Progressives and conservatives really do operate on fundamentally different understandings of ‘freedom.’
In a New Republic essay titled “How the Right Turned ‘Freedom’ Into a Dog Whistle,” Eric Herschthal reviews Jefferson Cowie’s new book Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power. 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.” Referring to radical groups such as the Black Panthers, whose ideas were “absorbed,” says Cowie, by mainstream civil-rights groups, Herschthal concludes:
The white elites in Cowie’s book battled against these radical groups as well as the federal government, and the ideology and language they developed still permeates our politics. When you hear conservatives calling for a defense of “freedom” against federal overreach, demanding more local controls of schools, casting themselves as victims of a radical “woke” culture war addled by overeducated elites, you’re not simply hearing a racist dog whistle: You’re hearing a sincere defense of what many Americans have long understood freedom to mean—the freedom to dominate others.
This is, of course, a convenient conclusion: If all political language is a smokescreen for the exercise of raw power, rather than a denotation of different but substantive conceptions of the common good, then the broader arguments and positions that said language represents can be disregarded as illegitimate to begin with. The fact is that progressives and conservatives really do operate on fundamentally different understandings of “freedom,” and those distinctions have characterized the nation’s political divide since the emergence of Left and Right.
But “the freedom to dominate others” is hardly a serious description of the Right’s thinking on such matters. As I wrote back in August:
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.”
Progressives may uncharitably and erroneously refer to the Right’s view of freedom as “the freedom to dominate others.” But in so many of our debates today, particularly in the cultural sphere, the Left’s view of freedom is that of “liberation” — not liberation from “domination” so much as license to be enslaved by vice, whether in the context of drug use, unfettered access to pornography, unrestricted abortion, or irreversible sex changes for minors. It is a freedom that often requires the degradation of the family and the very civic mores and institutions that make freedom possible at all — what Burke described as a “solitary, unconnected, individual, selfish liberty, as if every man was to regulate the whole of his conduct by his own will.”