Full text article at The Guardian
Writer: Sophia Rosenfeld
Freedom of choice is a venerable American value. Donald Trump’s attachment to it is, however, highly selective.
Over the first four months of his administration, Trump has been eagerly promoting the expansion of choice in our economic lives. That’s especially the case when it comes to our role as consumers. Think kitchens, baths and automobiles; the stated goal every time he talks about commodities has been increasing the number of options so we can select and buy what we like best – environmental effects notwithstanding. Even his tariffs are only supposed to bring temporary pain, as in emptier toy shelves, before American-made abundance starts to rule the day once again.
In our political lives, though, it’s a different story: the president and his administration have been busy instituting new restrictions on both the possibilities on offer and the picking itself. As citizens rather than consumers, we’ve been explicitly told our options are permanently contracting to “save our country”. No longer, for example, should it be possible to share “radical, anti-American ideologies” in our classrooms or decide how we want to be addressed.
As a result, our economic and political existences are now on rapidly diverging paths – with questions about what choice is good for, where it counts, and who is in charge of the menu at the core. What we are seeing is the emergence of a new kind of authoritarianism that still pays homage to libertarianism, but only in the realm of consumer choice.
A choice explosion
There is a long backstory here. Ordinary people, wherever they found themselves in the world, once had many fewer choices to make than we typically do today – and they didn’t attach as much meaning to the act of choosing either. One of the things that made one free before the modern era was not having to make a lot of decisions about where to live, how to make money, whom to marry, what to own or which political philosophy to back.
But over the last two and a half centuries, the range of both options and opportunities for choice-making – from determining what to eat for lunch to deciding with whom to spend one’s days and nights – has increased exponentially. The categories of people given the formal power to exercise this kind of self-determination have expanded, too, even as the possibility of being able to use this power has remained wildly unevenly distributed. This isn’t just an American story either. Something similar has happened in countries around the globe that consider themselves capitalist democracies.