From The Craig Bushon Show Media Team
When most Americans hear the word serfdom, they picture medieval Europe, with lords on their estates and peasants bent over muddy fields they were not permitted to leave. The image feels distant and safely buried, which is exactly why it is worth revisiting. History is useful because it gives us language for dangers that can return in forms nobody recognizes at first.
Serfdom was never simply about poverty. Its defining features were dependency and restricted exit, a condition in which a person’s labor, movement and future were bound to an arrangement controlled by someone else. Calling modern America a serf society would be careless and exaggerated, and we are not making that claim. The more useful question is whether a free people can drift toward conditions that share serfdom’s underlying logic, in which citizens remain legally free while layers of dependence steadily narrow their practical ability to say no and walk away. If that ever happened here, it would not arrive in medieval dress. It would come looking like necessity, paperwork, debt and access controls that nobody remembers voting for.
What the Founders Understood About Power
The Founders did not gather in Philadelphia to write a Constitution against serfdom, and it would overstate the historical record to suggest otherwise. What they did understand, from hard experience, was the danger of concentrated power, hereditary privilege and government that stops answering to the people it governs.
The Declaration of Independence holds that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with unalienable rights, and that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” That principle is a direct rejection of the idea underlying serfdom, in which a person’s station and obligations are fixed by birth and by the will of those above him. Under the Declaration’s logic, government exists to secure a liberty people already possess, and that liberty is never a privilege the government grants on its own terms. That distinction shaped everything the country built afterward.
Why the Constitution Divides Power
The Constitution carries that philosophy into structure. Its first three articles establish a Congress to make the laws, a president to carry them out and a judiciary to decide cases under them. The framers had watched the national government falter under the Articles of Confederation and knew the country needed a stronger one, but they were equally wary of placing too much authority in any single set of hands. Their answer was to create power and then deliberately divide it, giving government enough authority to function while making it difficult for any one institution to dominate the others.
James Madison stated the principle bluntly in Federalist No. 47, published in February 1788. The accumulation of legislative, executive and judicial power in the same hands, he wrote, “may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” The connection to dependency is direct. When the same authority writes the rules, enforces them, interprets them and decides whether you have any recourse against them, the citizen has nowhere else to turn. The framers built friction into the system on purpose and accepted a measure of inefficiency as the price, understanding that efficiency is a poor measure of good government when the efficient party is the one holding all the power. A dictatorship can be remarkably efficient, and the question worth asking is always what it is being efficient at, and at whose expense.
Federalist No. 51, published a week later and generally attributed to Madison, pushed the argument further. The essay begins from a sober view of human nature: people who hold power tend to protect and expand it, so a constitution cannot depend on officeholders always being honorable. The safeguard has to be built into the structure itself, which is why the essay insists that “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” Each branch was meant to have both the constitutional means and the personal motive to resist encroachment by the others. The design assumes that sooner or later someone will try to accumulate more power than the Constitution allows, and it plans for that day in advance.
Where the History Meets the Present
The relevance to modern America does not lie in any single law, tax, regulation, mortgage or corporation, and certainly not in the existence of government itself. The concern is cumulative, the gradual stacking of dependencies until citizens remain technically free while finding it harder to exercise that freedom in practice.
Picture a worker who has every legal right to quit but cannot realistically do so, because the job carries the family’s health insurance, the household’s housing stability and the payments on years of accumulated debt. Picture families who own less of what they depend on and rent or finance more of what everyday life requires, in a society where banking, work, travel and communication all run through digital systems whose gatekeepers decide who receives full access. Add regulation complex enough that an ordinary business owner cannot understand the rules governing his own enterprise without paid professionals, and debt heavy enough that people spend their working lives servicing obligations taken on decades earlier. None of these conditions, taken alone, amounts to serfdom, and America is not medieval Europe. History does suggest that it is worth paying close attention whenever the freedom to exit weakens while dependency grows, because the central question has changed very little over the centuries. It is whether a person can still walk away.
The Right to Exit
One of the strongest protections against dependency is having alternatives. A worker who is mistreated by an employer can work somewhere else, a family whose state turns hostile to its livelihood can move to another, and a customer treated badly by one company can take his business to a competitor. When government violates someone’s rights, an independent court offers a remedy, and when a bureaucracy rules against him, there is an appeal. When political leaders abuse their power, voters can replace them peacefully. These are easy to dismiss as procedural details, but each one is a working mechanism of freedom.
A person with alternatives has leverage, and a person without them is dependent. Dependency becomes genuinely dangerous when whoever controls a necessary resource also writes the rules for access to it. That was the arrangement under medieval lordship, and it remains the risk wherever power becomes excessively concentrated.
Federalism as a Second Barrier
The Founders divided authority a second way, between the national government and the states. Federalist No. 51 describes this arrangement as a “double security” for the rights of the people, since power surrendered by the people is first split between two governments and then subdivided again within each. With fifty states free to set different laws, tax burdens and economic conditions, citizens and businesses can sometimes relocate when one jurisdiction becomes inhospitable, and that possibility puts pressure on every state government to weigh the cost of overreach, corruption or poor governance.
The principle comes back to exit once more. The easier it is for citizens to choose an alternative, the harder it becomes for any single institution to exercise control over them. That does not mean every decision belongs at the local level or that federal authority lacks a legitimate role. It means divided authority is itself a form of protection, built into the system because the framers knew how concentrated power had behaved before.
“Don’t Tread on Me”
Before the United States existed, Benjamin Franklin published a woodcut of a snake cut into segments above the words “Join, or Die” to urge the colonies toward unity. By the Revolution, the rattlesnake had become a symbol of American defiance, and Christopher Gadsden’s yellow flag placed a coiled rattlesnake above the words “Don’t Tread on Me.” The symbolism is worth noticing. The rattlesnake does not go looking for a fight. It waits, and its rattle sounds a warning before it ever strikes, so the flag’s message was deterrence more than aggression: respect our rights and do not mistake restraint for weakness.
We believe the flag carries a second message that deserves more attention. “Don’t Tread on Me” is plainly addressed to outsiders, whether foreign enemies, would-be tyrants or governments tempted to overreach, but it also speaks to the citizens who fly it. Liberty can be surrendered through apathy and comfortable dependency as surely as it can be seized by force. The rattle is an instrument of vigilance, and the habit it represents is recognizing danger early, well before the foot is already coming down.
Liberty Requires Citizens Who Pay Attention
The Constitution cannot protect liberty on its own. It is a document, and the institutions it created are run by people, its laws interpreted by people and its elections decided by people. When citizens stop understanding their freedoms, those freedoms become easier to reduce, and when citizens stop watching government, it becomes easier for government to grow past its intended limits. If people trade independence for permanent dependency without weighing the long-term cost, no political structure can protect them indefinitely.
None of this makes government assistance inherently dangerous or regulation inherently oppressive, and the argument that taxes equal tyranny is too simple to be useful. The real question is cumulative. It concerns how much independence an individual retains once everything is added together, and how many meaningful choices are still left.
Freedom on Paper and Freedom in Practice
Russia offers a sobering illustration. Under the statutes Tsar Alexander II issued in February 1861, the serfs held by the nobility, roughly half of the Russian peasantry, received personal freedom. Legal freedom did not bring economic independence. Former serfs bought part of the land they had worked, and while the state compensated the landowners, the peasants repaid the state through redemption payments spread over 49 years. That debt was not written off until January 1, 1907, more than four decades after emancipation.
The lesson is that freedom on paper and freedom in practice are not always the same. A constitution or a statute can declare rights, but citizens also need ownership, economic opportunity, independent courts and real alternatives in order to exercise them. The Russian example is also a reminder that precision matters. If every policy someone dislikes gets labeled serfdom, the word loses its meaning. Understood as extreme dependency combined with restricted exit and concentrated authority, it remains one of history’s most useful warnings.
Guarding Against the Drift
History offers no single formula, but it points consistently in a few directions. A free society protects private property, freedom of movement, voluntary employment and free speech. It keeps courts independent and political power divided, preserves real competition, guards its constitutional limits and local institutions, and resists letting debt harden into something close to permanent bondage. Most of all, it protects the ability of ordinary people to build lives that do not require constant permission from powerful institutions.
A nation of millions of economically independent citizens is difficult to control, while a population dependent on a handful of institutions is far easier to manage. Not every dependency is sinister, but every dependency deserves scrutiny.
Reading Between the Lines
The deeper lesson of serfdom is that liberty does not sustain itself. The Founders refused to design a government on the assumption that good people would always be in charge, so they divided power, set institutions against one another and gave citizens more than one avenue of appeal. The protections that matter most to ordinary people follow the same logic, from owning property and moving freely to speaking, voting and leaving an arrangement that has turned against them. Those protections are what separate citizens from subjects.
Read this way, the Gadsden rattlesnake carries two warnings. To anyone who would threaten American liberty, it says don’t tread on us. To Americans themselves, it says to keep watching where the next step is coming from. Freedom seldom disappears because a population wakes up one morning and decides it no longer wants liberty. It erodes as small losses become normal and dependency becomes comfortable, until citizens stop noticing how many choices they have already surrendered. Serfdom teaches that lesson from centuries away, and the Constitution was built on the same understanding that power must be watched because it tends to grow. Each generation inherits that liberty, and its real task is to understand it well enough to hand it on intact.
The Truth Is Not Hate Speech.
Disclaimer
This commentary is intended for historical, educational and civic discussion. Medieval serfdom varied significantly by place and period, and comparisons between historical serfdom and modern American political or economic conditions are analytical rather than literal. Taxes, regulations, debt, government programs, employment relationships and modern technology do not individually constitute serfdom. References to the American Founding describe broad constitutional principles concerning liberty, consent, divided government and concentrated power, and should not be read as claiming that the Founders designed the Constitution as a response to medieval serfdom. Readers are encouraged to examine the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers and historical scholarship directly.
