Liberty in Practice, Not Just in Theory
As Independence Day approaches, I find myself returning - again and again - to the word Liberty. It’s a word we hear every July, printed on banners and shouted over fireworks, yet its meaning today feels more fragile than festive. For many, liberty has become a slogan instead of a personal responsibility. But liberty is not an inheritance we can simply receive. It must be exercised, defended, and lived.
What concerns me most is not that liberty is under attack from some specific political movement or ideology. It’s that we’re forgetting the conditions under which liberty can even exist. And this forgetfulness is bipartisan, cross-cultural, and increasingly embedded in the way Americans interact online and off. We are witnessing a collapse not of rights on paper, but of the willingness to defend those rights in practice, especially when doing so comes at a social cost.
One example? Free expression.
Today, expression is more frequently punished not by reasoned debate, but by cancellation. Not by public disagreement, but by digital erasure. Not by dialogue, but by career ruin. People are losing jobs, reputations, and opportunities not for violating laws, but for saying things others dislike. That’s not liberty. That’s enforced conformity masquerading as accountability.
This isn’t just a cultural shift. It is a civic regression. Liberty cannot survive where dissent is pathologized and where ideological nonconformity is treated as deviance. We have reached a place where many Americans no longer fear government repression so much as they fear peer outrage. This social pressure has proven more effective - and less reversible - than state censorship ever was.
Liberty requires more than constitutional protections. It demands cultural tolerance and public courage. The Founders understood this, and John Adams said it best:
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
That line is frequently misunderstood or dismissed. Some take it as a call for theocracy. It isn’t. Adams was not saying that only Christians, or people of a particular faith, could be free. He was observing something deeper: that the framework of liberty only functions if the people living under it are self-governing in spirit, not just in law.
Liberty cannot survive where people are passive. Nor where they expect their neighbors to behave rightly only because the government commands it. It survives only where people restrain themselves, respect others, and are willing to engage in the hard, messy business of civic life. It survives when rights are exercised responsibly and defended vocally—not just in the voting booth, but in the workplace, at the school board meeting, on the city council floor, and yes, even on social media.
What does this mean in practical terms?
It means defending the speech of people you disagree with, even when it costs you socially.
It means participating in civic life when it would be easier to stay home and complain.
It means recognizing that free societies require thick skin, honest disagreement, and a shared belief that liberty is more important than comfort.
There is no algorithm for liberty. There is only the difficult work of practicing it, day in and day out, when it's inconvenient, when it’s uncomfortable, and when it puts you at odds with your own tribe. And let’s be honest: that’s precisely the kind of liberty we’re losing. The performative kind—flags and slogans—we’ve still got. But the substance of liberty? That’s a different story.
In 2025, standing for liberty means refusing to outsource your civic duties to influencers, parties, or bureaucracies. It means teaching your kids to think freely and speak honestly, even when their views are unpopular. It means showing up, especially when your presence makes a statement.
Liberty is not the product of constitutional clauses alone. It is the byproduct of millions of individual choices, every day, by people who understand that freedom dies not with a bang but with silence.
So as fireworks fly this Independence Day, I challenge you to ask yourself: What are you doing—really doing—to keep liberty alive?
Because if you're waiting for someone else to do it for you, you've already surrendered it.
Let’s talk more about this. Leave a comment, share your thoughts, or forward this to someone who needs the reminder. Liberty isn’t just a right, it’s a responsibility.