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Intrigued by this passage from the introduction on "Reconstruction Syndrome" in the White south, quoted, in part, in Freedom's Dominion: The Second Reconstruction cemented and personalized these convictions in the minds of a new generation of white southerners and their children. To a large extent, these unfortunate tendencies still persist at, or just beneath, the surface of much of the present-day South-shaping and coloring the region's approach to politics, economics, and social mores. Often these tendencies appear in softer, sanitized, more euphemistic forms. Yet appear they still do, as an almost manic concern for states' rights, local autonomy, hyperindividualism, an unfettered —almost fetishistic—view of freedom, political conservatism, sectional pride, traditional values, religion, and gender roles (in fact, reverence for all things traditional), pride in the white race's leadership and achievements, disdain for hyphenated Americanism in favor of ethnic, racial, and cultural homogeneity—in sum, for all of the things that "made this country great." (page 2)

Cowie skillfully traces the instantiation of the concept of "freedom" in the US through the centuries, starting in the early 1800s and the blatant disregard for treaties with different Native American tribes and continuing through the fight against desegregation and to the storming of the capitol in 2021. At its root, this book shows how American freedom is the right of white people to exercise dominance over everyone else. The idea that freedom really means "freedom to dominate" is grotesque, but so neatly explains the political trajectory of the US that it cannot be ignored and has to be dealt with. Beyond that, the brief periods of progress - Reconstruction, the New Deal, the Great Society - show how headway can be made, but were always met with strong rollbacks of those gains. Highly recommend

Sadly still very relevant to understanding society in the US. From chapter 13: Lynching as an Act of Freedom "Reframing the most heinous aspects of American violence as part of the most cherished set of principles in American life is neither obvious nor easy to accept. It requires seeing lynching as what one historian of the South [Michael Trotti]called 'something akin to a prerogative'--a right one could have for the taking. In Ashraf H. A. Rushdy's intellectual archaeology American Lynching, he points out how the power of racial terror "arose precisely out of an ideology of the sense of what rights accrued to someone possessing democratic freedom' in a slave society. For people of European descent, the capacity for violence was their 'birthright, their heritage, the final statement of their freedom.' ... White freedom grew out of the actions of those who had 'the right to maim, torture, and kill with impunity.' To understand lynching is to root it in slavery, which fostered 'the sensibility of freedom, first for the colonial generations and then for all white people in the generations after the Revolutionary War.'[Orlando Patterson]"