejects thinking of immigration as simply a matter that starts at the border, with virtually no attention paid to the particular histories, international economic pressures, and specific U.S. foreign and domestic policy practices that generate migration patterns in the first place.
Immigration only happens at the border or at the airport. It is pointless to think of it as occurring somewhere else.
It carries with it an embrace of presumptive admission for all—the framework that throughout the nineteenth century defined the approach for European immigrants alone—and the basic decriminalization of entry.
In which case America's population will rise to over a billion within a decade. The standard of living would collapse as would the entitlements of vulnerable sections of society. This is actually a wet-dream of the plutocrats.
And the joining of labor and immigrant freedom
which is like the joining of the Feminist movement with the Incel movement.
opposes any closed vision of in-group solidarity,
e.g. that of women who don't want to see rape decriminalized
pushing both movement constituencies and Americans broadly toward richer accounts of shared class, social concern, and institutional arrangement.
Many rapists have had self-esteem issues. Women should understand that the mandatory rape of hot chicks is vital for the psychological health of the Rapist community.
Ultimately, there is no end-run around the hard political work of movement and coalition building.
Unless you are Donald Trump.
This moment instead requires a return to the essential project of revitalizing the institutions and social bases that would give meaning and power to any genuinely emancipatory narrative.
Rana is going to quit his job as a Professor to become a labour organizer in rural Texas.
Such a political project may not pay immediate dividends, but it is the foundation for real change.
This political project has been around for longer than I've been alive. It failed. Collective action to demand the rescinding of the Law of Gravitation doesn't actually help anybody.
And perhaps most important, it offers a concrete mechanism for combining a language of liberation with practical improvements to people’s daily lives.
Taking a dump improves our daily life. Why not shout 'Free Tibet you fucking Fascist!' while shitting? That's a concrete mechanism we can all avail of to ensure that the Law of Gravitation is rescinded- at least for our porcine comrades.
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