Freedom’s Orphans

What does freedom actually mean on July 4th, 2025?

The fourth of July is a good time to ponder the American relationship to liberty, and its synonyms, freedom and independence. To paraphrase Raymond Carver, what do we talk about when we talk about freedom?

Why does the word trigger us so? How is it that so many Americans have become afflicted with a creeping paranoia applied to basic government activities like requiring driver’s and gun licenses and auto insurance, vaccinating kids, managing public health emergencies, that makes them consider these as overreaches regarding their freedom? And why does that same obsession with independence not extend to the rights of other people – pregnant, gay, trans, those who immigrate – to do what they want with their own bodies?

For decades now, the Right has been plastering “liberty” and “freedom” on enterprises, the goals and effects of which on American life are about the opposite of freedom. Think, for example, of Jerry Falwell Jr.'s Liberty University, where rules restrict sexual interactions between the evangelical young people (even while the former president set up threesomes with his wife and the poolboy). Think of “Moms for Liberty” and their staunch support of an insurrection, and now a regime forcing American women into the era of back-alley abortions. Think of the MAGA movement itself, liberty-sloganeering instigators of the white nationalist crackdown on the bodily freedom of millions, often carried out by nameless, masked men.

The summer after the January 6 insurrection, I went to Michigan to do a story about the Michigan militia members who had threatened to kidnap the “tyrant bitch” (as they called her) Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and either hogtie her or put her on a boat in Lake Michigan without a paddle. Reading through hundreds of pages of their encrypted chats, as well as testimony in preliminary hearings, one thing that stood out to me was their shared anxiety about threats to personal liberty – by state insurance regulations, traffic cops, debt collectors, and most of all, gun regulations. That any “authority” dared tell them what they could and could not do with their cars and firearms galled them.

This diffuse paranoia finally found a single focus in the face of the governor, who had locked down the state of Michigan during COVID-19, an unprecedented health emergency.

I visited their homes, which were draped with Confederate flags. Some of the accused were eventually tried in Jackson, Michigan, on state gang charges. Jackson is a south-central Michigan city clinging to economic viability as a prison-industrial town. The great employer is the largest walled prison in the world – or so it is billed. It sits on the edge of town, LED-lit and wrapped in miles of razor wire, glittering like a giant diamond visible for miles in the table-flat dark at night.

So what is it that Americans like these militia members, and their pardoned “brothers and sisters in arms” from the January 6 insurrection, actually crave when they speak of independence?

The Michigan militia members were tried and convicted and are serving jail sentences now. Writing about them, I happened to be in their community (which is actually called, in one of the many cartoonish metaphorical coincidences that seem to characterize this moment in American history, Hartland) for the Fourth of July fireworks and parade.

The Fourth of July in Hartland was a good day to investigate how real Americans define freedom. One thing was clear: the word was associated with embattlement and aggression. One homeowner had erected a DIY sign on the lawn festooned with American flags, and the statement “In the truest sense, freedom cannot be bestowed, it must be achieved.” At Walmart, you could buy a China-made sleeveless t-shirt with the slogan “SORRY I can’t hear you over the sound of my FREEDOM.”

But when asked to define the word, the people I talked to were surprisingly flummoxed. At a fireworks display on Pleasant Lake, families were tailgating on a public campground, billowing Trump flags awaiting the fireworks. Children gamboled and splashed in the lake as I chatted with a woman on a golf cart streaming with Trump and American flags. I asked her to tell me her definition of independence. After some hemming and hawing, she resorted to tautology: “just that feeling of freedom, I guess.” I pressed her, what was the feeling, though? “Just … feeling free.”

Golf cart mom wasn’t alone in her incoherency. Anyone I put the question to there at the campground, and later at the local parade, struggled to define it. After decades of right wing sloganeering and fetishizing of “liberty” while lawyers and politicians work to restrict the rights of people with whom their movement disagrees or whose skin tone, culture and language differs from theirs, American liberty is as ephemeral a notion as the fireworks that will celebrate the word after dark tomorrow night.

As a journalist in the Midwest in the ‘80s and early ‘90s and then at some points in the oughts, I bore witness in real time to Main Streets getting boarded up and abandoned school buildings turned into tire dumps. The gyre spun ever faster, and the center could not hold. Local news sources evaporated, replaced by a cacophonous online info-world, the car economy tanked and tanked again, leaving broke communities atomized into disconnected men, women, and children peering into their phone screens. Meanwhile, blood and treasure oozed out of America and into wars in the Middle East to avenge 9/11. Instead of turning on the men who led them into that, out of reach in their black SUVs and helicopters, they turned on each other – the “tyrant bitch,” whether Whitmer or Nancy Pelosi, the bogeyman of the undocumented immigrant criminal, the bureaucracy at the motor vehicle department.

Historian Greg Grandin, in his 2018 book The End of the Myth, looked at the timing ofTrump One’s big beautiful wall talk and his then-developing obsession with human “vermin” and enemies within. Grandin proposed that the American frontier – real and then mythic – always acted as a kind of steam valve for the simmering social violence borne of America’s heterogeneous experiment. When the Western frontier ran out, when the foreign wars of imperialism had been won or lost and there was no more blood and treasure to wage more, Grandin argued, the ideal of personal “freedom” remained the last way out: “A restored ideal of freedom as freedom from restraint was both an effective demagogic tactic… and a way to conjure an inclusive, boundless Americanism.”

As we approach our nation’s 250th anniversary, a year from now, it behooves us to think again and deeply about what independence means to us, not just personally but collectively, as a people united by the idea.