An analysis published Wednesday by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities found that millions of low-income Americans have stopped participating in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program ever since President Donald Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law last year.
According to CBPP’s analysis, SNAP participation declined by 6% between July 2025 and December 2025, with 2.5 million fewer Americans receiving benefits.
I think taking the American pursuit of freedom as a given is an incorrect assumption. Freedom is used here not as an idea that must be analyzed and fought for, but as an identity marker that’s trotted out to defend oneself both from others disapproval or disallowal of one’s actions and as a cudgel against those whose actions one disapproves of.
The easiest place to see this is in the concept of religious freedom. The same people who harp on religious freedom often want to declare America a Christian nation. They’ll whine and sue that their religious freedom is being attacked when they’re expected to treat a gay couple as married, but they’ll stand firm when other religions demanded the right to marry gay people, or when people wanted the religious right to psychedelic use (including indigenous use of peyote).
I’ve been reading The Dawn of Everything and it brings up indigenous critiques of European settlers, especially those attributed to Kondiaronk, and some of these groups have a much more complete and realistic understanding of freedom than even the better end of the average American today. And yeah the book goes into how their perception of freedom includes duties to enable others to actually engage in it. The freedom to move far away requires the duty to show hospitality.
When many Americans talk about freedom these days it’s just a virtue signal, regardless of if the virtue is actually possessed. We still do have those who genuinely believe in freedom, the ACLU remains as such, but they were considered radical from the start.
I don’t understand how you can claim that American pursuit of freedom is an incorrect assumption, and then in the very next sentence, you also claim it’s an identity marker.
Freedom is an indoctrinated core value for many Americans, but only as a mantra they don’t really understand the meaning of.
I agree that Americans in general have no real understanding of what freedom really is, and are confused on the issue to a degree that they actually undermine their own freedom.
Good example, and yes the double standard is maddening, and Americans fail to understand that the right to oppress others is not freedom for the people, but will always end as only freedom for the most powerful to oppress the people.
That sounds very interesting, kind of like the tolerance of intolerance paradox, that teach we shouldn’t allow intolerance, we also need to enable the freedom of others, to have real freedom in society.
I think there is much truth in that, but it is more than just virtue signalling, because it seems also like a religious mantra, so it is the strongest possible kind of virtue signalling.
And when something becomes religious, rationality about the issue goes out the Window.