Every few years, there’s a clip from the HBO show The Newsroom that goes viral as a supposedly damning indictment of America’s decline on the world stage.
“America is not the greatest country in the world anymore,” declares Jeff Daniels’ character, a pompous news anchor who breaks the mold by being ever-so-slightly anti-American.
“Canada has freedom, Japan has freedom, the U.K., France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Australia, Belgium has freedom. Two hundred seven sovereign states in the world, like 180 of them have freedom,” Daniels states before listing various rankings in which America is behind its international comrades, such as literacy, math, science, life expectancy, infant mortality, median household income, labor force, and exports.
“We lead the world in only three categories: number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real, and defense spending, where we spend more than the next 26 countries combined, 25 of whom are allies,” he adds.
Mic drop! Cased closed! Unless, of course, you live in reality.
Does the United States have problems? Of course, because the U.S. is a creation of flawed beings. But that’s hardly a unique American trait. What is a uniquely American trait, however, is that those who created it understood and embraced the flawed nature of humanity and built a country that not only values individual freedom over all else but protects it against the inevitability of human nature.
Free speech is the ultimate example. The U.S. is the only country in the world with concrete protection for true freedom of speech that it both respects and protects.
The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States famously reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Other countries have weaker degrees of legal protection for speech, and they don’t even mean it. Meanwhile, American history stands as evidence that the U.S. means it, with even the American Civil Liberties Union famously defending the Ku Klux Klan in pursuit of free speech. To understand free speech, you must also understand its paradoxical nature: that it protects everyone equally, whether you like their speech or not.
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And how does the rest of the so-called superior world handle the free speech they claim to guarantee for their people? German citizens are being arrested for “hate speech.” British citizens are being arrested for social media posts that trigger anxiety. Australian citizens are arrested for questioning the government’s COVID-19 policies. Yet somehow, Germany and Australia rank above the United States on the CATO Institute’s Human Freedom Index (the United Kingdom ties with the United States at 17th).
Across the world, freedom itself is as subjective as freedom of speech, and there’s only one country that understands what freedom of speech is, warts and all: the United States of America. If you disagree, answer this: How many of the other “like 180” sovereign states in the world that have freedom would arrest you for the crime of wrongthink?
Ian Haworth is a syndicated columnist, speaker, and podcast host. You can find him on Substack and follow him on X at @ighaworth.