Chris Kremidas-Courtney
We Americans like to tell ourselves a comforting story; that our deepest political value is freedom. Freedom of speech, religion, and most of all the freedom to be left alone. We recite these ideals as proof of moral seriousness, as if naming them were the same as living them.
But freedom on its own has never been enough.
For much of American history, freedom has been interpreted through an intensely individualistic lens. It’s too often been about my rights, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. That emphasis has produced extraordinary creativity and economic dynamism, but it’s also produced an ethical blind spot so large that entire populations have been allowed to suffer inside it.
The violence, fear, and insecurity that Americans are now encountering with fresh shock did not suddenly appear with Donald Trump. Versions of it have existed for generations in Black communities, Indigenous communities, and other marginalized populations. Disproportionate policing, arbitrary surveillance, and legal systems that felt less like protectors and more like threats. For too long, our politics have spoken the language of rights while tolerating systemic harm to the vulnerable.
By accepting that reality as someone else’s problem, we’ve failed morally.
When institutions doled out selective cruelty, we looked the other way. In our politics we accepted the practice of sacrificing someone else’s rights for our own stability. We talked about empathy but in practice, ours was conditional.
It should not surprise us then that a system built on conditional justice would eventually become openly predatory toward everyone.
This is the uncomfortable truth Americans must face: individualism does not merely coexist within our present crisis; it helped to create it.
As Christian pastor and author Roger Wolsey puts it:
“A society that is comprised of mere individuals who have little connection with, or concern about, others isn’t one that can function or survive for long.”
When freedom is detached from responsibility, it becomes fragile and easy to lose. When rights are defended only for those who look like us, live near us, or vote like us, they stop being rights and start becoming privileges. And privileges can always be revoked.
This warning is not new. German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller lamented both his own and the German people’s lack of solidarity with the most vulnerable in his 1946 poem:
“First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me.”
Niemöller’s poem describes how authoritarianism advances; not through a single cataclysmic event but through an unending march of socially tolerated dehumanization and exclusion. Martin Luther King Jr. captured the same reality in simpler form: “No one is free until we’re all free.”
In other words, freedom survives only when it’s supported and defended by solidarity.
Solidarity is neither charity nor pity nor performative allyship. Solidarity is the recognition that our fates are materially linked, whether we like it or not. It’s the decision to treat an attack on any person or community as an attack the entire social and political fabric that we all live within.
Other societies have understood this in ways too many Americans have rejected.
“Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité” (Liberty, Equality, Fraternity) was the rallying cry of the French Revolution and today it’s the official motto of The French Republic. This civic ethic pairs liberty with equality and fraternity not for sentimental reasons but because liberty without strong and equal social bonds becomes hollow. This doesn’t mean modern France is a perfect model of liberty, equality, and fraternity but that these are the values they strive to achieve, much the same way our own Constitution is aimed at forming a “more perfect union.”
Poland’s Solidarnosc (Solidarity) movement in the 1980s did not defeat an authoritarian system through rugged individualism. It did so by building mass, cross-sector collective action leading to free elections in 1989 and a democratic Poland ever since then.
These movements were imperfect, like all human movements, but they grasped something essential; that power organized collectively is the only force that reliably constrains power concentrated at the top.
America’s crisis is not simply one of leadership, but of civic culture.
We have been trained to think like consumers of politics rather than active participants in a shared democratic republic. Most Americans evaluate policies based on personal comfort and convenience. We stand against injustice only when it becomes personally disruptive. And too often we ask what the system does for us personally before asking what kind of society its creating.
Solidarity requires recognizing the most vulnerable as part of “us.”
It asks why we didn’t stand up for transgender people, a tiny minority of 1% just of the population, when television screens were filled with $215 million in anti-trans ads during the 2024 election.
It asks why, in a nation of immigrants, so many ignore the demonization of people who come to America seeking a better life and are less likely to commit crimes than those born in the US.
It asks why too many Americans choose to “not be political” since the system serves them while it punishes and holds others down.
It asks white Americans in particular to acknowledge that many of the warning signs we are seeing now were impacting black Americans for decades. It didn’t matter to most white Americans until people who looked like them were gunned down by ICE. The appropriate response to these difficult realizations is not necessarily guilt, but a commitment to change – to embracing solidarity.
Solidarity means showing up when the targets don’t look like you. Solidarity means defending the rights of the vulnerable even when it costs your comfort. Solidarity means building inclusive multiracial, cross-class coalitions that are durable and active.
After centuries of holding individualism as a core value, some Americans can be expected to bristle at the idea of solidarity in the mistaken belief that it means an end to their right to think for themselves. To be clear, solidarity does not mean uniformity of thought nor conformity that stifles creativity or free expression. What it means is to pool our collective voices and power into movements that protect the rights of everyone in the same spirit as the motto of the United States from 1782-1956; E Pluribus Unum (Out of Many, One). Solidarity asks us to strive to live this motto once again.
Solidarity is not a replacement for freedom, but a necessary foundation that ensures liberty can endure. Without solidarity, rights decay into memories and institutions hollow out until they serve only the powerful. Without solidarity, democracy becomes an empty shell where elections are a performance and not the expression of the people’s collective will.
America does not need a new myth of individualism and exceptionalism. We need a new politics where solidarity is a core democratic value. One that understands freedom is a shared condition, not just an individual situation. And one rooted in the ethic that the rights and safety of the most vulnerable are the only reliable measure of whether our society is actually free.
The door to unfreedom was left open by self-centered individualism, but it can still be closed. It won’t be closed by lone heroes but by people uniting together in solidarity in the belief that no one’s rights are negotiable and no one is disposable.
