South Dakota Values Freedom More Than Security — And We Should Be Grateful for That

April 25, 2026

In an era when governments increasingly justify expanded surveillance, paternal regulation, and administrative control in the name of “public safety,” South Dakota often reflects an older constitutional instinct: that liberty is not a secondary value to be balanced away, but a primary political commitment. That instinct is imperfectly honored, and often contested. But it exists. And it deserves gratitude.¹

The American constitutional tradition has always wrestled with the tension between freedom and security. The choice has rarely been between absolute liberty and absolute order; rather, it has been whether governments presume liberty and justify exceptions, or presume control and grant freedoms only conditionally.² South Dakota’s political culture—shaped by frontier skepticism, rural independence, and constitutional conservatism—has often leaned toward the former.³

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That orientation can be seen in attitudes toward speech, arms, property, homeschooling, religious conscience, and decentralized governance.⁴ It can also be seen in a more intangible cultural ethic: a widespread suspicion that bureaucracies should not lightly interfere with private life. That skepticism may frustrate technocrats, but it is also a democratic safeguard.⁵

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The classical warning came from Benjamin Franklin: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”⁶ The quotation is overused, but the underlying principle remains profound. Political communities do not usually lose liberty in one dramatic moment. They trade it away incrementally, often through measures justified as protective.⁷

South Dakota, despite its contradictions, has often resisted that drift.

Its constitutional structure itself reflects this populist liberty tradition. The state has one of the oldest and most robust systems of direct democracy through initiatives and referenda.⁸ That architecture assumes ordinary citizens can govern themselves—a fundamentally liberty-centered premise.

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Its political culture has also frequently privileged personal autonomy over administrative paternalism. During national debates over mandates, emergency powers, and centralized health governance, South Dakota became emblematic—admired by some, criticized by others—of a model prioritizing individual choice over coercive state management.⁹ Whatever one thought of every policy decision, the deeper constitutional question was unmistakable: should security claims always override liberty claims? South Dakota’s answer was often no.¹⁰

That matters.

Because free societies depend less on perfect policy than on preserving a presumption against overreach.

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This tradition also has implications for criminal law and drug policy. Prohibition systems often justify coercion through security rhetoric: public order, public health, public danger. Yet liberty-centered analysis asks whether coercive controls are proportionate, evidence-based, and consistent with constitutional guarantees.¹¹ That is why debates over cannabis, civil forfeiture, search doctrine, and administrative policing are not peripheral—they are tests of whether a state truly prioritizes freedom.¹²

And here South Dakota has seen both conflict and progress.

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The voter approval of Amendment A in 2020 reflected a majoritarian assertion of personal liberty and democratic sovereignty, even though it was later invalidated in court.¹³ The subsequent medical cannabis program, though imperfect, likewise reflects growing pressure to align state policy with autonomy rather than prohibition reflexes.¹⁴

These episodes reveal something important: liberty in South Dakota is not merely rhetorical. It often reappears as a civic demand.

That should not be romanticized. South Dakota has also sometimes fallen short of liberty principles—whether in criminal enforcement, civil liberties controversies, or overbroad exercises of authority.¹⁵ Gratitude is not blindness.

But gratitude is warranted because liberty cultures are fragile.

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Many jurisdictions increasingly equate governance with managerial control. Safety becomes a universal trump card. Bureaucratic convenience becomes public necessity. Rights become exceptions to expert rule.¹⁶

South Dakota often retains an older view: that the citizen is not a subject to be managed, but a sovereign person whose freedoms precede the state.¹⁷

That is a remarkable inheritance.

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Political theorists from Locke to Tocqueville warned that freedom depends not only on constitutions but on habits of self-government and cultural resistance to centralized power.¹⁸ Once those habits erode, legal protections often follow.

South Dakota still carries much of that inheritance.

One sees it in ranch-country individualism. In local suspicion of concentrated authority. In a durable belief—sometimes rough-edged, sometimes admirable—that people should be left alone unless government has a very strong reason to interfere.¹⁹

That disposition is often caricatured as stubbornness.

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Sometimes it is constitutional wisdom.

And it deserves to be defended, especially by those who criticize the state in other respects. Reformers should be capable of saying both that South Dakota must improve, and that it has preserved something precious.

Because it has.

It has often chosen freedom over fear.

And for that, I am grateful.²⁰

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Footnotes

1. See U.S. Const. amends. I–X; S.D. Const. art. VI.
2. See John Locke, Second Treatise of Government §§ 123–131 (1690).
3. See Elazar, American Federalism: A View from the States 87–92 (4th ed. 1994).
4. See S.D. Const. art. VI, §§ 1–29.
5. See Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America 489–95 (Harvey Mansfield & Delba Winthrop trans., 2000).
6. Benjamin Franklin, Pennsylvania Assembly Reply to the Governor (Nov. 11, 1755).
7. See Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom 119–32 (1944).
8. See S.D. Const. art. III, § 1.
9. See Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo, 592 U.S. 14 (2020).
10. See Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905) (illustrating the enduring liberty-security tension).
11. See Gonzales v. Raich, 545 U.S. 1 (2005) (O’Connor, J., dissenting).
12. See Timbs v. Indiana, 586 U.S. 319 (2019).
13. Thom v. Barnett, 970 N.W.2d 535 (S.D. 2021).
14. S.D. Codified Laws ch. 34-20G.
15. See Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018).
16. See Philip Hamburger, Is Administrative Law Unlawful? 1–25 (2014).
17. See Declaration of Independence para. 2 (U.S. 1776).
18. Tocqueville, supra note 5, at 662–70; Locke, supra note 2.
19. See Larry J. Sabato & Howard Ernst, Encyclopedia of American Political Parties and Elections 1207–09 (2006) (discussing Plains political culture).
20. See generally U.S. Const. amend. IX; S.D. Const. art. VI.

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