Politics & Power Quote by Rosanne Cash

Rosanne Cash skewers a familiar American pose: patriotism as a megaphone, “Freedom” as a branding iron. Her target isn’t love of country; it’s the performative kind that needs an audience and a villain. “Scream” does a lot of work here. It conjures talk-radio outrage, flag-waving spectacle, the volume-first politics where intensity substitutes for argument. She’s not describing conviction so much as compensation: when your identity is built on being the truest American, dissent stops being a normal feature of democracy and starts looking like treason.

The sting is in the reversal. The people most eager to wrap themselves in the language of liberty often end up policing speech, punishing “unpatriotic” art, boycotting books, demanding ideological loyalty tests. Cash points to the paradox at the heart of culture-war nationalism: freedom is treated less like a shared framework and more like a private possession. If it belongs to “us,” then “your” freedom to disagree becomes a threat.

Coming from a musician, the line carries extra context. Artists routinely get drafted into these fights, praised as authentic voices when they echo a tribe and attacked as elites when they complicate it. Country and Americana in particular have been battleground genres, where “real America” gets defined loudly and narrowly. Cash’s intent is less to scold than to expose the trick: the loudest freedom-talk can be a mask for discomfort with pluralism, the one thing a functioning democracy can’t do without.