Americans Love Freedom — But Fear Sovereignty

Guest Opinion by Alicia Boothe Haggermaker

Americans love the word freedom.

We wrap it in flags.

We chant it at rallies.

We invoke it in speeches.

But sovereignty? That word makes people uneasy.

Because in modern America, freedom has come to mean permission inside a system — while sovereignty means responsibility outside of it.

And those are not the same thing.

The freedom most Americans defend looks like this:

The freedom to choose between options presented to you.

The freedom to vote between two pre-filtered wings.

The freedom to speak — within corporate platforms.

The freedom to consume — within approved supply chains.

It feels empowering. But it’s menu-based autonomy.

You can choose from what’s offered.

You didn’t design the restaurant.

Sovereignty is heavier. It asks different questions.

What are you building locally?

What systems are you reinforcing?

What are you personally responsible for maintaining?

What are you willing to defend — and at what cost?

That kind of responsibility is harder to slogan.

At the center of this tension is our cultural obsession with efficiency.

We treat efficiency as a moral good.Efficient manufacturing.

Efficient healthcare delivery.

Efficient food production.Efficient governance.

Faster output. Lower cost. Higher GDP.

But efficient for whom?

Efficiency measures output relative to input. It does not measure truth, health, or wisdom.

Efficient ≠ smart.

Efficient ≠ healthy.

Efficient ≠ true.

A system can be highly efficient at producing chronic disease.

Highly efficient at addicting attention spans.

Highly efficient at centralizing power.

Highly efficient at funding war.

Highly efficient at degrading soil, air, and water.

You can efficiently control populations.

You can efficiently wage war.

You can efficiently hollow out communities.

You can efficiently destroy your environment.

You can even efficiently destroy yourself.

Efficiency is not morality. It is amplification.

If a population is anxious, distracted, and dysregulated, the market will efficiently serve those fears and desires.

Efficient outrage.

Efficient dopamine loops.

Efficient convenience dependency.

And when those things scale, we shouldn’t be surprised by the outcomes.

If we efficiently amplify outrage, we shouldn’t ask why society feels fractured.

But that doesn’t mean anger is the problem.

There is healthy anger.

Anger is a signal that something is unjust. That accountability is missing. That a boundary has been crossed.

If we are not angry enough about corruption or abuse of power to act, we are complacent.

The problem isn’t anger. It’s commodified outrage.

Healthy anger is directional. It leads to reform, responsibility, repair.

Manufactured outrage is circular. It leads to scrolling, shouting, and paralysis.

Modern systems are extremely efficient at converting undisciplined anger into engagement — and engagement into profit.

That’s not sovereignty.

That’s stimulation.

Sovereignty is disciplined power.

It means accepting friction instead of demanding instant solutions from centralized authorities.

It means strengthening local resilience instead of outsourcing responsibility upward.

It means tolerating slower processes in exchange for greater durability.

We claim growth while degrading the environment and hollowing out communities.

But growth is not just expansion.

Cancer grows.

True growth strengthens the organism without destroying the host.

When “growth” requires constant extraction — of resources, attention, health, and trust — that’s not development. That’s trajectory.

Freedom without sovereignty becomes dependence.

And dependence — no matter how efficient — is fragility.

Americans don’t lack freedom.

We lack the appetite for sovereignty.

Because sovereignty is heavier than rebellion aesthetics.

It requires responsibility, not just rhetoric.

The real question isn’t whether we are free.

It’s whether we’re willing to carry the weight of being sovereign — or whether we prefer to work tirelessly just to pay someone else to manage our existence.

Full Substack here: https://open.substack.com/pub/haggermaker/p/why-americans-say-they-love-freedom?r=2oy210&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

Alicia Boothe Haggermaker is a lifelong resident of Huntsville, Alabama, and a dedicated advocate for health freedom. For more than a decade, she has worked to educate the public and policymakers on issues of medical choice and public transparency. In January 2020, she organized a delegation of physicians and health freedom advocates to Montgomery, contributing to the initial draft of legislation that became SB267.

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