As Melissa Butcher puts it in her book The Trouble with Freedom: Love, Hate and America’s Future (Manchester UP, 2026) when asked to rank the importance of freedom to them most Americans would put it as an 11 out of 10. So, what happens when the idea of freedom becomes not something that unites Americans but rather, through its different interpretations, ideals and priorities becomes something that polarises Americans? Based upon extensive fieldwork and interviews with Americans across the states, Butcher is able to explore not just the different conceptions of freedom of America across realms such as justice, COVID, the rural/urban divide and religion, but also gives us an insight into how Americans think about America and how, especially at the local level, there are areas of hope which confound the claims we hear at the national level.

In our conversation we discuss issues such as how she identified her places to visit and people to speak to, the daily experiences of crossing the US/Mexico border at El Paso, Texas, the important conversations that can come from speaking to people as people rather than labels and why, precisely, so many Americans bring up postmodernism at the same time that Universities no longer teach it.

Your host, Matt Dawson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow and the author of G.D.H. Cole and British Sociology: A Study in Semi-Alienation (2024, Palgrave Macmillan) and co-editor of The Anthem Companion to Henri Lefebvre (2026, Anthem Press) along with other texts.

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