When we talk about freedom in America, we tend to assume the word holds a universal meaning—that it is self-evident, inherited, and obvious. Ask any crowd of people and they’ll nod enthusiastically at it. But after conducting a series of street interviews with college students, one thing became impossible to ignore: the word “freedom” is still embraced, but its original meaning is gone. That’s a problem because people who share a word but not its definition cannot long share a nation.

What They Said

Asked to define freedom, nearly every respondent gave a version of the same answer: 

“Freedom to me means like I can go out and just be me and not have to live up to stereotypes.”

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— INTERVIEW 1

“Freedom means the ability to express yourself freely, live how you want, and not have to worry about having negative interactions with others.”

— INTERVIEW 2

“I think freedom just means the ability to make whatever decision you want and kind of not get judged for it.”

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— INTERVIEW 4

 

At first, these answers sound harmless—even positive. They’re thoughtful and earnest. But read them again slowly. In every single one, freedom is defined as a feeling; specifically, the feeling of not being criticized, not being judged, and not having to meet anyone else’s expectations.

 

That’s not liberty, that’s comfort. And those are very different things. 

If this is not freedom though, then what is, and who gets to decide the definition? While the origin of the term can be traced to a multitude of historical sources, many find its American anchor in the Bill of Rights. 

The Bill of Rights, ratified in 1791, was created to restrain the government. It explicitly details individual sovereignties that no legislature, no executive, and no court can lawfully invade. The framers had just lived under a government that taxed without consent, quartered soldiers in private homes, and denied jury trials. They were not theorizing; they were legislating from experience. And to think that it’s been reduced to the validation of one’s feelings is utterly insulting.

THE BILL OF RIGHTS — A CLOSER LOOK 

• 1ST: Freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition — protects you from government censorship.
• 4TH: Protection from unreasonable search and seizure — the government may not invade your person or property without cause.
• 5TH: Right to life, liberty, and property — the state cannot deprive you of these without due process of law.
• 10TH: Powers not delegated to Washington remain strictly with the states and the citizens.

These protections describe what the government cannot do to you. They say absolutely nothing about what your neighbors, your colleagues, or strangers on the internet must think of your choices.

However, I should commend the one individual who at least attempted to reference an Amendment in her response. When asked if freedom possessed moral or legal limitations, she said “to an extent yeah…like legally, we have a 2nd amendment, like freedom of speech and everything…” 

Perhaps this was an honest mistake. But considering the Second Amendment is famously the right to bear arms, paired with the fact that she later claimed America is headed towards an authoritarian government “you know, with Trump being our president and everything,” I am hesitant to give her the benefit of the doubt. Regardless, this illustrates an underlying problem. Many still use constitutional vocabulary, but have lost grip on its architecture. A nation that forgets the difference between its amendments has already begun forgetting the philosophy behind them.

Other respondents also acknowledged that freedom has limits, but I was shocked by their rationales. None of them pointed to government overreach as the threat (other than Ms. “Trump is a King,” of course). Instead, they pointed to social harm, to the feelings of others, to community expectations, and to the fear of cancellation.

"A lot of people that have controversial thoughts cannot surface them because they’ll get canceled—because of cancel-culture. You have to worry about things you say because you don’t want them to blast you in the future."

— INTERVIEW 4

This respondent is highlighting something significant: social enforcement and reputational destruction are real and ever-present. But notice the shift: the definition of the threat to freedom has gone from the “state” to the “crowd.” Scarily, the solution being implicitly proposed isn’t more constitutional protection, but more social approval.

The Founders feared government because governments have armies, courts, prisons, and tax collectors. They knew that the “crowd” could also be tyrannical, which is exactly why they put rights in writing and made them incredibly difficult to revoke. The result? A mob cannot suspend your Fifth Amendment rights and a president cannot “cancel” your First Amendment protections by executive order. The document was built to withstand popularity contests.

Sadly, when a generation grows up believing freedom means freedom from judgment instead of freedom from government, the document begins to lose its power. 

None of this is accidental. For decades, American civic education has been in a tremendous decline. The Constitution is taught less, and the history of why these protections exist—the actual experience of oppression that produced them—has faded into the dismissal as a mere “master narrative”. What remains is the language of rights without the reasoning behind them.

Into that vacuum has come a replacement framework, one built more for therapy than governance. It sounds compassionate. It frequently is compassionate. But compassion is not a constitutional principle, and good intentions have never reliably protected rights from cultural pressure.

The conservative case for structured liberty is not a cold one and it is certainly not indifferent to human dignity or individual expression. It is precisely because human dignity matters that the structures protecting it cannot be left to the good will of the culturally dominant. Good will changes. Law, at its best, does not. 

When one interviewee said that freedom is “given” when it comes to personal choices but “earned” in other contexts, he was inching toward something true—the distinction between natural rights and institutional trust. But he unfortunately had no framework to articulate it, presumably because nobody had given him one.

Here is what makes all of this concerning: the individuals in these interviews are not rejecting freedom—they value it sincerely. But they have been handed a version of the word from which the most important content has been subtly removed. It has been made personal where it was structural, emotional where it was legal, and subjective where it was shared. 

At the end of the day, freedom defined by feeling is freedom that can be taken away whenever feelings change. Simply put, judgment is not tyranny, disagreement is not oppression, and a society that cannot tell the difference will eventually trade its constitutional protections for likes on Instagram.

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