No I think we meet all other reasonable measures also. The experience of freedom in the US is the freedom to make increasingly virtual and arbitrary consumer choices. That’s pretty much it. It’s not the experience of freedom of speech in practice, not free time, not freedom from usurious debt, not the freedom of rising prosperity, not freedom from opaque government interference and meddling.

When people use the word “authoritarian” they are just signaling that they believe the narratives that our media speaks with one voice about those bad, bad other countries.