As Elizabeth Nolan Brown rightly notes at Reason, Kamala Harris has shed her failed progressive persona from 2020 in favor of a new quasi-moderate stance, a linchpin of which has been “freedom.”
Over the summer, Harris’ evolutions kept on coming, with her campaign issuing rapid-fire disavowals of many of her previous positions. Because she ran her failed 2020 presidential primary bid on an ultraprogressive, big-government platform, many of her new positions are noticeably more oriented toward the mainstream—and freedom.
After all, who doesn’t like freedom, right? What’s not to like?
Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, have even embraced “freedom” as a central theme of their 2024 campaign. The word is emblazoned all over their rally sites. Lyrics about freedom pulsed over and over again between speeches at the Democratic National Convention (DNC). But what do Democrats mean by “freedom”? At best, it’s an inconsistent vision. At worst, it’s an attempt at radically redefining what American freedom means.
Most of us think of freedom as the right to be free from government interference and prohibition. We have free speech not because others don’t get to despise us for what we say, but because the government can’t prevent us from saying it. We can pray to the god of our choice, or not, because the government is prohibited from telling us which god is the one true god. But that’s not the “freedom” the Harris campaign is selling.
As part of the Green New Deal Harris supported, the federal government would have “guarantee[d] a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the United States.” The Harris ’24 campaign has since said she does not support a federal job guarantee.
It’s long been a mantra of the empathetic left that people should have a right to a laundry list of things that most people want, from healthcare to housing to a college education to jobs to jobs that pay well enough to sustain a decent lifestyle. This, too, has come under the rubric of “freedom” from sickness, poverty, homelessness and hopelessness. Most of all, there’s the freedom of living in a world where no one feels unsafe.
Harris says the words freedom and future “more than four times as often as Biden did,” according to a Washington Post analysis published August 8. In her first official campaign video, released in late July, images of Trump and his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio), flash across the screen while a Harris voice-over says, “There are some people who think we should be a country of chaos, of fear, of hate. But us? We choose something different. We choose freedom.”
Much as we love the word “freedom,” is living in a country without chaos, fear or hate “freedom”?
Herein lies the paradox of Democrats’ freedom rhetoric. Some of it embraces negative liberty, a freedom from other people—especially the state—using force to compel or prevent people from taking some action. But much of it centers on good things that people allegedly have a right to enjoy or access, or bad things that they allegedly have a right to avoid.
In Harris’ first campaign ad, she speaks of “the freedom not just to get by, but get ahead,” “freedom to be safe from gun violence,” and “freedom to make decisions about your own body.” Only one of these three things—the bodily autonomy plank—is plausibly a call to get the government out of “telling [people] what to do.”
This isn’t to say that the things Harris is trying to promote aren’t good things, and the things she claims to be fighting against, chaos, fear and hate, aren’t bad things. Rather, they don’t bear upon freedom. Granted, government prohibition of abortion is very much an issue of freedom, depending on where you stand on the issue. Some will frame it as a woman’s freedom to make decisions as to her own body, while others will frame it as a fetus’ freedom to survive and be born. I pick the former, but that’s me.
Another example is tolerance of sexual orientation and identity. We no longer criminalize sodomy, and you can be as gay as you want to be or change your appearance to suit whatever gender feels right. There’s no law prohibiting you from doing so. But is it freedom for the government to prohibit other people from not embracing your choices? But if people don’t embrace, or at least openly accept, their choices, will they feel “safe”?
“The right to be safe is a civil right,” Harris said in June. But the federal government cannot guarantee everyone’s individual safety any more than it can guarantee individual happiness, or marital satisfaction, or ponies. Authorities can make basic rules to help protect life and property, but these already exist and any further insistence on guaranteeing “safety” is generally a coded call for policies that infringe on privacy and freedom.
Years ago, it became increasingly clear that people, particularly young people, not only expected safety as a protected component of their everyday lives, but expected the government to provide it for them. If there was a problem, government should fix it. After all, wasn’t that the purpose of government, to give you everything you wanted because it was your right? Not just a safety net in the most extreme of circumstances, but a duty to fulfill the promise of “happiness” in whatever form that happiness took.
There’s a similar boundlessness to a “right not just to get by, but get ahead.” From a negative liberty viewpoint, we already have this right. There is no law mandating we all merely “get by,” and no law making it illegal to “get ahead.”
The problem is that getting ahead took effort, just like people used to have to get off their couch to get takeout or bend over to put on their shoes. If it takes effort, then it’s not a right and as we’re reliably assured, freedom is our right.
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Its quite obvious neither candidate will give you more freedom, in fact they both intend to take a lot away from you. We have been naughty, using the internet to express opinions that are not in line with our betters, and they will punish us as small children-
An ID to get on the internet, a smack on the hands for ‘wrongthink’ and ‘no more internet for you until you learn how to behave!’
The lines between the rulers and the ruled over have never been so clearly defined, its not Left versus Right, its them against us. While we will get jailed for expressing what they call mis-information, the politicians exempt themselves, or they would be the first inside for lying!
Many political candidates have moved past making promises to promising fantasies. Much of the public eats this up. I don’t think they can really believe such fantasies are going to be delivered. But their lives are so empty and with not much positive around to attach to, they get a rise out of hearing the fantasies. Something like reading fairy tales to children.
RIP, Kris.
He was so young there. RIP, Kris.
Good to see Howl back!
Recommended without linking or posting:
Pharrell Williams “Freedom” from Despicable Me 3.
The corporate news media landscape is now mostly sponsored content pushing the vacation ownership slash timeshare exit duopoly on us. Here’s your freedom, now let us help you get your freedom back.
Wait, what happened to “joy”? Have they moved on from “joy”? These are progressives. They are going to progress us into another four years of Donald Trump. What ever happened to Ed Koch’s “liberals with sanity.” I miss Ed Koch. I wonder what he would think of all this.
I think the,Inigo Montoya meme “you keep using that word, but I do not think it means what you think it means” is on target. This is the party that describes the 1st Amendment as an obstacle, seeks to repeal the 2nd Amendment, and sees the 4th Amendment as another obstacle to be neutered. Apparently they only want freedom to dominate you, who will be free to consume government propaganda, and server the new nomeklatura
You misunderstand the freedom they are talking about.
The freedom they seek is your freedom from having to worry about independent thinking, making choices in life, how to spend your income, who you can associate and be friends with, what home you want, the car you drive, the foods you eat, what movies and books to watch and read and how to vote.
The new masters will make all these decisions for you and tell you how to live every facet of your life and relieve you of any income over what they decide you should be allowed to spend on the approved things in life. This is “FREEDOM!!” from having to decide how to live your life.
I think she is re- definining the word “freedom” to be a collective freedom. Like the 2nd A collective right to bear arms. But this would be collective freedom from want, freedom from fear, freedom from hate, freedom from hurtful speech, and freedom from hurtful, ugly, outmoded religious beliefs.
Call it FDR II. Moving forward, progressively.
What’s interesting is that is exactly the fear so many who want desperately not to vote for Trump have with Harris, that she’s only pretending to be moderate while concealing her intention to “move forward, progressively.” But if she told the truth rather that hide behind rhetorical tricks, she would get crushed because outside of a small deluded minority on the far left of the Dems, no one wants a progressive president.
“Liberty is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes. Of all the so-called natural human rights that have ever been invented, liberty is least likely to be cheap and is never free of cost.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers
It is not freedom to force others to embrace your identity. That is coercion, the opposite of freedom.
When did feeling safe become a right? I feel unsafe on New York City subways so I don’t ride on them. Is more than a shoulder shrug warranted?
Main statement is that when freedom of speech is in question, I am a one issue voter. The current administration has been curtailing that and I do not care who I have to vote for to oppose those efforts.
Harris voices clear and unequivocal opposition to censorship, she has my vote.
The Republicans want to be in your bedroom. The Democrats want to be in every other room.
FDR spoke of “the Four Freedoms” — freedom of speech, of worship, from want, and from fear. Were the latter two technically “freedoms”? Who cares? It was good political rhetoric. I think we should allow today’s candidates an equal shot at eloquent sloganeering.
Vice President, I served with Franklin Roosevelt. I knew Franklin Roosevelt. Franklin Roosevelt was a friend of mine. Vice President, you are no Franklin Roosevelt.
Based on Mr. Harris’s definition, the most free person would be someone serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole. Freedom from homelessness? Check. Freedom from hunger? Check. Freedom from sickness? Check. (Ok. That’s a stretch given prison healthcare. But it’s free and lifelong). Freedom from unemployment? Check. (With good behavior, a job will be found for you.). Freedom from worry about retirement? Check. As a resident of a maximum security facility you should have none of the anxieties of living outside it.
“But the federal government cannot guarantee everyone’s individual safety any more than it can guarantee individual happiness, or marital satisfaction, or ponies.”
I await Ken White’s response to this pro-pony propaganda.
I reread this post and noticed the observation that many expect the government to provide them with “happiness”. But those who demand “happiness” seem to have forgotten that the word is part of a phrase, “pursuit of happiness”, which is very different from ” happiness” itself.
Without true liberty, you cannot pursue true happiness. Without true liberty, you are left with nothing but what others will allow you to have, and history shows that inevitably, you end up with nothing but misery.