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The Cheesecake Factory Model of Freedom
00:34:32
In The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life, Sophia Rosenfeld traces how choice evolved from secret ballots and dance cards to consumer overload and political battlegrounds. She also dissects ihow the pro-choice movement’s framing...
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Summer fun goes great with Family Freedom from T Mobile. We'll pay off four phones up to $3200 and give you four free phones all on America's largest 5G network. Visit your local T Mobile location or learn more@t mobile.com familyfreedom up to $800 per line via virtual prepaid card typically takes 15 days. Free phones via 24 monthly bill credits with finance agreement eg Apple iPhone 16 128GB8 2,999 eligible trade in eg iPhone 11 Pro for well qualified credits end and balance due if you pay off early or cancel contact T Mobile Phone the Gist is Looking for a Social Media Manager do you want to get into the fast paced world of deciding if I look good on horizontal or vertical video? Well then this is the job for you. It's actually an excellent opportunity. It's a good staff to work with if you listen to the show. If you know someone who's good at social media, if you understand how YouTube can be leveraged to reach the youths, please get in touch with us. We are at the gist@mike pesca.com if you if you have any interest or know of someone with interest in this part time job Social Media Manager the Gist@Mike Pesca.com It's Friday, August 15, 2025 from Peach Fish Productions, it's the Gist. I'm Mike Pesca and the District of Columbia filed an emergency motion on Friday before a Judge Reyes now talking about challenging the federal government's attempt to take over the city's. Judge Reyes doesn't seem to like it, but the federal government does have some authority, at least for 30 days, to be in an emergency. Commissioner authorities are also clearing homeless encampments in the District. Now I have to say I'm very alarmed by this expansion of federal powers. I could see Trump trying to bring it to a city near you. But I do also have to say that there are elements of the coverage which go like this. This is dangerous, this is excessive and Trump lied to get there. Now one, I'm with you. Two Absolutely. Three he can't not lie. But then again, I look at the characterizations of his justifications, which are things like crime is out of control and here is the New York Times covering that. Judge Reyes states that for today's purposes, she's not going to get into crime statistics or hear arguments about whether or not crime is out of control, as Trump has repeatedly claimed against all evidence. Times also said that Trump takes control of D.C. police citing bloodthirsty criminals. But crime is down against all evidence. Well, here's some evidence that crime is really bad. They have a murder rate of 27.5 per 10000. Now, murder rate was higher a couple of years ago. When Trump cites his most glaring statistics. Then he had a list of world capitals and he said that D.C. was the worst, even though on the list was Lagos, Nigeria, which is not a capital. He said D.C. was the worst, said it's worse than Mexico City, it's worse than Bogota, Colombia. This inspired a CNN fact check headline. Trump claims Washington's murder rate is higher than Bogota or Mexico City. Here's what the stats from those countries say. So paragraph, paragraph, verbs, verbs. They say Trump was right. In fact, it's a lot higher. Mexico City's murder rate is 10 per 10000, if you could trust the official statistics. But I think in this case, because we're not talking about buried bodies in a desert, I think in fact you can, it's a lot higher. CNN goes on to say murder dropped. We'll get to that in a second. In 2024, we. Which leads to, I'll quote the most recent official data reflects a more nuanced picture. So again, data shows that crime dropped in Washington D.C. it dropped everywhere. So what you'd have to do to judge that against the claim that Bogota and Mexico City are better than murderers. See, if crime dropped there and it didn't, but it's still 10. D.C. is still 27 and a half. New York City's homicide rate is under 5. If you were in a pretty bad neighborhood in New York City and teleported to the equivalently bad, quote, unquote neighborhood in D.C. your rate of getting killed would go up. And while it's true that crime has gone down, I know that means literally there's less crime and less murder this year than last year, but sometimes I think the crime has gone down claim stands in for don't worry, the things will get better. Rather than last year was a bad year for murder, it was the fourth worst year in the last 20 in Washington D.C. the year before that was the worst year in the last 20 in Washington D.C. i don't know what a reassuring picture that is. And in general, I don't want any federal forces or anyone Donald Trump controls addressing this problem. But we shouldn't have to live with this situation. I know why we do. Today I was talking to a German historian and writer and she was talking about how in her country there are a lot of concerns about crime. There are a lot of changing demographics and people were feeling safety as a number one issue and it was affecting the rise of the far right AFD party. And I looked up the murder rates for Germany. There are.83 homicides,.83 nationwide. Again, Washington, D.C. 27 and a half, which is crime going down. And don't exaggerate how bad crime is. Donald Trump There is one reason for all of this, of course, and it's guns. In all the countries like the UK and Germany that fret about crime. And then you look at their crime rates and their murder rates and their fractions of ours, the answer is, of course, guns. So since you can't do anything about guns in the United States, United States, less than you could do before recent Supreme Court rulings, what you do is bluster and fight over the claims of bloodthirstiness and use your own claims like sites without evidence. We shouldn't have to live like this. Or more to the point, of those communities acutely affected, they shouldn't have to die like this. On the show today, I will spiel about syllabi in Georgia. Should teachers have to disclose what they're teaching and what books they're assigning the case for? No. Might just save a life. But first, all of this is about choices. The choices we made about guns, the choices the Georgia teachers are making about their assignments. Because we live in the age of choice, for good and ill. Too many choices in the supermarket, too many claims of freedom of choice and animating sometimes totally opposite political agendas. This is all the subject of an interesting, nay, very interesting new book by Sophia Rosenfeld. It is. I just mentioned the title, the Age of Choice, A History of Freedom in Modern Life, Restaurant menus, dating, and yeah, we get to reproductive rights. Sophia Rosenfeld, up next, my favorite shirt. This shirt I love. It's actually three shirts. It's a black one, it's a putty one, and it's a white one. And it's from True Classic. True Classic, like the name implies, is simple, it's crisp and it takes something as basic or classic is a white T shirt and makes it feel and look fantastic. Because a true classic, it's never just about the fit or the fabric. The clothes fit the way they should fit, which is weird to understand. After wearing white T shirts that fit the way white T shirts aren't supposed to fit. Hundreds of examples, thousands of data points of white T shirts fitting incorrectly. Then I throw on the True Classic and I'm like, oh, this is it. And that's when I found my truth, my true. I've been wearing true classics for a while now. If you watch any of the video, you will see me often in a true classic. Hey, what's that? Not bunching. That's a true classic. Clean, effortless fit that actually works for real life and videoing the gist. You can find all of them at Target, Costco, or head to trueclassic.com gist to try them for yourself. FDR had the idea of the four freedoms. I'm sure you've memorized them, but let's recount Freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from fear, Big one for fdr. And freedom from want.
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From want.
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It seems like maybe not so much a freedom, but it does get at Isaiah Berlin's idea of negative liberty. Now, choice has become more than a freedom, more than a feeling. It's a bit of a way of life, but maybe it's not what's making us most free. Sophia Rosenfeld is the author of the Age of Choice, a history of freedom in Modern Life, in which she argues that choice is some. Something like the meeting point of democracy and human rights culture and consumer culture. Professor Rosenfeld, welcome to the gist.
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Thanks so much. It's a pleasure to be here.
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So I want to jump right in. And the book lays the predicate and takes the listener along and we're oriented and we're going to get to all that. But I want to start at just the most exciting, scintillating event in the book. I, of course, speak of the Pontefract by election of 1872. Is that right?
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One of the more obscure dates and places, I might add, in modern history. But yeah.
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So what was going on in Pontefract is what, a hamlet in England?
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It's in Yorkshire. It's in northern England. It was a town associated with coal mining. It's not a place people talk about a whole lot, but I think something really rather remarkable happened there in the 1870s, and that was the first required election in which everybody was required to use a secret ballot to vote.
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Why is that an important touchstone in the history of choice?
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Yeah, so we tend to think that the age of revolutions, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, gave us political choice because you find the word all over the place. But the idea in the 18th century was really that the people, kind of collectively and by people, I really mean, you know, sort of white men with some property standing for their households, would come to a consensus about what was right. It didn't mean what we think of as choice. Each person privately trying to figure out what they most believe themselves and recording that information so it could all be aggregated later. And the switch to the secret ballot, which happens rather suddenly in the late 19th century into the 20th and is now the kind of gold standard for elections around the world, was the moment, I think, that in which the modern understanding of voting as choosing just what you want without consulting other people based on your interior sentiments and values, so it could be added up later, came to fruition.
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Is there something, and I want to spend much of this interview talking about reproductive rights, but is there something about choice inherently tied up to the genders, Very fundamentally tied up in a way that maybe you realize when writing the book.
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You know, I didn't actually start out thinking this would be a book with so much emphasis on women, and it's not a book about the history of feminism, as you say. But I just got. The more I read, the more I was struck. Women are all over this story. And partly it's because in the beginning, when they are the first shoppers picking these two kinds of fabrics or two kinds of ribbons, it's easy to sort of dismiss them as making insignificant, unimportant choices in a not important realm. And as you say, Hercules, the model of Hercules, choice is something quite different. It's this guy who's making the most important kind of choice between doing the right thing or doing the wrong thing. And it's allegorized as him picking between a woman who's a temptress or a woman who represents, you know, the virtue, you might say. And that gives way to this kind of more silly notion of the coquette's the one who's like, I picked the blue ribbon. What difference does it make? And it's not a serious model, but over time, more of our choices look like those of the coquette than they do those of Hercules. Most of the choices we make in everyday life, you know, do I want the ham sandwich or the. The blt, are a lot more like the coquette's choice than they are. Like, there's a right answer and a wrong answer to scenario choice. And women over time seize on this kind of disconnect. And so a lot of feminism from that. You mentioned the suffragettes, but onwards too, all the way to second wave feminism. And Betty Friedan is framed around this notion. Women need more choices in more different spheres. They need choice in employment, they need choice in education, they need choice. And whether even to get married or have children in the first place. Interestingly, feminism kind of capitalizes on liberalism to become framed around choice. So I just saw this possibility that you could really think about the broader problem of choice in our society a lot by looking at these kinds of areas in which gender as well as other things are at play.
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When did choice begin. Begin to be so associated with freedom? It wasn't always so fundamental to freedom. It might be hard for us to conceptualize that now, but it wasn't always the case.
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Absolutely not. So you never see the word choice associated with freedom. When you go back a few hundred years, you know, if you were a noble person in, say, 18th century France, partly what made you free was that you weren't dependent on anyone else and almost everything in your life was already set. So you didn't have to scramble. You might have already been betrothed to somebody from birth. You already had possessions, you had land, you had an income, you had a status and a name. Choice didn't get you very far. Choice was for people who had to try to make it on their own. But over time, choice becomes a kind of form of access to. To both getting what you want and also to a kind of status. I'm the sort of person who gets to make choices about my life. That's a way of saying I'm a full fledged adult person. And I don't think there's a date you can point to when this happens. But the story that I tell is really about how this happens over a certain number, really centuries. But I don't think it's really solidified till the 20th century. I mean, the 20th century is really when we start to think fundamentally people are free when they can choose things.
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I think it must be tied to the Industrial revolution, because beforehand there weren't even enough calories to sustain anything other than the bare rudiments of living. And now that we live in an age of abundance as opposed to an age of scarcity, it is an age of choice.
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It's abundance in things. It's also the proliferation of different belief systems. So kind of pluralism in the world of ideas as well as stuff. It's also the rise of cities where people don't all know each other. And so things like romantic choice aren't between five people you already know and your families know, but between strangers. It's a story that goes along with the growth of the modern world, but it's not just a sort of natural outgrowth. I don't think of there being more things or abundance. It's also a common kind of story about how this idea of choice got so valorized. How we came to turn choice making into something that's a value unto itself, not just a way to get things right.
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Now, the problem of choice is, I suppose, in some societies, not enough of it. But in our society, it's too much of it. Was there ever an acknowledged equilibrium? We were living in the perfect age of just enough choices?
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That's a good question. I think if you. The sort of propaganda around the Second World War is often that there's a certain perfect balance of political and economic freedom. You know, it's a myth too, but that was when you started with fdr. So that was the kind of moment with the celebration of freedom as the hallmark of what made the Allies, and especially the US different either from communist states or from totalitarian ones. Today, we're more likely to complain in some parts of the world about choice overload. You go to Amazon and you want to buy, I don't know, a toaster, and there's 65 different kinds. And who the hell wants to read about every one of these before picking a toaster or something like that? And in poorer parts of the world, obviously, people are often told that they have choices and they don't have real choices, and they're often penalized for not making good ones. And there's a lot of resentment of a culture, understandably, that insists upon kind of personal autonomy. And choice is the way to actualize oneself as a person. So you can see it sort of impinging on our politics in every direction.
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Yeah. Remember that Wendy's commercial evening wear. And it would be a drab outfit, formal wear, and it would be the same drab outfit over and over again. The point of Wendy's being we as America have choice, which is like a piece of cheese on the burger or a tomato.
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Exactly.
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Yeah. What's the difference between, say, voter preference or the choices of the people and the concept of the will of the people?
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Yeah, that's really interesting. I mean, the will as it was defined here, you're in a sense referencing rousseau in the 18th century and this idea of a general will. The will was the idea that there was something all the people shared and wanted collectively. And choice as we talk about it now is very different. It's much more this sense I mentioned of a kind of aggregated set of everybody's distinct decisions with the idea that we're very unlikely to agree about much at all. Very minimal area of agreement. And choice also suggests that there are kind of menu of options, whereas the will suggests there's just something human nature requires or demands.
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Yeah. It reminds me of something that you've written about, which is the idea of common sense, which maybe seems to be just out there and obvious, but is often a construction that's used as a means of manipulation, Right?
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Absolutely. Common sense is really interesting in that regard because it would seem to be something that crosses all cultures and all times. And of course, not only is it quite specific, people think something's common sense at one time that they don't in another. But the sooner, you know, in politics, if somebody says it's just common sense, you can assume it's a controversial topic because it's almost always used as a kind of the inverse of what you might think, you know, say gun control. And somebody says, just let's use common sense. That generally means there is none.
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One area of choice that makes life miserable, I'm told, is dating these days is unbelievably hard because there's so much choice and you could always swipe left and there is no incentive as compared to the days when we were in village with 200 people and if there was one marriageable young lady and a marriageable young man, they'd get married. Now, I was reading your book about how dance cards were used back in the age of balls, and there is an innovation, which is someone's dance card can be filled as per the idiom. But if the dance card wasn't filled, a woman who always had the choice would be able to turn down someone, but she couldn't pick someone else. I think that this actually probably alleviated a lot of the psychological angst with that that current daters are dealing with today.
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There was so much etiquette around dating and dancing in public in the 19th into the 20th century. I mean, if you read Jane Austen, you can't believe how many things there are you could make a mistake doing. And you might think, oh, my God, this was so punishing. Everybody had to know their exact roles, and you couldn't walk this way, and you had to give your left hand to somebody not your right, and your dance card had to be filled in a very specific way. But the idea was definitely to protect both the social order and to protect individual sentiments. The idea that people could get so hurt by rejection in this kind of public setting or by monopolizing somebody's attentions and not somebody else's. And so I got interested in these dance cards because I was also interested in restaurant menus and secret ballots. And all kinds of things that I would call kind of choice technologies. And they were ways to kind of help you navigate this new world of selection. Sometimes other people, sometimes objects, sometimes what you want to have for lunch. And dance. Cards are a really interesting one because as they proliferated and they made choice easier, they also added ever more rules. Not legal rules, but informal kind of etiquette rules. And I think, yeah, just norms. And I think those are really an important part of this story. You need a lot of rules for choice to work.
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Choice without norms is flummoxing, actually. More oppressive, leads to greater unfairness. But, but how do you get the norms in there? You know, a lot of times our current architects of choice, like the people who run the dating companies, they're disincentivized to create norms around it. And maybe that's good short term thinking. Yeah, but it's also why these companies actually, the, the dating apps aren't such great investments.
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No, you, they, they want you on there as long as possible and swiping right or left as long as you possibly can. And this is true for shopping in general. And you know, nothing more resembles the world of shopping these days than online dating because it's really the same model. Right. It's like, here's a set of options and keep thinking, which ones do you like? And you know, and then of course, the only difference is that the objects have to choose you back when it's dating. Whereas I guess the toasters on Amazon don't have to like you the same way.
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Would you say the current Cheesecake Factory menu is an analog for our society as a whole?
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That's a question I've never gotten before, specifically about Cheesecake Factory. I think the, I mean, you know.
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This thing, this, this thing is tome, this thing has, you know, more entries than the tax code.
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Right. And that's, and I think that's because people want to feel that more choices, it means more freedom, you have more options. It's sort of a, the premise is always more is better. However, we also have a lot of trouble navigating too much, which is one reason especially wealthy people employ a whole host of people to help them select things, to curate their homes through decorators and personal shoppers, financial planners, trip planners. I mean, these are all to kind of help you through the idea that the options are vast. And I myself, I don't know about you, but if I see a menu that I have to turn 10 pages on, I give up. I mean, I don't want to read 10 pages of options in a restaurant. I'd rather a few good ones.
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So I want to get to the pro choice movement. Is that a fair framing? Is that a framing that you understand the rhetorical appeal of, given everything you've studied?
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So right after Roe v. Wade was decided, which was 1973, the major feminist organizations in the United States and some of their counterparts in Western Europe, too, kind of had a. Still had a kind of problem on their hands, which was how to persuade a broad public that abortion was a real option, that it really could be, in a sense, destigmatized in relation to the past. And we can look back at the meeting notes of these different organizations, and it's really interesting. You see, they tried out a lot of different ideas. They thought, maybe we sell this on the basis of equality. In England, it was sold largely on the basis of healthcare. It's been less controversial also in England. In the US what was decided by now by Planned Parenthood, by a number of other organizations, was largely this idea of choice. And why? Because it was thought who could really object? Nobody was saying you have to have an abortion. Nobody was pushing this idea. It was just offering it as one more option. And the idea was that individuals could, based on their same values and predilections and needs, the kinds of basis on which they made all other decisions, decide in this capacity too. And it would allow women to feel like full fledged choosers, which was really what had become the status of an autonomous person. In many ways, this made a tremendous amount of sense. I see why people fell in line with this. And we've had the right to choose and various versions of that ever since. But it also faced a lot of backlash that was probably not expected.
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Mm. And it's inherently American to emphasize that. If you said, which society, which society says it's healthcare, which society says it's choice? I would definitely say, oh, yeah, the one that has Virginia Slim cigarettes marketing all over the place is the one that's gonna frame it as a choice.
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Right. And it fit in with. It fit in with human rights language, it fit in with commercial culture. It fit in with politics on both sides of the aisle. In the 1970s, I really think it was seen and it was marketed as a very American idea. Americans like choice, and we're expanding the realm of possibilities. But there was backlash both from the right and from the real left as well, pretty quickly in ways that are really interesting.
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Yeah. Do you think vulnerability of that is okay if you're pro choice? Obviously, if that faction gets to Define their opponents, they would say anti choice. But then their opponents actually choose a label of pro life, which is to say to cut through and maybe define the question. The opposite of that number would be anti life. So maybe pro choice works better than pro life. But I don't know that anti choice is more powerful than anti life.
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Nobody proposed anti choice. It's interesting. That was a. That's a non starter. It's still a non starter. Nobody goes into politics, says, I'd like to take away your choices. But on the right, a very clever strategy emerges, which is to say, yes, but isn't there something more important and greater in a sense than choice?
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Right.
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And that is life itself. And in a way they went back, the right went back to the kind of Hercules choice notion, which there was kind of, maybe there's choice, but there's a right choice and there's a wrong choice. It kind of remoralized the options. And now you might say that was purely a cover for a kind of anti feminist position. And that's a legitimate argument. But if we just look at the rhetorical strategy of arguing that choices have moral grounds and some are more weighty and worthwhile than others, there was a great success. What the right proposed. And on the left, yeah, no left, there's a clever strategy too.
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So yeah, but I would say that now nowadays you hear reproductive rights more often expressed as the legalized abortion movement slogan. And this gets back to what I was saying, that everyone wants more rights. People aren't as clamoring for more choices. So. So it seems to me that back when this slogan was adopted, I could understand the merits, but the stakes and the salience of the issue were somewhat undermined by pitting it as a choice question. And then they had to react to their opponents framing it as a much bigger issue, a life question. And then the counter mobilization was, all right, now we're going to be a rights issue. And that would be my analysis anyway.
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I think that's correct. I mean, you do see a number of organizations backing away from the choice framing these days. Reproductive justice, for instance, is a bigger framing, even though equality people are still worried about framing in terms of women's equality. But there is a sense that choice has been a little bit of weak tea to combat an argument as strong as the right to life. Even if the right to life has been attached to something that might be described as a set of cells with not a child yet it's simply had a kind of way of turning the anti abortion position into a morally Righteous position.
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A
Sophia Rosenfeld is a professor of history at the University University of Pennsylvania. In her new book is the Age of A History of Freedom in Modern Life. Thank you so much.
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B
Thank you.
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A
And now the spiel story today caught my eye in the Atlanta Journal Constitution. They cover Dixie like the do you know Georgia professors fear harassment as agency moves to make syllabuses public choice not to go with syllabi. We'll bring that up with the linguistics department whose required reading is I guess we won't know if the Georgia public university professors get their way. The argument is if certain books are put online, if certain course requirements are known to bad faith actors in the public who do searches, those teachers can be harassed. Now I have to say, and by the way, yes, it's true, teachers have gotten death threats for things they teach in their class. Now I have to say initially I was as sympathetic to the argument that public college professors should be able to hide their syllabuses even though it's required by law. About as sympathetic to that argument as the ICE agents need to wear or should be allowed to wear masks argument because some ICE agents have or could be doxed. Also true, just like the university presidents. I'm sure that death threats have been filed more than I'm sure that I know that death threats have been filed. But I think that this is the price and it's too high a price in our society, even if no actual attempts on anyone's life occur. It's too high a price to have to deal with that psychologically. But it is a sad price of public service. And then I read a quote from an individual, an attorney from an organization. I almost never disagree with the foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. And Zach Greenberg says it can really implicate academic freedom because of the inevitable online outrage, mobs and calls from politicians, legislatures and the general public to fire professors and change their courses. And then there was also an official from professor group who said just that. In fact, he researches Tim Kaine does academic freedom at the University of Georgia who says that several colleagues routinely receive death threats from people who disagree with their academic work by posting syllabuses. Again, why not syllabi online without full context like the course itself? Quote, we're creating conditions that make that the death threats more possible. And he says that colleagues say, I don't want to put my family through that. If a certain book is going to cause someone to threaten me, I'm just not going to teach the book. This is a sad place that we are in but the solution is not to turtle. I do not believe there are so many death threats. Podcasters get death threats. Maybe you haven't gotten death threats, but all manner of public official officials have gotten death threats. And the answer cannot be do not engage in public officialdom or do not. If you want to make the case that a professor of classics never ran for office, it comes at a price. Too high a price. But I still think that we have to commit to being open. If there were any FOIA request for syllabi, of course those requests would be granted. So why not wait for someone to have to file the request? And maybe it would be filed on behalf specifically of organizations looking to almost literally target professors. Be open. Put it out there. We should, in fact, hunt down those who would hunt us down first. I know that's hard. We do take death threats seriously. We can't harden every target. But this is just where we are in America today. Also, Steven Pinker, the Harvard professor, tweeted a list that he came across. It wasn't his list. An analysis of US College syllabi by the Open Syllabus Project shows that bell hooks is assigned more than Aristotle, Judith Butler more than Plato, Edward Said more than can't, and Foucault more than everyone. So you just pick someone who you think, like Shakespeare, belongs up there in the firmament. No, it's all Foucault. I'm glad to have that information. Goes Foucault, Shakespeare, James Stewart. You're a scurvy spider. No, I know the Scottish. Is it Scottish Enlightenment thinker? James Stewart, then Karl Marx, then Stella Cottrell. Who? I don't know. I don't even know Stella Cottrell. I'm going to read the work of Stella Cottrell and I am definitely not going to threaten anyone who assigned Stella Cottrell. And our society has become way too violent and way too expressive. And you put those things together and it can chill us. But I do have to rebut the fire assertion that the best way to have individual expression is to allow the individuals who are college professors or ICE agents to opt out of a means of expression. And that's it for today's show. Corey Warr is the producer of the gist and Ashley Kahns, our production coordinator, Kathleen Sykes helps me with the GIST list very much helps me me. Philip Swissgood consults on all matters Substack, where I am@mikepesca substack.com and Michelle Pesca oversees it all. Peru. G Peru. Du Peru. And thanks for listening.