The DNC’s Sinister Rebrand of “Freedom”

Hillary Clinton, speaking at the Democratic Convention last night, said Democrats had “put a lot of cracks in the highest, hardest glass ceiling”:

I want to tell you what I see through all those cracks… I see freedom. I see the freedom to make our own decisions about our health, our lives, our loves, our families, the freedom to work with dignity and prosper, to worship as we choose or not, to speak our minds freely and honestly. I see freedom from fear and intimidation, from violence and injustice, from chaos and corruption. I see the freedom to look our children in the eye and say, “In America, you can go as far as your hard work and talent will take you” and mean it.

Get ready for the new “Freedom Frame,” an argument for massive expansion of federal authority, disguised as a celebration of rights:

Studying abroad in 1989 I heard a Soviet professor stress his country guaranteed health, housing, education, free education, employment, fair payment for work, “rest and leisure,” and “maintenance in old age” as basic rights. Our class knew this same Stalin-authored Constitution from the 1930s guaranteed freedoms of conscience and assembly as people were being put to firing squads for wrongthink. It still impressed some in the class that Soviets defined as rights things Americans only called policy aims, and dealt with at best through programs like Social Security. For obvious reasons, my Russian professor left out why our Constitution was written that way.

The American system is built to protect natural rights, derived not from the government but God, or whatever your conception of God might be. The Soviets believed “rights” flowed from the state, which is why citizens had duties in addition to ostensible benefits. With economic rights, you had a responsibility to help build up the “wealth and might of the country,” which was the “inviolable foundation of the Soviet system.”

This learning experience left me paranoid about any promises of “freedom” phrased as delineations of public authority. We heard many last night.

Freedom from is as hot a catch-phrase in campaign 2024 as “joy” or “weird.” A lot of these freedoms are either new assertions of authority or efforts to overturn a longstanding emphasis on natural rights, which academics have long argued is flawed. Author George Lakoff’s “Whose Freedom? The Battle Over America’s Most Important Idea” is a seminal moment in this loony history. I read the New York Times excerpt in 2006 and remember thinking it was almost cartoonish in its misread of the Bill of Rights. Lakoff clearly thought the minimum protections laid out in the Constitution could be expanded to a vast list of progressive promises (Broad access to borrowing! Longer life expectancy! More class-action suits!) without fundamentally altering the American system. Why didn’t Lakoff just push to make his promises government policy? Why demand they be added to our intentionally short list of immutable, natural rights? No way this catches on, I thought.

At first it seemed it wouldn’t. Democrats ceded the word “Freedom” to Republicans for ages, content to mock the GOP’s more ridiculous uses of it (“freedom fries” being a great example). On the stump, Democratic candidates emphasized words like “justice” and “equality” instead, in much the same way they used terms like “compassion” while GOP candidates thundered about “hard work” and “responsibility.”

In campaign 2024, however, “equality” is disappearing (for reasons that should also raise eyebrows) and a flood of propaganda initiatives is embracing a new blue-party “freedom frame,” under which Democrats are supposedly re-seizing the term from Republicans. Of course liberal groups like the ACLU were once more aggressive guardians of traditional civil liberties than Republicans, or at least as aggressive as libertarian groups like the Cato Institute, but framing the Bill of Rights as GOP territory has been central to the propaganda assault.

Hillary’s speech last night was the most aggressive rollout of the “freedom frame” re-brand I’ve heard. She even heralded the “freedom to work with dignity, and prosper,” a line pulled from Stalin’s 1936 constitution, which included both the right and the duty to do “socially useful work.” I’m not sure what Hillary’s “freedom from chaos” can mean except expanded policing rights, nor can her endorsement of the freedom to speak “honestly” do anything but frighten, since America already has the most expansive and successful laws protecting freedom of speech ever written. Coupled with the Tim Walz brain-fart claiming there is no Constitutional protection for “misinformation,” cheering the right to “speak honestly” sounds like exactly the kind of Orwellian word-shift we were all once taught to watch out for in junior high.

About the former, the New Republic just ran a piece (“The Democratic Party Is Now the Real ‘Freedom’ Caucus”) that talked about “negative freedom,” which they equate with Republicans traditionally defining “freedom as absence of government intrusion.” They quoted “freedom frame” advocate and Florida House member Fentrice Driskell talking about “the freedom to be healthy, prosperous, and safe. You tell people what they deserve and what freedom would look like.”

The idea that people not only deserve to be prosperous but should have that belief guaranteed by government would have mortified the likes of Jefferson and Madison, who were mostly concerned with guaranteeing our right to try to make a living without having our heads beat in or soldiers quartered in our homes. As for the second idea: no matter what your feelings about guns are, a “freedom to be safe from gun violence” is a clear challenge to the 2nd Amendment, which is designed to give individuals the right to challenge state power. This is a classic “freedom to” version of rights which BU health officials wrote years ago was too “narrow” an idea, and needed updating for a more civilized time.

Drumbeats about the “freedom frame” started long before last night. Rick Stengel, the ex-journalist who became one of America’s first federal censorship officials while serving as head of Barack Obama’s Global Engagement Center, just wrote a piece in Time about “How Kamala Harris Took ‘Freedom’ Back from the GOP.” Stengel in it rewrote history to fit the new “progressive” concept of freedom, by which he really means a more state-controlled one:

It was the philosopher Isaiah Berlin who first made the distinction between positive freedom—freedom to—versus negative freedom, freedom from. Positive freedom is the ability to exercise choice, to act on one’s free will. Negative freedom is the freedom from constraint imposed by others… Modern Republicans embraced the idea of negative freedom…

 

It was Lincoln who… saw the infringement of freedom for some as undermining freedom for all… The Progressives in the early 20^th century continued this idea, and saw government’s role as freeing people from economic exploitation while creating more economic opportunity.

Through these mental gymnastics the “pursuit of happiness” is transformed into tasking government with “freeing people from economic exploitation,” basically the opposite idea. As we’ve seen, the U.S. system is flexible enough to accommodate government policies to encourage economic growth. The “rights” portion of the Constitution though is intentionally concerned with restraining government, for the excellent reason that the people who founded this country had horrific insight into the tendencies of depraved despots. Trying to knock over the Bill of Rights by adding a long list of new positive “freedoms” to be guaranteed by benevolent officials like Rick Stengel is a deeply sinister idea. Of course, the media is fully on board.

Stengel is also using a trick that’s suddenly everywhere. The Bill of Rights, it is claimed, was written only for “old white guys,” according to Republicans. Therefore, new freedoms need to be added or restored, so people like Walz can say, “Mind your damn business!” without it becoming an instant laugh line. In reality the efforts of people like Lincoln or Martin Luther King, Jr. were designed to make America “be true to what you said on paper,” not to add new state powers. But the notion that new powers are needed to secure “equality” is going to be claimed, and bet on it not being the last time, either.

Some of the wounds Republicans are going to suffer here are self-inflicted. Democrats are crafting a lot of the “freedom” argument around the abortion issue. They will claim, I think plausibly, that the battle over reproductive care started with conservative efforts to use state power in a way they usually eschew, in this case to bar abortions. Of course, they’ll leave out more recent Democratic efforts to put medical authorities at the center of our lives during the Covid-years with expanded surveillance, censorship, and vaccine mandates, since making “freedom from disease” a “core aspirational right” is part of this new re-brand. “Mind your damn business” apparently only applies to certain medical procedures, not all of them.

Articles like “Democrats Lean Into Liberty and the Language of Republicans” in the New York Times use sleight of hand to get to the main idea. That piece starts with the abortion issue but moves to the concept that “government has a major role to play in promoting the public good.” I can tell you right now what “freedoms” you’ll be offered under this flag: freedom from “chaos” (more policing), freedom from “misinformation” (censorship) freedom from “want” (command economics), freedom to “love who we want” (we have that already, but this will be the rallying cry for gender-identity lunacies), freedom from “fear and intimidation” (more surveillance of domestic threats), and so on.

In a political season filled with trivialities and stupidities like “the politics of joy,” this “freedom frame” is extremely consequential, and deadly serious. This is the whole ballgame, and we’ll hear more of it all week. The Constitution has been a boon to conservatives and liberals alike for centuries because it placed the natural rights of people above those of the state. This rebrand is claiming to add new individual rights under the guise of assuming new state powers. As Walter Kirn said last night, it places a collective vision above the traditional American emphasis on the individual. It’s not a small thing, even in terms of the change in attitudes on this front within the Democratic Party. Beware the “freedom frame.”

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