"It's a Free Country!"
From taken-for-granted catchphrase to archaic relic of a lost paradigm
“It’s a free country!”
Back when I was a kid, this phrase was tossed off — casually, regularly, confidently, without a second thought — in response to any and all sorts of minor slights or disagreements. As I remember it, the social context was often so mundane that this familiar retort slyly landed as slightly comical:
“Why are you wearing shorts when it’s only 30 degrees out?”
“It’s a free country!”
“Why are you running there when there’s plenty of time to walk?”
“It’s a free country!”
“Why are you having another piece of cake when you’ve already had two?”
“It’s a free country!”
There were also times, however, in which this typically tossed-off phrase was used in ways that referenced its deeper meaning — a commitment to the core liberal values of individual freedom of conscience, thought, speech, and expression. For example:
“What do you mean, ‘you don’t think so?’ Everybody thinks so!”
“Well too bad, I don’t. It’s a free country!”
Looking back, I’m intrigued by my memory of just how ordinary and ubiquitous this phrase used to be back in the day. It strikes me as a telling relic of a now faded and largely forgotten (or for young people, never experienced) political culture — one in which the belief that America was a “free country” was so easily presumed that stating it assertively out loud seemed almost silly.
Counterintuitively, the very fact that we took the value of freedom so seriously is precisely what prompted us to joke about it so lightly. Looking back, I see the casual everyday popularity of the phrase “it’s a free country!” as a sign of just how much we took the assumption that we all shared the same vision of freedom for granted.
Today, I can’t imagine anyone living in the equivalent of the Blue State progressive liberal culture I grew up in using the phrase “it’s a free country!” in such a jokingly nonchalant yet fundamentally serious way, ever. At the very least, it would sound weird, stilted, and antiquated. More worrisomely, it would probably come off as suspiciously “right-wing adjacent.”
After all, the once quintessentially left-liberal allegiance to “free speech” has been re-coded as a “problematic” conservative talking point, has it not? Even the ACLU, which famously defended the right of neo-Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois — a town adjacent to where I grew up and heavily populated by Jews, many of whom were Holocaust survivors at the time — has rejected its former commitment to defending it fiercely, selectively advocating for the suppression of speech it now regards as politically beyond the pale instead.
The twinned advent of Trumpism and wokeism turned what was once a defining hallmark of left-liberalism — the championing of freedom of conscience, thought, speech, and expression — into something that makes contemporary progressives extremely uncomfortable, both in theory and practice. Since I live in a Blue State bubble, I’ve felt the weight of this shift acutely. At the risk of sounding snobbish, I can’t help but feel that what used to be one of the most creatively vibrant sectors of American society now tends to be socially conformist and intellectually dull. The sort of freely exploratory, open-minded dynamism I used to associate with the liberal left has shifted to those who identify as “heterodox,” “dissident,” or “politically homeless” and refuse blind allegiance to either the left or the right. Sadly, however, such exploratory thinkers are not only cast outside the sanctioned circle of the progressive left, but to varying degrees ignored, dismissed, attacked, or demonized by it.
Ritual Affirmations, Echoing Silences
Experiencing the arc of the Covid pandemic while living deep inside a Blue State bubble made me think a lot about the tremendous power of collective ritual affirmations, particularly when most people are feeling disoriented, ungrounded, and scared. Back then, it seemed like almost every social interaction (which were of course limited to outdoor walks or fire-pit gatherings) necessitated going through the same litany of Covid-cautious affirmations (e.g., how careful you were being about masking). It felt like a ritual because no new information was being shared. Instead, it was the same set of observations and assurances, over and over again.
As literally the only person around who didn’t share the sanctioned Blue State perspective on Covid, I found these communal recountings of protocol observance boring and alienating. But as far as I could tell, everyone else seemed to easily accept if not genuinely relish them. There appeared to be a deeply felt need to signal to one another that yes, we’re all in this together and that yes, of course, we share the same commitment to doing the right thing and keeping each other safe. All of which are, of course, good pro-social values to affirm. Which is why even though I rationally disputed the factual bases for these Covid rituals (most of the time, silently to myself in my head), I remained sympathetic to the good-hearted impulses that were driving them (at least in the vast majority of cases).
That said, it remains terrible to contemplate the extent to which such well-intentioned expressions of solidarity and care were bound up with a collective refusal to acknowledge, let alone discuss the many extremely serious questions that Blue State Covid policies should have logically raised. What if, for example, “safety” policies such as extended school closures were not only not working as advertised, but also generating a cascade of individual, familial, and societal problems whose costs could easily have been predicted to dwarf whatever benefits were obtained? What if the cloth masks sewn up by all those socially responsible women (before we could simply order them off Amazon) actually did little to no good? What if the risk of Covid among healthy young people was so exaggerated that countless numbers were pushed into far more damaging levels of anxiety, depression, and substance abuse? What if a careful look at the data indicated that over time, there was no discernable difference in outcomes between Red States that followed few if any of these protocols and Blue States that not only legally mandated but culturally canonized them?
Despite endless affirmations of the necessity of “following the science,” such questions were roundly considered taboo in progressive circles during the pandemic. Even now that fears have eased and most have moved on, there’s little interest in reconsidering the wisdom of the Blue State approach, let alone grappling with new information that challenges its assumptions. It’s a nonsensical combination of commitments: It makes zero sense to proclaim faith in “science” while simultaneously observing a cultural ban on critical questions and compelling counter-hypotheses. After all, scientific knowledge only evolves through repeated rounds of hypothesis testing and robust, open-ended debate. Yet questioning the narrative handed down by Dr. Fauci and the elite legacy media remains deeply unwelcome in Blue State America.
Paradigm Break
Initially, this collective resistance to critical thinking could have been justified as a reasonable response in the face of an unprecedented, confusing, and frightening situation. As time went on, however, I came to believe that something much bigger was going on. Looking back, my conclusion is that the Covid experience cemented a profound shift in both the conscious commitments and much more subliminal taken-for-granteds (which are typically more important) of American progressive culture.
Prior to Covid, the 2016 Presidential election had profoundly shocked progressive liberals who believed (whether consciously or unconsciously) in the “right side of history” narrative. This deeply embedded faith that human history can and should “progress” along some sort of quasi-divinely ordained path towards something that every right-thinking person could easily recognize as “justice” has been deeply embedded in American progressive culture since at least the early 20th century. Presidents Obama and Clinton invoked it often. Obama even had the phrase, "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice," woven into a rug specially designed for the Oval Office.
Right up to the penultimate moment of the 2016 election, virtually every Democratic pundit and partisan assumed that Hillary would, of course, win. In those oh-so-innocent days, electing the first woman President seemed to many to be virtually ordained by this so-called “arc of history.” The more fervent and unshakeable this often subliminal belief, the less possibility there was that Trump’s victory could be interpreted as simply a stunning political defeat. Instead, it was nothing less than a traumatic break with the order of the world as (many believed) it should rightfully be.
This isn’t to suggest that there aren’t countless worthy critiques that can and should be made of the Trump Presidency; without a doubt, there are. Rather, it’s to emphasize that the sense that America’s rightful destiny had been unjustly violated ran much deeper for many progressives than any standard-issue political analysis could begin to touch.
Grappling with such a profound socio-psychological shock required either radically reassessing one’s taken-for-granteds (leading, in my case, to Liberal Confessions), finding scapegoats to blame (see, for example, Russiagate), or jumping onto a new political bandwagon altogether (hello, wokeism). Unfortunately, after a brief period of questioning and reflection, the dominant narratives pushed by both the elite legacy media (most notably, The New York Times, Washington Post, and NPR) and the dominant Internet and social media companies (especially Google, Facebook, and Twitter) heavily favored the latter two options. Given that many progressives — particularly the more affluent and college-educated — continue to see these information sources as trustworthy and unbiased (a laughably blinkered yet still widespread view), these scapegoating and woke narratives have had a tremendous cultural impact.
The fact that these media narratives amplified and accelerated the newfound power of “cancel culture” exponentially intensified their cultural impact. Newly developed social media algorithms pushed vigilante justice campaigns into virality. Meanwhile, legacy media outlets gaslit their readers and listeners into pretending that nothing untoward was happening at all. At the same time, anyone who worked or went to school under the ever-expanding surveillance of DEI and Title IX bureaucracies was drilled in what was or was not permissible to say and do. In this climate, it’s hardly surprising that asking heterodox questions, let alone challenging sanctioned narratives became a widely unpopular and (depending on the situation) potentially dangerous act.
When Covid hit, these toxic dynamics were already well-established. Consequently, the sociocultural impact of the pandemic was much more wrenching than it would have been otherwise. Of course, this was not only true within Blue State America. In countless communities across the country, the coordinates of many preexisting social norms and cultural paradigms were lost. Here, however, I’m simply focusing on one: That is, the profound shift that occurred in the reigning culture of Blue State America.
If 2016 was a traumatic break from the presumptive “arc of history,” the years 2020-21 extended this breakage to encompass the whole of the old left-liberal paradigm, which had once taken this optimistic faith in (capital-”P”) Progress quite sincerely to heart. Throughout the 20th century, left-liberals believed that modern forces of science, technology, and rationality could and would be harnessed successfully to the project of building a liberal democratic society in which every citizen would be truly equal and free.
In retrospect, it’s clear that the cultural and structural underpinnings of this faith had been weakening for decades. To most people (including myself), however, the real extent of this erosion didn’t start to become evident until 2016. One reason for this was that President Obama had been exceptionally masterful at masking the growing cracks in its foundation — a skill that was, in fact, key to his enormous resonance among left-liberals. In the crucible of Covid, though, this long-weakening political paradigm finally broke down. And in its place, the basic tenets of post-liberal progressivism (a.k.a. wokeism) were secured.
Normal Acquiescence
This isn’t to suggest (as some right-wing activists would have you believe) that most garden-variety progressives — e.g., people who loyally vote Democratic but aren’t committed politicos, activists, or ideologues — are truly on board with the new program. They’re not. They’re simply (like everyone else, regardless of political persuasion) busy with their lives and, all too often, struggling with their own personal, familial, and community problems. Most people lack the time, resources, and/or motivation to thoroughly rethink the political priors they were socialized to believe in. There’s also a natural desire to stay culturally aligned with one’s peer group.
All things considered, it’s not surprising that most progressives have quietly acquiesced to the new woke dispensation. If not directly confronted with a problem that might force them to grapple with its real-world implications, it’s normal human behavior to go with the flow and keep whatever qualms you might have to yourself. Plus, given the risks of “cancellation” or, depending on your work environment, being reported to some opaque and capricious bureaucracy and subject to its unpredictable judgments, it’s by far the most prudent course of action for many.
So, for example, most progressives dutifully adopt the new practices of saying “sex assigned at birth” and repeatedly reiterating their pronouns whether or not they support — or even understand — the ideological rationale behind it. Personally, I’d wager that most progressives over 30, including those in the LGBT community who have simply been living their lives and not paying attention to the shifting ideological tides, don’t understand it unless they happened to have studied queer theory in college. Regardless, it’s simply what’s done in Blue State America today. And it’s socially awkward and, depending on your particular social and employment contexts, perhaps dangerous to question it.
In this context, it’s no wonder that the old adage, “it’s a free country!,” seems so archaic today. A culture that so strongly disincentives what should be properly regarded as logical questions (e.g., isn’t biological sex better described as “observed” rather than “assigned” at birth?) is a culture in which this once taken-for-granted sense of freedom has been significantly eroded. True, it’s still quite possible to access a good variety of political ideas and cultural projects if you have the time and motivation. There’s still much more freedom in the United States than in many parts of the world. But particularly when it comes to politics, you must seek it out very deliberately. Otherwise, a confluence of powerful forces will keep you locked in your own intellectually airless silo, whether progressive or otherwise.
Let Humpty Fall
Beyond the concrete explanations for why so many Americans have become so tightly locked into their Red v. Blue silos — the decimation of traditional journalism, the niche targeting of Internet algorithms, and so on — there are psychological ones. At the bottom line, it’s simple: People are extremely resistant to changing their deeply embedded worldviews. This is human nature. Maintaining the same deep-seated assumptions that we’ve long navigated the world with is comforting. Having them upended is extremely discomforting and even, in some cases, traumatic.
As psych professor Ronnie Janoff-Bulman explains in her outstanding 1992 book, Shattered Assumptions:
We are cognitiviely conservative; from both motivational and information-processing perspectives, we are heavily biased towards the old rather than the new, our preesixting theories rather than new data. . . . such that our fundamental assumptions never cease to provide us with an intelligible, comfortable, known universe. Yet there are times that this known universe is suddenly and powerfully threatened. These are times marked by trauma (p. 45).
While Janoff-Bulman’s theory wasn’t designed to apply to political culture, it’s helpful to see what’s been happening in America during the past six years (or longer, depending on circumstances) through this lens. From this perspective, one reason that many Americans want to stay in their groupthink political silos is that it feels psychologically safer there. Even beyond the social support and affirmation such conformity provides, there’s often also a greater sense of security in one’s own mind. The subconscious rationale is simple: Surely, if everyone around me believes X, Y, and Z, then it must all be true.
The more such presumptive “truths” resonate with what one has long believed, the less desirable it is to question them. For most people, this is the case regardless of external material and social circumstances. It’s simply a natural property of the human mind.
That said, the more that everyday experiences deviate from this socially shared map of the world, the greater the sense of psychological strain will be. There needs to be some reasonably believable fit between what we presume to be true and life as we actually experience it. The more this gap grows, the more we have to —whether consciously or unconsciously — start making choices about how best to handle this discrepancy. Should this increasingly felt divergence between reality and belief be investigated, ignored, denied, or attacked? Should we develop a new map of the world or double down on our old one?
With nonstop propagandistic encouragement from legacy media, big tech, the Democratic Party, and major corporations, many progressive liberals have — whether deliberately or by default — chosen the “double down” option. The problem, of course, is that the old progressive liberal paradigm they were once rooted in is no longer politically, culturally, or economically functional. For a variety of reasons that are far too complex to go into here, it’s been breaking down since the 1970s. So even though a thorough reassessment of the progressive liberal project is wholly warranted, by and large, it’s not happening.
The successive shocks of Trump’s 2016 victory and the 2020-21 Covid pandemic broke this already fragile paradigm, which had developed in the no longer extant circumstances of the mid-20th century. During the past six years, it’s sped from the Kuhnian stage of “model drift” right on through to post-liberal paradigm change (see “Kuhn Cycle” graphic, above). More often than not, erstwhile left-liberals have become deeply confused, as former liberal presumptions were rapidly replaced by new post-liberal (a.k.a. woke) decrees.
For this part of the population, asking too many critical questions — even in the privacy of one’s own mind — risks instigating a process that might send you down the rabbit hole and perhaps even through the looking-glass into new ways of seeing the world that put you sharply at odds with your tribe. For most people, this is quite understandably not an enticing prospect. It’s no wonder that they’d just as soon take a pass.
Still, over time, constantly having to thought-police oneself and others in an effort to keep the Humpty Dumpty of a historically spent paradigm from falling off the proverbial wall is enormously stressful. Potentially, there’s much to be gained from working with gravity to let it go. Of course, it’s important to do so in a prudent and considerate way. But once the old paradigm is broken, new mosaics of meaning can be created. And there’s the freedom to imagine crafting them to become far more hopeful and compelling than before.