Nate writes about an essay that claims that “freedom” is a dog whistle when used by right-wing politicians:
The essay traces how segregationists like George Wallace used the “language of freedom” as a smokescreen for institutionalized racial oppression. Wallace’s message, Herschthal writes, “resonated with many white Americans outside the South precisely because he did not explicitly endorse racism but cloaked it in the language of freedom against an overbearing federal government.”
Herschthal — and Cowie — take that reasonable assertion and expand it to implicate not just conservatism but much of the broader American political tradition. “Where most see George Wallace as injecting something new into modern conservative politics,” Herschthal writes, Cowie “sees Wallace as tapping into something very old. Since the nation’s founding, . . . one common understanding of the term freedom has been the ‘freedom to dominate others,’ especially against a tyrannous federal government.”
The “freedom to dominate others” against the federal government is one thing. Segregationists did indeed abuse “freedom” in that way. I’d add that left-wing politicians, at least since Woodrow Wilson, have sought the “freedom to dominate others” with the federal government. Franklin Roosevelt carried out a progressive economic program in the New Deal that ushered in a new era of governmentalization of everyday life. He did so in the name of “freedom,” too, as is evidenced in in his 1932 Commonwealth Club Address and 1941 Four Freedoms speech, even while confiscating privately owned gold nationwide and interning Japanese Americans.
Regardless, it is worth noting that even politicians who sought to curtail freedom felt it necessary to appeal to it as a rhetorical tool to further their cause. Freedom is a powerful idea to Americans, so much so that everyone has to claim they are on its side (no matter what side they are actually on) if they want to win Americans’ support. That’s a good thing. It’s at least better than the alternative we often witness in other countries, where everyone has to appeal to socialism or to nationalism in his rhetoric to win support.
The challenge for conservatives, of course, is to articulate a healthy vision of freedom in contradistinction to the Left’s. But that challenge, as Nate notes, has been around since at least Edmund Burke’s time, and it will never go away entirely.