Which Is the Party of Freedom?

‘F reedom,” like any number of political buzzwords, has been used to defend or assail almost every imaginable political program in existence, from anarchist-adjacent libertarianism to Stalinist communism and fascism. As Frank Filocomo notes on the Corner today, the anarcho-capitalist economist Murray Rothbard “once argued for a ‘purely free society’ that would, among other things, ‘have a flourishing free market in children’ bought and sold as goods by parents.” The French Revolution’s Jacobin radicals famously fought under the banner of liberté, egalité, fraternité. (Or “liberty, equality, fraternity”). Vladimir Lenin argued for a “proletarian freedom,” in contrast to the “bourgeois freedom” of the capitalists, arguing that “there cannot be, nor is there nor will there ever be real ‘freedom’ as long as there is no freedom . . . for the workers from the yoke of capital.” Ronald Reagan framed his vision of freedom in terms of limited government: “Man is not free,” he maintained, “unless government is limited.”

Today’s progressives, too, are seeking to recast their political project in terms of freedom. The New York Times reports “that Democrats at every level of the party and of varying ideological stripes — including President Biden, abortion rights activists in Kansas and, now, a constellation of left-leaning groups — are increasingly seeking to reclaim language about freedom and personal liberty from Republicans”:

For much of the midterm campaign, Democrats have grappled with how to define their message, weighing slogans like “Democrats deliver” and “Build back better,” and issuing warnings against “ultra-MAGA” Republicans.

Now, a coalition of progressive organizations has settled on what its leaders hope will be a unified pitch from the left. This November, they plan to argue, Americans must vote to protect the fundamental freedoms that “Trump Republicans” are trying to take away.

That pitch is the product of a monthslong midterms messaging project called the “Protect Our Freedoms” initiative, fueled by polling and ad testing.

The Times goes on to outline how a number of different progressive strategy and advocacy groups are seeking to argue that “core American values — such as free elections in which the will of the people is upheld, or freedom for individuals to make decisions for their families — are now uniquely jeopardized,” noting the “striking . . . fact that left-wing organizations are now embracing language that has been more closely associated with small-government-minded conservatives.”

Of course, the conservative view of freedom, at least in the Anglo-American context, is more complicated than a singular attachment to small government. It’s true that the dueling right- and left-wing conceptions of freedom often roughly break down along the lines of what Isaiah Berlin famously described as “negative” versus “positive” liberty: Conservatives tend to be partial to negative liberty, which Berlin describes as “involved in the answer to the question ‘What is the area within which the subject — a person or group of persons — is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons?’” Progressives, contrastingly, usually opt for the positive iteration, which Berlin argues “is involved in the answer to the question ‘What, or who, is the source of control or interference that can determine someone to do, or be, this rather than that?’” Views of government action proceed accordingly from these two visions of freedom: Freedom from coercion often emphasizes limited government, whereas freedom to a certain amount of affirmative entitlements often favors government provisions. In this sense, Reagan’s conviction that “man is not free unless government is limited” is at direct odds with the philosophy outlined in Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1944 State of the Union address: “We have come to a clear realization of the fact,” Roosevelt argued, “that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. ‘Necessitous men are not free men.’”

But antipathy to government coercion is not the sole defining characteristic of the conservative vision of freedom. Conservatives believe that order and virtue are a prerequisite to liberty, and that a licentious liberty — that is, freedom without restraints on vice and immoral appetites — is not freedom, but bondage. As Edmund Burke, the godfather of Anglo-American conservatism, famously wrote, “Liberty without wisdom and virtue is the greatest of all evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition and restraint.” True ordered liberty, in the conservative view, is what Princeton’s Robert George describes as “liberation from slavery to self,” which can only flourish amid social conditions and civic restraints that “elevate reason above passion or appetite, enabling us to direct our desires and our wills to what is truly good, truly beautiful, truly worthy of human beings as possessors of profound and inherent dignity.”

Those civic restraints, which serve as the foundation of the conservative vision of freedom, are what today’s progressives define their freedom against. Progressives see freedom in terms of “liberation,” too — but not liberation from slavery to vice so much as the license to be enslaved by vice. The Left’s freedom, in contrast to the Right’s, is defined by the freedom to end the life of children in the womb, the freedom to teach corrosive racialist ideologies in the classroom, and the freedom to sexualize and confuse young children, up to and including encouraging them to undergo life-altering gender-transition surgeries. California governor Gavin Newsom said as much in a recent advertisement he aired in Florida, where he informed viewers that, “Freedom is under attack in your state. Your Republican leaders — they’re banning books, making it harder to vote, restricting speech in classrooms, even criminalizing women and doctors.” A July op-ed by Steve Benen for MSNBC, titled “Democrats and Republicans wage a quiet fight over ‘freedom,’” made a similar point, arguing that Ron DeSantis’s rhetoric about “freedom” was belied by the fact that the Florida governor “made it easier to ban books from school libraries and classrooms” and “signed an infamous anti-LGBTQ measure described by opponents as the “Don’t Say Gay“ policy.”

So which side is the “party of freedom”? It depends on whom you ask. But if Democrats want to convince voters that the Left is the authentic partisan of liberty, they will have to explain why late-term abortions, child gender transitions, and obscene, sexualized content in the classroom is an essential component of freedom. And that, I would wager, is no easy feat.