By Barb Dwyer

Today, large sectors of the United States will celebrate two hundred and fifty years since the Declaration of Independence. There will be fireworks, drones choreographing constellations above stadiums, schoolchildren singing the word “freedom” until it’s lost all meaning. Pundits, puppets, and politicos of every persuasion will compete to pronounce “liberty” with the greatest conviction. Corporations will print “independence” on disposable cups and limited-edition sneakers. Police departments will release commemorative badges. The military will stage flyovers.

And prisons will continue receiving new arrivals before, during, and after the speeches.

The anniversary will not lack words. It will lack silence—the silence necessary to register discourse in the Foucauldian sense: the structured conditions under which statements become thinkable, speakable, and credible. Discourse is not simply language but the historical arrangement of knowledge and institutions that determines what can be said, by whom, and with what authority. Only within that silence can words begin to recover their weight.

In “Fellow Prisoners,” John Berger urges us to distrust “jailer’s talk,” the official language of those who administer confinement. However different individual jailers may be, their official vocabulary serves the same purpose: to legitimize authority and obscure domination. Terms like “security,” “democracy,” “human rights,” and “freedom” become ritual slogans, repeated until they cease to illuminate reality and instead organize obedience. Within the prison, such words lose their capacity to clarify or guide thought. Berger’s challenge is not merely to question them but to refuse allowing their official meanings to shape one’s imagination.

Americans have long described their country as a “great experiment.” The phrase has the weight of civic mythology, carried forward from the so-called founders who themselves held others in bondage while hypocritically speaking of universal liberty. The metaphor is generous because experiments are allowed uncertainty. They are granted time. They are excused repetition.

But two hundred and fifty years is not a preliminary stage. An experiment is judged by what it produces, not by what it intended. This one has produced enduring systems of confinement: the largest prison population in the world, an immense apparatus of immigration detention, and a social order in which policing extends into nearly every dimension of public life. It has produced schools that often resemble early sites of discipline, borders that function as mobile carceral zones, and technologies of surveillance that follow people from childhood into work and beyond.

These are not accidents or deviations from an otherwise successful design. They are its recurring outcomes. The familiar defense is that the republic remains unfinished. But unfinished is not the same as innocent.

And a structure that has reproduced the same relations of domination for a quarter millennium cannot forever be described as simply “under construction.”

The Declaration announced independence from a king. It did not announce independence from property. It did not announce independence from conquest. It did not announce independence from slavery. It did not announce independence from the police, who had yet to emerge in their modern form; and it did not announce independence from the penitentiary that would soon accompany industrial capitalism into history.

The republic declared itself free while inventing new techniques through which freedom could be rationed. This is not hypocrisy in the ordinary sense. It is architecture.

Empires often begin by describing themselves as “escapes.”

This anniversary will tempt many to rescue the Declaration by insisting that its promises remain unfinished. Others will insist they have already been fulfilled. Both arguments assume the same thing: that freedom is a destination toward which the existing state is slowly walking.

Yet states do not gradually abolish the conditions that justify their own existence. Every state preserves, somewhere, a frontier, a prison, an enemy, an emergency. These are not accidental failures; they are sources of authority.

The police do not arrive after freedom has failed. For the state, they are one of the ways freedom is defined.

The anniversary will also celebrate democracy. Yet democracy cannot be measured by ceremony alone. It must also be measured by who governs, who is governed, and who disappears from political visibility.

A system filtered through the Electoral College, shaped by partisan gerrymandering, and reinforced by multiple forms of voter suppression cannot be treated as simple popular sovereignty. Millions are excluded through felony disenfranchisement. Entire populations in places like Puerto Rico remain subject to federal power without equal political representation. And a judiciary with extraordinary interpretive authority stands far beyond electoral accountability.

Representation survives as language. Its substance grows harder to locate.

There is a habit, shared by much of the right and much of the left, of speaking as though liberty were something governments distribute. The disagreement concerns administration. Who deserves it? How much? Under what regulations? After which background check?

Liberty becomes a license issued by an office. Freedom becomes compliance correctly documented. Independence becomes national competitiveness. Words once associated with escape become methods of inventory.

Security means permanent surveillance. Peace means managed violence. Justice becomes organized punishment. Freedom becomes the ability to choose among options produced by systems that already define the limits of choice.

The prison does not stand beside the republic as its contradiction. It stands within it as one of its clearest achievements. A society that confines such a large portion of its population, while exporting similar logics through detention systems and border regimes, cannot treat incarceration as an exception to its values.

Mass imprisonment is not what follows the failure of freedom. It is one of the ways freedom has been organized.

There are other vocabularies. Not slogans but practices. Someone opening their home after an eviction. Neighbors preventing an arrest. A medic arriving before permission. Workers refusing together what each alone could not refuse. Children inventing games in abandoned lots without asking who owns the ground beneath them.

Mutual aid has always spoken more quietly than patriotism. It also survives longer.

No society can meaningfully claim independence while depending upon domination to sustain itself. No infant survives independently. No harvest grows independently. No language invents itself.

Interdependence is not the opposite of freedom. It is its condition.

What is called independence at the level of the nation often depends, in practice, on the managed dependence of others.

This anniversary will tempt celebration. Yet such celebrations requires forgetting. And there is too much that refuses to be forgotten.

The prison and the border recognize each other. The occupied territory and the over-policed neighborhood exchange techniques. Weapons tested abroad return home as instruments of domestic order. Languages of counterinsurgency become languages of public safety.

History keeps receipts even when governments destroy archives. The jailer learns internationally. So must those who refuse jailers.

What then should become of these exhausted words? Not abandonment but recovery. Freedom should no longer describe a flag. It should describe the absence of domination. Liberty should no longer mean permission. It should mean that no institution possesses the authority to cage another human being. Independence should no longer celebrate separation through sovereignty. It should describe forms of life sufficiently interwoven that no power can easily sever them into obedience.

These meanings cannot be proclaimed into existence. They must be practiced until the official definitions sound implausible.

Freedom, in this sense, is not distributed by institutions. It is enacted against them, beside them, and despite them. Even where surveillance is greatest, people continue exchanging uncoded measures: a glance, a warning, a shared resource, a refusal, a remembered name. Recognition precedes authorization.

Perhaps this is what deserves commemoration after two hundred and fifty years. Not the declaration that inaugurated a republic. But the countless undeclared acts through which people continue making life less governable than the systems built to contain it. Those acts have never needed fireworks. Only rebels, lovers, comrades, caregivers.