Anne Applebaum is a Terminal Illness

2024, summarized: You’re sitting in a ballpark, watching a baseball game. The person sitting next to you has a radio, tuned to the play-by-play announcer. You watch the batter drill a line drive up the left field line. The third baseman dives for it, missing, and the batter races around first and keeps going, as the third base umpire throws out an arm to signal that it’s a fair ball. “A swing and a miss for strike three,” the announcer says on the radio. “That’s Ohtani’s second strikeout of the game.” You squint at the radio. “That’s not true,” you say, pointing at the field. “He’s sliding into second.” An usher comes running down the stairs. “Excuse me!” he shouts. “We have a zero-tolerance policy for disinformation! Do I need to call security?”

On October 4, the relentlessly appalling Anne Applebaum hosted a podcast at The Atlantic website on the topic of American freedom. To borrow from Mary McCarthy, every word was a lie, including “the” and “and.” If you’d like to take a moment to see it for yourself, it’s here, paywalled, and here as a non-paywalled reprint at MSN.

Opening the discussion, Applebaum and co-host Peter Pomerantsev “explain” that there are two competing models of freedom in the American past. One model is adherence to American political norms, centered on submission to the authority of the federal government. Read this carefully:

Pomerantsev: Anne, the common conception—the one that I have, anyway—is that freedom is meant to be a good thing. Freedom is meant to be the same thing as democracy. Those two words—I hear them used interchangeably. Freedom means the Bill of Rights, the freedom of the press, the freedom of assembly, the freedom to choose who rules you.

Freedom is choosing who rules you. “Freedom is meant to be a good thing.”

There’s a scene in The Forty Year-Old Virgin in which a bunch of young men sit around drinking beers and talking about sex with their slightly odd older co-worker, and he starts trying to agree with them about how hot it is to touch a woman. “Yeah, man,” he says, fidgeting in his chair. “It’s so hot! It’s like…touching a…bag of sand.” They instantly realize that he’s never done the thing he’s describing.

So. Just a few days ago, I argued that whole layers of high-status American political and cultural figures are “no longer culturally American.” They don’t see the country, they don’t like the country, and they don’t have the most basic American instincts. Peter Pomerantsev thinks that living in America is like touching a bag of sand.

If freedom is “the Bill of Rights” and “the freedom to choose who rules you,” then no human being on the planet was ever free before the Bill of Rights was ratified, and no one outside the United States currently has freedom. You become free only with the promulgation of formal governmental rules on the existence of your freedom. Freedom is a federal document. “Freedom is meant to be democracy,” and those words are interchangeable. Freedom is voting. A stateless society without authorities who rule over the people is unfree: they don’t vote. You have to be ruled to become free.

This man is a dangerous idiot.

But then, incredibly, Anne Applebaum outdoes him:

Applebaum: Not quite. There’s another equally old American version of freedom, which is freedom to defy the federal government—you know, the freedom to go out into the Wild West and make up your own rules.

Applebaum begins a discussion with a history professor, Jefferson Cowie, who “explains” that this sick and dangerous idea of American freedom centers on the freedom to dominate others. “He describes how white settlers in the 1830s refused to abide by treaties that the federal government had signed with Native Americans and, instead, would repeatedly steal their land.”

Cowie: And so you have this really explosive moment where white settlers were promised, in some broad sense, access to land. They were denied it. And they took their claims of freedom against the federal government that was denying them the ability to take the land of other people—their freedom to steal land, basically.

Applebaum and Cowie go on to make other comparisons in which, for example, George Wallace argued for the freedom to impose racial segregation against the federal insistence on equal rights. Cowie winds up for the big finish:

We allow the word freedom to work in the political discourse because it appears to be a kind of liberal value, but underneath it is actually a very powerful ideology of domination. And that’s what he’s really talking about there, because it’s at that moment that the federal government is coming in to take away their freedom to control the political power of Black people.

So in every conflict over this model of freedom, a relentlessly emancipatory federal government — benevolent, respectful of minority rights, committed to justice for all — slams into state and local knuckle-draggers who say they want freedom, but are only using that word to mean that they want to hurt and dominate other people. The federal government is social rules, fairness, decency; resistance to federal authority manifests a sick conception of freedom at the inherently unfair lower levels of American society. State officials are mean; communities are vicious; the federal government is nice. Unclear how the mean locals turn into angels when they move to hold office in the District of Columbia, but there’s somehow a magic process of transformation in which a cruel people have a wise and decent central government. Power always makes people much kinder and more restrained.

This is derangement, and an assault on the most basic American history. It’s madness, but deliberate madness.

In Jefferson Cowie’s telling, the United States government respectfully negotiated treaties with native people, but then cruel locals resisted federal rules and stole their land anyway. In the actual American past, treaties tended to be treaties settling the conditions of removal, and the federal government tended to ignore the terms that obligated them to support and assist the people whose land they were taking. Here, go read the US State Department’s description of this history. Compare it to Jefferson Cowie’s description, in which native people lost land because cruel white settlers didn’t obey the kind and decent federal government.

Flatly, the federal government was invariably the principal agent of American Indian dispossession. The federal Indian Removal Act of 1830 gave the executive branch the power to remove all native people from the eastern United States. President Andrew Jackson’s message to Congress in December of 1830 reported on the progress the government was making in that project: "It gives me pleasure to announce to Congress that the benevolent policy of the Government, steadily pursued for nearly thirty years, in relation to the removal of the Indians beyond the white settlements is approaching to a happy consummation." The Trail of Tears was a federal project, full stop.

Then came the Dawes Act of 1887, federal legislation that enabled the US government to take another 90 million acres of land held by native people.

Jefferson Cowie’s revisionist history, in which a boldly emancipatory federal government desperately tried to protect minority rights while mean local white people refused to obey the decent federal government so they could go on being mean and racist, is indescribably filthy and shameful.

Cowie is the author of a recent Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power. Here’s the publisher’s description of that book: “American freedom is typically associated with the fight of the oppressed for a better world. But for centuries, whenever the federal government intervened on behalf of nonwhite people, many white Americans fought back in the name of freedom—their freedom to dominate others.” Here’s how that book about the federal government’s relentless efforts to intervene on behalf of nonwhite people deals with, for example, Japanese-American internment, a federal project:

The Indian Removal Act, the Dawes Act, the Fugitive Slave Act, Japanese-American internment: Mean white people refused to obey the federal government’s rules about having a decent and kind society where nonwhite people could advance. This is apparatchik history, the narrative service of power. The federal government has always been very good, so the devolution of power to states and communities is inherently oppressive. Only the centralization of power guarantees real freedom.

The Atlantic explains the two models of American freedom: one that allows you to be ruled by central power, and “the freedom to dominate and to control in defiance of the law.” Freedom is obedience; failure to obey is domination, a corrupted freedom of cruelty. Only our submission to centralized political authority guarantees our future as free people.

They go on, by the way, and bring other voices into the discussion.

Timothy Snyder: The basic way that this argument about freedom is now run is that people say, The less government you have, the more free you are, which is fundamentally not true.

God help us. The attempt to remake history and revise the meaning of words is war by other means. I keep feeling on first instinct like I’m listening to fools, to people who don’t understand what they’re doing. That’s not it. Listen to their sentences. “The common conception is that freedom is meant to be a good thing.” There’s no future that includes any degree of partnership with people who think like this. Read the whole thing and see if you disagree.

“Those who are no longer our countrymen.”