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Comment by rsynnott | Hacker News Reader

When _was_ it the land of the free? The period between giving black people the vote and the PATRIOT act? Even then, it was hardly number one.

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The US spend a very large portion of the 20th century being significantly freer than most other places on earth.

Certainly not perfect (especially not if you were black, Japanese, gay or communist), that would be a silly claim, but freer.

But, for the whole of the 20th century, I think, one could make the argument that there were places freer, particularly if one happened to be a member of one of the US's more hated minority groups. From WW2 to the 60s, if you happened to be a racial minority, there was almost no-where less free in the developed world; the US was extremely late amongst developed countries to grant universal suffrage.

the US was extremely late amongst developed countries to grant universal suffrage

I'll agree with you that the civil rights movement beginning in the 1960s was necessary for the United States to extend the benefits of freedom to all its citizens. But universal suffrage for women came significantly earlier in the United States than it did in Switzerland, for example, and black people in my state (Minnesota) have always been able to vote and to own property and to marry whomever of whatever race and so on since before Minnesota became a state (which, indeed, was one of the points of the Dred Scott case, in which a slave tried to become free by claiming that his passage through the free territory of Minnesota should end his condition of slavery). The Civil War was a necessary reaction to totalitarian denial of basic human rights by the Confederate states, and the civil rights movement after World War II was a necessary response to the deplorable segregation that still occurred in those states long after the Civil War, but everyone in some regions of the United States has long recognized that slavery and Jim Crow segregation were both aberrations, gone in some states from the beginning, and always contrary to the basic principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights (and the bills of rights in various state constitutions).

Yep, I didn't say it was the last democratic developed country to grant universal suffrage, because of Switzerland (or the one or two cantons that didn't let women vote).

I am always at odds with this because I find myself talking about our freedoms being taken away while I think back on my grandfather and what he went through. Gay people are even getting closer to the vast majority accepting them and possibly marriage (depending on the supreme court). This country was built with women and blacks having no true freedom. That does not mean I am not appalled at what is happening now, but what should we go back to? People constantly mention "freedom" like everybody in this country always had it. The government is just finding ways to do what it has always done, which no includes technology. The main difference is that the internet lets us know without a short time-span.

I do hope that we can make a better future, but it is not like the past was the greatest thing either.

One of the nice facts about history is that you will never see any group trash "liberty" and "freedom." Just about every dictatorial, authoritarian, or megalomaniacal political movement thinks it's pro-freedom. Communists? "The bourgeois have enslaved the proletariat, and we lock them up in the name of liberating the people." Nazis? "The actions of the Jewish Conspiracy at the end of the Great War have enslaved the German people." The U.S. Civil War stands as one of the most explicit examples: one side rallied behind the idea that slavery must be abolished; the other side rallied behind the idea that the federal government has no right to tell its member states what to do. It was a war where the liberty of the lowest class was pitted against the liberty of the state.

It's as if Mother Liberty was the Goddess herself: for whenever two nations come into a fight, people in both are always saying that "God is on our side"...

This goes back a _very_ long way; politicians used similar rhetoric in the Roman Republic (which was a slavery-based state which granted a meaningful franchise only to a wealthy elite).

This is because of the nature of freedom. Freedom is to constraints as silence is to sound. Constraints are the things that positively exist, freedom only exists as the negative space.

This is also why the concept of free will is so problematic: how free does will have to be to be called free will? Does it have to be free from the laws of physics? Does it have to be free from coercion?

I think there are more concepts where we have it the wrong way around like this.

Freedom is indeed absence of coercion by others. What's wrong with that?

Edit: thanks for the clarification, koningrobot,

Nothing, the problem is not with reality (of course :-). The problem is that most people seem to think about freedom as something positive. You can only create freedom for Joe by coercing Jane to not violate it. This enables the kind of scenario that the parent to my original comment describes.

I think your first sentence is really interesting & insightful, kind of treating "true" freedom as a sort of absolute zero -- that is, a never-actually-reachable ideal.

I feel like free will doesn't have much to do with the kind of freedom we're talking about, though. If some other human being (or group) has the ability to make you do something you don't want to do, that's a problem of freedom, not free will. (After all, you could decide not to do that thing and suffer the consequences).

Free will is much more about things that you have no ability whatsoever to actually make that decision in the first place, whether because of the manipulative hand of some supernatural force, or via some radical rationalist explanation of decision making.

I see at least two implications of what I said, one being that freedom is an absolute zero, the other being that shifting freedom around is a zero-sum game. Maybe these two are related in some game-theoretic way, I'm not sure. The only fundamentally productive way of obtaining freedom is by getting more control over our environment, i.e., technological progress.

I understand the distinction you're making between freedom and free will; I mentioned it because the compatibilist notion of free will is what you're calling freedom here. But yeah, it's probably not too relevant to the original discussion.

That period includes the internment of 110000 Japanese Americans in War Relocation Camps without any kind of due process. Land of the free, unless your parents were born in the wrong country.

Well, that depends on whether he meant when we gave black people the right to vote on paper (after the Civil War) or when black people effectively got the right to vote (1965). I assumed he meant the latter ;-)

Oops. Sorry, my lack of knowledge of the US history is showing.

Actually, right after the Civil War, I've read that things were pretty different - I know there were a lot of blacks who moved into Indiana and were accepted quite warmly by the people here, up into the 1880's and the Klan really got underway.

By 1930, of course, the KKK had a significant political presence in Indiana, and at this point, white rural Hoosiers hate blacks with the best of them, but I was surprised to learn that that attitude came well after the end of the Civil War.

There was no Klan in the 1880's. There was a Klan from the end of the war until the 1870's but that was a disorganized vigilante group and it was suppressed by state governments. Around 1915, Birth of a Nation came out and people started romanticizing the Klan and it reformed. For a good 35 years though, there was no Klan of which to speak. That's not to say there weren't other groups which filled the same niche in that time period, but the Klan itself didn't exist.

As for when, it wasn't the land of the free when they wrote the Constitution, but it was when Jefferson made them add the first ten Amendments. It wasn't if you were a black person who couldn't vote and it was in the period directly following the Civil Rights Movement -- unless you were gay, in which case it became the land of the free after the Stonewall riots. Unless you were gay AND in the military, in which case it just recently became the land of the free when Obama ended "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." Obama made America briefly the land of the free when he was elected and unmade it again very soon after taking office. Unless your hobbies involve consuming any of a number of harmless or nearly harmless plants and/or chemicals, in which case you're going to have to wait until they ratify the 21st Amendment a second time.

Point is, it's always been a fight.

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