America, land of the unfree

How negative liberty can paralyze a nation

Photo by Ferdinand Stöhr on Unsplash

Freedom is not a gift received from a State or a leader but a possession to be won every day by the effort of each and the union of all. —Albert Camus, “Bread and Freedom” (1957), Resistance, Rebellion, and Death [tr. O’Brien (1961)]

On Freedom

by Timothy Snyder

Crown Publishing, 345 pp., $32.00

Like most Canadians with family and friends in the United States, I have enjoyed many a conversation with American people about their country and how they see it. But one stands out in my memory, a conversation with a complete stranger that took place nearly twenty years ago, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

During the autumn of 2005, I had flown to New York at the invitation of the Asian American Writers Workshop to read from my recently published memoir, The Rice Queen Diaries. The next day I visited the MoMA, as I enjoyed doing whenever in the city. After a few of hours of art appreciation, and needing a coffee break, I headed for the cafeteria where I soon found myself chatting with a White heterosexual couple from St. Louis. When they asked where I was from and I told them, they started peppering me with questions about Canada. How were we different from the U.S.?

Inevitably, American exceptionalism came up. I confessed to this friendly couple that I was puzzled by what I saw as a peculiar insecurity about the United States: that the Leader of the Free World lacked the self-confidence to leave its collective door wide open, instead arming itself to the teeth with more guns per capita than anywhere else on the planet. Fortress America also seemed to feel not only entitled but obligated to spread its gospel of freedom by flexing its military might worldwide—welcome or not. Truly great societies do not need to boast about their greatness, I argued; they simply allow the rest of the world to discover it for themselves.

At the time, I would not have invoked Donald Trump. Though he had launched “The Apprentice” the previous year, The Donald in 2005 was hardly anyone’s idea of the zeitgeist: back then, he seemed little more than a walking cliché of 1980s excess, a celebrity has-been unlikely to occupy the public sphere beyond reality television, where he was free to indulge his lust for firing people. But my point was anti-Trumpian, in retrospect: American culture’s penchant for upsizing everything, its weakness for narcissistic self-mythologizing, suggested that, deep down, the U.S. was shallow. Provincial, even.

This must have horrified the St. Louis couple. But to their credit they were patient listeners, nodding as politely as any good Canadian while I, the Canadian, ranted on.

“I mean, why does pro baseball call its final ‘The World Series’ when only American teams participate?” I asked rhetorically. “Why is your football final called ‘The Superbowl,’ as if everyone should know what that means?”

Just then, the St. Louis couple looked up behind me. I turned around to see a well-dressed, middle-aged Black man standing near our table. Two decades later, his features remain as foggy as those of the White couple. But I recall him being distinguished in a professorial way, perhaps even wearing a tweed jacket. He carried himself like an ivy league economist.

“Excuse me for interrupting, sir,” he said, his diction reinforcing the impression, “but I couldn’t help listening in. Do you mind my asking where you’re from?”

“Not at all. I’m from Canada.”

“Well, that makes sense,” he smiled, seating himself opposite me.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Your being Canadian, I mean. The things you’ve been saying—I hear it all the time from Canadians. Your people are full of grievances. You are aggrieved.” He dragged out the second syllable of “aggrieved” for added emphasis.

“I’m sorry. I don’t quite catch your drift.”

“Canada is a nation of colonial subjects—you are a colonial—so of course you object to the U.S. because we are the greatest country on earth. You depend on us for everything, so you are embarrassed by this fact and resent us for it. Aggrieved!”

“Excuse me? We are not a subject nation, and—”

“Yes, you are. Look at your currency, your money. Your bank notes have a queen on them. You can’t even call yourself an independent nation. You’re not a republic. No wonder you’re aggrieved!”

Instantly, my face flushed. Now I was on the defensive.

“Look,” I replied. “I understand the enormous gulf in power between our nations. The U.S. influences our culture and politics in more ways than I can count—it’s impossible to avoid. As Pierre Trudeau once said, being neighbours with the U.S. is like a mouse sleeping next to an elephant: you feel every twitch.”

“Yes, I’ve heard that one before,” he sighed, unimpressed. “And well you should. If it weren’t for the U.S., Canada would be swallowed up by the Russians in ten minutes. So the notion that we are ‘insecure’ is nonsense. If anyone’s insecure, it’s you Canadians who always complain about us. But don’t worry—you have an inferiority complex, so that is to be expected.”

“Now, wait a minute—”

“And so, my dear fellow, it is called ‘The Superbowl’ because it IS the Superbowl. It is called ‘The World Series’ because it IS the World Series.”

“The Cubans and Japanese would beg to differ,” I replied. “They can whup your ass at baseball.”

“Well, good for the Cubans. How’s that working out for them, as a country? As for Japan, guess who put them back on their feet after beating them in World War II?”

Christ, I thought. Who is this guy? I felt like I was being paleo-conservative tag-teamed by William F. Buckley Jr., Norman Podhoretz and Ayn Rand, all at once.

Wearing a smug grin, my opponent was clearly enjoying himself. He could see I was shocked to hear such credulous right-wing patriotism coming from the mouth of an African American. Thanks to his quick wit and debating style, I was too flustered to mention life expectancy, universal health care, strong public services, environmental protections, or comparative stats on gun ownership and mass shooting incidents to counter his American exceptionalist narrative vis-à-vis Canada. As for the toxic legacies of anti-Black racism, which prevented most African Americans from enjoying his good fortune? I wasn’t going there—not with Canada’s treatment of Indigenous and, yes, Black people so ripe for his easy rebuttal.

This man had joined our little chat for the sole purpose of putting me in my place as an ungrateful neighbour, an impolite Canadian with quaint delusions of cultural superiority. There was no way he was leaving the conversation without vanquishing me; he was in it to win it. He was all about winning, American-style. And so, like the sort of Canadian I suspect he thought I was, I let him.

Rising from my seat I nodded at the St. Louis couple, who had said nothing the whole time, then turned back to the professor.

“You got me there, sir,” I said. “Here’s to the land of the free and home of the brave.”

Then, tipping my cup, I swallowed the last of my coffee before scurrying back into the gallery.

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Recalling this encounter two decades later, part of me wonders if my tormentor was merely a Socratic ironist: an intellectual sadist having fun at my expense without believing a word of what he was saying. But a larger part suspects he was dead serious, so I wish I had a better comeback. Or one of those if-only-life-were-like-this fantasies, like that scene from Annie Hall where Woody Allen’s character, standing in a movie line-up with Annie, is annoyed by a tiresome media professor behind them who’s trying to impress his date with half-baked opinions about Fellini films and Marshall McLuhan. (Allen walks off camera, returning moments later with the actual McLuhan, who proceeds to destroy the hapless prof with a few sharp words.)

Looking back on the MoMA cafeteria incident, I wish I could have called up the ghost of another African American New Yorker to rescue me from that arrogant professor. James Baldwin, I am sure, would have made mincemeat of my interrogator’s vulgar imperialist jingoism.

On October 16, 1963, Baldwin gave a speech titled “The Negro Child: His Self-Image” to an audience of teachers working in New York’s public school system. Seven weeks after the March on Washington, the speech addressed some of the challenges the education system faced in preparing children to grapple with the myths and realities of U.S. history.

“It is not really a ‘Negro revolution’ that is upsetting the country,” noted Baldwin. “What is upsetting the country is a sense of its own identity.” He went on:

What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one’s heroic ancestors. It’s astounding to me, for example, that so many people really appear to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free. That happens not to be true. What happened was that some people left Europe because they couldn’t stay there any longer and had to go someplace else to make it. That’s all. They were hungry, they were poor, they were convicts. Those who were making it in England, for example, did not get on the Mayflower. That’s how the country was settled. Not by Gary Cooper. Yet we have a whole race of people, a whole republic, who believe the myths to the point where even today they select political representatives, as far as I can tell, by how closely they resemble Gary Cooper. Now this is dangerously infantile, and it shows in every level of national life.

Baldwin charged the straight, White American male with having lost his grip on reality thanks to such myth-making, which is consistent with the principles of negative liberty—another force of infantilism in U.S. politics. As Timothy Snyder explains in On Freedom, negative liberty prioritizes individual release from the shackles of government while eschewing outside influence. It celebrates a ruggedly masculine and inward-looking independence, fetishizes the Second Amendment, and demonizes the Other. Positive freedom, which is outward looking and cooperative while embracing interdependence, has never gained traction in mainstream American culture. This, Snyder and I would agree, is a national tragedy with global implications.

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When I bought my copy of On Freedom just before November 5, I was anticipating a cerebral high-five—a reader’s victory lap. This sure-to-be-satisfying tome would be all the more gratifying for its reinforcement of the civic values Americans would embrace by electing Kamala Harris as the next U.S. president. Instead, my post-election reading experience became a sad reflection on why we’d been dreaming in technicolour about that expected result.

Far from being “the land of the free,” the ironically named United States is today a country plagued by an epidemic of unfreedom. And Snyder—a Yale professor of history and global affairs whose previous works, including Bloodlands, On Tyranny, and The Road to Unfreedom, have focussed on unfreedom in a European context—has diagnosed the malaise rather well.

To begin, he identifies the five forms of freedom that must be present in any healthy democracy: sovereignty (the learned capacity in individuals to make choices), unpredictability (the power to adapt physical regularities to personal purposes), mobility (the capacity to move through space and time following values), factuality (the grip on the world that allows us to change it), and solidarity (the recognition that freedom is for everyone). All five of these freedoms struggle to assert themselves in today’s U.S.

His distinction between positive and negative freedom is based on the German philosopher Edith Stein’s concept of Leib, “the body,” which holds that we gain knowledge of ourselves when we acknowledge other human beings. The Leib is distinct from the Körper, which is a foreign, heavenly or racial body that is an object, not a subject.

“We tend to think of freedom just as freedom from, as negative,” writes Snyder:

But conceiving of freedom as an escape or an evasion does not tell us what freedom is nor how it would be brought into the world. Freedom to, positive freedom, involves thinking about who we want to become. What do we value? How do we realize our values in the world?

Like that famous Jeff Daniels speech in The Newsroom, Snyder shares telling examples of how America has fallen. In terms of self-reported well-being, Americans rank fifteenth in the world; as for life expectancy, there are about fifty countries where people live longer than Americans. But the clearest indicator of literal unfreedom is the incarceration rate: about 1.7 million Americans are now in prison, roughly the population of West Virginia. Most of those prisoners are Black, and racism goes hand in hand with privatization to keep it that way.

“When the government pays companies to imprison, it creates a lobby for locking people up,” writes Snyder, who also teaches at prisons and shares some of what he has learned from his inmate students. “Private prisons, private jails, private detention centers, and private concentration camps should all be banned…It is wrong to incentivize incarceration.”

One of the strongest forces of negative freedom is libertarianism, which celebrates the impulsive individual while discouraging discussion around what structures society needs in order to create sovereign individuals. Says Snyder:

Libertarians claim to believe in property rights. Were they sincere, libertarians would be at the forefront of those arguing for reparations for Native Americans. Why are they not? Because libertarianism is a sham. Wealthy libertarians favour the state interventions that allow them to generate their wealth; they just oppose government action that might enable others to do the same.

On Freedom repeats a warning that anticipates Trump’s second election victory:

If we accept the erroneous tradition of negative freedom, we will end up turning against one another. We will have trouble seeing the other as a person, a Leib, an equal. Unable to see others, people who have fallen for negative freedom will have trouble seeing even themselves (and the harm they are doing to themselves).

There’s also this:

If we take negative freedom to the extreme, we just reach oligarchic chaos. This then intersects with the fascist idea that we need a leader who is above the law and should be allowed to stage coups.

Now that a second Trump term will soon become reality, a lot of U.S. voters are about to experience a buyer’s remorse that will make British voter angst over Brexit look like a shopper’s regret for buying the wrong deodorant. But Snyder’s take on liberty, published before the U.S. election, does offer Americans hope—if they act upon it:

Positive freedom leads us to treat one another as actors in history. If freedom is something we must build together then each of us has a stake in the other. If virtues are real but clash, then we have to declare our own as well as accommodate those of others. If freedom is about the future, we must work together to keep it open.

This means, of course, taking individual as well as collective actions to build civil society.

“Each epoch,” Snyder concludes, “demands a courage specific to its challenges.”

He’s talking about his own country, of course. But the same goes for Canada, whose citizens cannot afford to be smug about similar divisions in our society.

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