A lot of people feel like we’re sliding into a form of “soft feudalism” where a small group at the top makes the big decisions, and everyone else mostly lives with the consequences. It doesn’t look like the Middle Ages on the surface—no castles or crowns—, but the underlying pattern is similar: concentrated power, limited real options for most people, and a system that quietly says, “Know your place.”

In medieval feudalism, a tiny class of lords owned the land. If you were born a peasant, you worked that land, paid the lord, and hoped you survived. You were technically “protected,” but you weren’t really free. The law, the church, and custom all told you this was just the natural order. The whole setup made it very hard to move, to improve your situation, or to challenge the people on top. Your job was to keep the machine running for them.

Now picture today’s version. A small number of people and corporations own or control the things you can’t live without: housing, health care, energy, major employers, and the big platforms where news and business happen. You don’t farm their fields; you rent their apartments, work for their companies, swipe their cards, and scroll their apps. At every step, they take a cut. If your rent, medical bills, and debts keep you just above water, then on paper, you’re free, but in practice, your choices are squeezed. You can’t easily quit, move, or speak up, because you’re always one crisis away from disaster. That, my friends, is not real freedom. This hits freedom at several levels. At work, a handful of big employers or chains can dominate a region or industry. If you anger a boss in that world, “just get another job” is less realistic than it sounds. Contracts, noncompete, and reputational blacklisting make workers cautious. You’re formally free to say what you think, but you know one wrong move can get you labeled “trouble” and quietly shut out. Over time, people stop exercising their freedom because they’re afraid of the consequences, not because they suddenly love the system. Creating fear is one thing that erodes our freedoms.

The same thing happens with speech and dissent. You still have legal rights, but your livelihood often depends on staying inside invisible lines. If your employer, your landlord, or the platforms you rely on can punish you for what you say—firing, banning, demonetizing, or just quietly burying you in the algorithm—you learn to self-censor. There’s no dungeon, no king’s jailer. There is just the knowledge that certain topics, tones, or actions could cost you your income, your reputation, or your access. That’s enough to tame a lot of people without ever changing a law. We are guaranteed Free Speech by the Constitution, but it doesn’t seem to stop the persecution if our employers don’t like what we say. There are fewer and fewer social media platforms that don’t suppress free speech.  Today, it seems to take a whole lot of money to protect your legal rights when the rich and powerful want to take them away,

On the political side, you still get to vote, and that matters. But money filters what your vote can do. The same kinds of donors and lobbyists often sit behind both parties, making sure that no matter who wins, certain fundamentals don’t change. Regulations get written with lobbyists at the table. Tax codes are “reformed” in ways that always seem to work out for the same small group. Media narratives focus on culture-war fights at the bottom while barely touching the structural deals at the top. That is because of who controls the media.  So, your freedom to choose is real, but the menu you’re choosing from is heavily pre-screened.

Underneath all of this is a story about what success means and who “deserves” what. In the old feudal order, the story was that nobles were chosen by God and birth. Today, the story is that extreme winners are simply “more talented” or “harder working,” and that if you’re struggling, it’s mostly on you. That makes it easier to accept a world where one person can own more than a million families combined. It also helps people on top feel moral while they use their power to tilt the rules further in their favor. If everything is just “the market,” then no one has to admit that a lot of this is designed. Designed into a system that creates poverty.

In the dark ages, people claimed that they were ordained by God to be better than everyone else and to rule. Was that based on the teachings in the Gospel? Today, we still have people who feel that because they are rich, they are blessed by God more than the poor people. Whatever someone believes religiously, most people feel that a decent society shouldn’t treat human beings as expendable parts in an engine for someone else’s wealth. That’s where today’s quasi-feudal setup does the most damage. It doesn’t just limit income or comfort; it quietly shrinks people’s sense of what is possible. Instead of asking “What kind of life do I want?” they ask, “How do I hang on?” Instead of asking “What kind of country do we deserve?” they ask, “Which elite faction hurts me a little less?”

We’re not back in the Dark Ages yet. We still have tools peasants never had: the vote, independent journalism, unions, public interest lawyers, local organizing, and the ability to speak and coordinate with people across distances in seconds. Those tools are under pressure precisely because they’re dangerous to a would-be ruling class. Our independent journalism is dying as the powerful buy the media that journalism depends on. Our right to organize and to protest is under attack by the very people who are supposed to protect it. Everything that they, the would-be ruling class is doing is to keep us distracted, divided, and doubtful. That’s the tell. If everything were fine, powerful people wouldn’t be working so hard to keep you distracted, divided, and doubtful that change is possible.

So, when you look at this emerging neo-feudalism, the core question isn’t left vs. right, or even religious vs. secular. The question is: do you want to live in a country where ordinary people actually have room to make real choices, or in one where a tiny group sets the boundaries and calls that “freedom”? If you care about liberty in any serious sense, you can’t just look at what’s written in law; you have to look at how power and resources are really arranged. That’s where you’ll see whether we’re a free people or just well-managed serfs with smartphones.