The Atlantic
Power comes before freedom, not the other way around.
Who did John Adams include in “our Struggle”? Just the wealthy white men assembled with him in Philadelphia? Who was “our Struggle” truly for? Who really declared independence from Great Britain on July 4, 1776? Who was really in the process of becoming free?
Because power comes before freedom, not the other way around. Power creates freedom, not the other way around. We can’t be free unless we have power. Freedom is not the power to make choices. Freedom is the power to create choices. And to have the power to shape policy is the power to create choices. That is why power is in the hands of the policy maker.
English power created the choices and policies that the white Founding Fathers were forced to abide by, which they rebelled against, just as American power created the choices and policies that the rest of us were forced to abide by, which we’ve since rebelled against. Only power gave those rich white American men freedom from the rich white British men.
Power freed them to trade with merchants and planters outside the British Empire. They could buy and sell slave-grown and manufactured products from anyone. They were no longer absolutely subjected to British capital and merchants and taxes and laws. The 13 colonies were no more, even though Abigail Adams’s Ladies, my enslaved ancestors, working-class whites, and Native Americans were, in many ways, still colonized after the founding of the United States. Only power will one day give the rest of us freedom within this nation founded by white men, for white men, as those white men have said repeatedly.
Our American project is not built on the idea that we became free in 1776 or any year thereafter, but that we are fighting for freedom, oftentimes from the economic and political interests that became free on 1776. Take the African American fight for freedom that did not end when chattel slavery or Jim Crow formally ended or civil and voting rights formally began. A group of African Americans, who were no longer enslaved around Savannah, Georgia, told Lincoln-administration officials on January 12, 1865, that freedom is “placing us where we could reap the fruit of our own labor, and take care of ourselves.” They demanded land to be free.
Pundits talk of American disunity as if the divide is brothers and sisters fighting. This is a power divide. Let’s not ask why the master and the slave are divided. Let’s not ask why the tyrant and the egalitarian are divided. Let’s not ask why the sexist and the feminist are divided. Let’s not ask why the racist and the anti-racist are divided. The reasons should be self-evident. There’s no healing these divides or bringing these powers together.
America is the story of powerful people struggling to keep their disproportionate amount of power from people who are struggling for the power to be free.
The power to be free should have particular resonance on this Fourth of July in the eye of Donald Trump’s America. Resonance for all those struggling for the power to free those Latinx children and mothers and fathers from the terror and horror that is the southern border. Resonance for all those Americans struggling for the power to free humanity and Earth from the fatal grips of climate change, bigotry, and nuclear war. Do all those Americans really have the power to be free?
Wealthy white men certainly do. Disproportionate power and freedom. I live in Washington, D.C., but I won’t be anywhere near the celebration or political rally on the National Mall. I won’t be anywhere near the Lincoln Memorial on old grounds straining to hold up the weight of armored vehicles. I don’t want to see that tragedy or the walking tragedy of red MAGA hats moving around covered minds. I don’t want to hear verbal fireworks from President Trump, a speech that is liable to set anything within earshot that is true or loving on fire. Lincoln’s statue shall overlook Lincoln’s reincarnated old rival from the 1858 midterms, the pomp and circumstance of Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois on steroids. And far away, somewhere, new Lincolns, in female and male and non-gender-conforming bodies, will be readying for the task of saving the Union that Lincoln did not save from Trumpism.
I have always understood why humans resisted tyrants. But I never really understood why humans fully submitted to tyrants until I studied American history, until I entered Trump’s America and watched the patriots to tyranny. To believe freedom comes before power is to stifle the struggle to equalize power. It is to reinforce the power of the extremely wealthy white men who declared independence years ago. There is no more docile slave than one who believes he or she is free.
On July 3, 1776, John Adams again poured out his private thoughts in a letter to his wife. He could see what his fellow delegates set in motion. The ordered world of hierarchy he venerated would one day be no more. “The People will have unbounded Power,” he wrote. “But I must submit all Hopes and Fears, to an overruling Providence.”
He feared that “America shall suffer Calamities still more wasting and Distresses yet more dreadfull.” But he saw how the people’s struggle could become his struggle. Adams helped start the echo that has carried through American time up to the protests at the southern border today. He wrote that all the calamities “will have this good Effect,” inspiring “many Virtues” and correcting “many Errors, Follies, and Vices, which threaten to disturb, dishonor, and destroy Us. The Furnace of Affliction produces Refinement, in States as well as Individuals.”
When Americans struggle for the power to be free, they are afflicting and revolutionizing and refining the United States. They are the Patriots. Patriotism on the Fourth of July is resistance.
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