Freedom's Just Another Word For...

The Dismantling Of American Democracy by Nancy Ohanian

Brown County is the fourth most populous county in Wisconsin. Green Bay is the county seat and biggest city. After the Republican-dominated state Supreme Court forced in-person voting on the state, Brown County was hot hard with new COVID cases. The Public Health Department reported another 95 cases Wednesday, bringing the total above 1,600. Wisconsin was headed for a mild pandemic before the Supreme Court ruling which has steepened the curve considerably. Yesterday the state has 1,540 cases per million people; not good but increasing by the day.

The Republican ideologues on the state Supreme Court, led by GOP ideologue Chief Justice Patience Roggensack, seem determined to cause more unnecessary suffering in the state. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported asked "How do you take an already heated Supreme Court hearing on Gov. Tony Evers' stay-at-home order and make it even more explosive?" He responded to his own question: First, you have one justice liken the order closing schools and businesses to 'tyranny' while also bringing up the Japanese-American internment camps from World War II. Then you get Chief Justice Patience Roggensack to dial it up even more by appearing to downplay a flare-up of coronavirus cases at a major meatpacking facility in Brown County. '(The surge) was due to the meatpacking-- that's where Brown County got the flare,' Roggensack said. 'It wasn't just the regular folks in Brown County.'"

In 2016 Brown County voters gave Bernie more votes then either Hillary or Trump. Bernie won 22,471 votes to Hillary's 16,626 and Trump's 18,706. In November, the county went Republican, Trump winning 52.7% to 41.9%. In 2018 the voters split their tickets. In the gubernatorial race, Republican incumbent Scott Walker, who lost statewide, beat Democrat Tony Evers 53.1% to 44.7%. But the county also went for Democrat Tammy Baldwin in the Senate race, giving her a 51.5% to 48.5% win over Republican Leah Vukmir. And in the congressional race (WI-08), GOP incumbent Mike Gallagher won handily over Beau Liegeois. Brown, the biggest county in the district performed at R+21 level.

State Rep. JoCasta Zamarripa said she was "very offended" by Roggensack's statement.

"It's classist, and it's out of touch," said Zamarripa, a Milwaukee Democrat who is also a Milwaukee alderwoman. "It's embarrassing that we have a Supreme Court justice who would say something like that."

Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett said he was "shocked" by the remark, and Democratic Sen. Dave Hansen of Green Bay accused Roggensack of "elitism and ignorance." He said the statement showed the justice was "unfit to serve" on the high court.

Labor leaders were equally upset with Roggensack, the head of the conservative majority on the court.

Pam Fendt, president of the Milwaukee Area Labor Council, said she found Roggensack's remark "divisive." Her group represents 100 local unions with 25,000 workers.

Fendt said those working at meatpacking plants live in neighborhoods, go to church and coach Little League. They are, she said, as much a part of the community as anyone else.

"It is shocking and deeply offensive that Justice Patience Roggensack would suggest that workers in meatpacking plants aren’t 'regular folks' who deserve protection," said the United Food & Commercial Workers Local 1473, which represents 5,000 employees in meatpacking plants in Wisconsin.

Umair Haque also answered a question-- why the world is horrified by the American Idiot. He wrote that "the American idiot is, by now, a figure that’s the stuff of myth and legend across the world. Nobody else is really quite sure: are Americans really like this? This… well… laughable? Yesterday, they were the kind of people who made their kids do “active shooter drills,” meaning masked men burst into classrooms… and pretend… to kill them. What the? Today, they’re the kind of people who happily congregate in parks and on beaches during a global pandemic… when the lunatic fringe amongst them isn’t protesting for “liberation” in the first place. What on earth? I don’t use the term as an insult-- the American idiot. I mean it in a precise way, as I try to remind people. For the Greeks, 'idiot' carried a precise and special meaning. The person who was only interested in private life, private gain, private advantage. Who had no conception of a public good, common wealth, shared interest. To the Greeks, the pioneers of democracy, the creators of the demos, such a person was the most contemptible of all. Because even the Greeks seemed to understand: you can’t make a functioning democracy out of…idiots."

Now, I’m going to generalize. But I don’t mean that all Americans are idiots. I mean that, for example, more or less everyone who wants to carry a gun to Starbucks, deny their neighbours healthcare, make people beg for medicine online, and not let anyone in society ever retire… all of those people in the world, by and large, are Americans. Nobody else-- nobody in the whole world at this point in history-- thinks such things are remotely desirable. Hence, the American idiot. It means: the world’s largest and most hardened subset of idiots at this point, in the Classical Greek meaning of the word, is largely American.

‘Freedom?’ ... ‘More like freedumb.’

...When the world looks at America, it sees the American idiot, and what it tries-- and usually fails, because it’s lost for words-- to express is something like this: can people really be this selfish? This oblivious? This… thankless? Why do they keep voting for less healthcare, retirement, education, income, savings, happiness, trust, year after year-- even the so-called good ones? What kind of people…why are the literally the only people left in the whole world who do that? And then… complain bitterly about not having… the very things… they deny each other? Who can even make sense of this, the bizarre circular firing squad of social suicide that America has become? But all those, of course, are key traits of the idiot. The answer-- sadly, I think-- is: yes, people can really be this way.

Perhaps because they don’t know any other way. Maybe because it’s all they’ve ever been taught or told. That’s not an apologia for the American idiot, by the way. Or is it? Even I wonder. Still, let me try to explain as best I can-- America’s strange and complicated with freedom, one so perverse that freedom became twisted into something very much like its opposite. It has to do with the way Americans think-- unsubtly, narrowly, single-mindedly-- about what freedom is, and means.

About half a century ago, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin divided freedom into two categories-- maybe you already know them. Negative freedom, or freedom from. And positive freedom, or freedom to. The theory then went-- and this became the basis of generations of American thought-- that only the freedom from was worth developing and cultivating.

Berlin was a Russian-born dickhead-- actually a Latvian living in St. Petersburg when the Russian Revolution broke out in 1905. Listen to this YouTube of him and you'll want to throw a rotten tomato in his face. You can't; he died in 1997.

The freedom “to,” on the other hand, was vilified as something that only communists and socialists would want. Why? Because my “freedom to”-- say to be educated, or to be healthy-- requires your input, help, cooperation. But American thinking-- which became obsessed with individualism-- couldn’t admit or permit that, because then maybe you weren’t “taking responsibility for yourself” and all the rest of the jargon.

All this dates back, of course, to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, the Uberman. It’s not too hard to see why a society that was born in slavery, and continued into segregation, in which horrors like crippling and maiming people for the color of their skin were perfectly alright-- why a society like that ends up prizing freedom from. America’s obsession with freedom from dates right back to the slave-owner’s desire for freedom from government intervention, law, common decency, any tiny shred of humanity-- to have the power to exploit and abuse human beings on an unthinkable scale. There’s a straight line from Nietzsche’s “master morality” naturally dominating the “slave morality” to Berlin’s “freedom from” any restraint on power-- and that straight line is the one American thinking, still backwards, mired in the logic of domination and exploitation, traced.

...Here’s how extreme America’s belief in freedumb-- freedom as the absence of any kind of obligation or responsibility to anything greater than narrow, immediate, infantile self-satisfaction-- has gotten. Americans aren’t just congregating in parks and beaches during a global pandemic. They’re literally the only people in the world who just voted against better healthcare (from Bernie and Liz) in the middle of a pandemic. Think about the scale of such folly for a moment. What kind of people vote for worse healthcare… during a pandemic? John Cleese would struggle to make a face that expressed the surreal tragicomedy of such a thing. But that’s what Americans did… what they do, over and over and over again.

Why? Because they still believe-- even if they don’t think they believe-- in Berlin’s tired, weary, flawed old distinction. Freedom has only come to mean the removal of any restraint-- negative freedom-- on the exercise of individual desire, the satiation of individual appetite. What freedom still doesn’t mean in America is any of the following, good healthcare, retirement, education, and so forth, because what freedom has never meant is any form of collective action.

Let me put that more sharply. What if the only way that I can have decent healthcare is for you to have decent healthcare-- first? What if the only for me to have a decent retirement is for us all to have one, first? You see, that logic-- which is the math of public goods-- makes a mockery of Berlin’s dichotomy. Then, what we don’t need is simple “freedom from” some kind of restraint-- but the “freedom to”… collectively organize, coordinate, take action.

Freedom from can give us liberty as individuals, it’s true, from kings, and even governments. But only the freedom to can give us liberty as societies, groups, classes, nations. These two kinds of freedoms might exist in tension-- but try to have one without the other, and the result is a spectacular collapse. Freedom to without freedom from gave us the Soviet Union. But freedom from without freedom to gave us America, the failed state, the world’s first poor rich country. Gentle Europe, wise New Zealand, humble and kind Canada-- which balance the two-- have found a kind of miracle in that equilibrium.

...Carrying a gun to Starbucks-- so kids have to do active shooter drills. Being able to “choose” between a million health insurance plans, none of which covers you-- so that you don’t have to pay higher taxes to the hated government. Making everyone stand on their own two feet-- even while every force in society is cutting those very limbs away. Never taking any kind of collective action as a society-- that’s socialism! That’s communism!! Those things are bad!! They’re terrible!

No, my friends. Americans will never understand the miracle of European social democracy, of Canadian investment in each other, of New Zealand making a difficult, joyous peace with a broken past. They won’t. Because they can’t? Because they don’t want to? Because nobody teaches them about the gentle and beautiful power in cooperation, in dignity, in respect for the self and others as more than a thing of appetite? Because they’re trapped by a sordid history-- which they secretly care little about overcoming?

Maybe, in the end, it’s just all the above.

Freedom! Here I am, the American idiot, carrying my gun to Starbucks, before I go to Walmart, where I’ll choose between a million different flavors of the Everyday Low Price, and then I’ll dream about being Great Again, while I drive my big car down the big, empty highway, listening to some bellowing mullah of capital and individualism and cruelty telling me to hate and rage a little more. Along the way, so what if I create my very own exploitation, abuse, misery, decline into poverty, despair, degradation, dehumanization? Hey! Don’t tell me any different!

Isn’t that what freedom really is?