The US presidential election campaign is about different definitions of “freedom” | Eric Foner

THe recently concluded that the Democratic convention marked a sharp turn in American political rhetoric. “Freedom, where are you?” sang Beyoncé in the video that opened the convention. Her song proved to be a fitting introduction to the days that followed. Joe Biden had made saving democracy from the threat of MAGA authoritarianism the core theme of his ill-fated election campaign. The basic theme of Kamala Harris' convention, invoked by almost every speaker, was “freedom.”

Nearly a century ago, in the wake of the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt linked freedom with economic security for ordinary Americans—”freedom from want” was one of the four freedoms that summed up the country's goals in World War II. That definition of freedom, a product of the New Deal, assumed an active role for the federal government. But since the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan effectively redefined freedom as limited government, low taxes, and unregulated business enterprise, Democrats have more or less ceded the word to their opponents. Now they want it back.

Of course, liberty—along with freedom, which is generally used as a synonym—has been a U.S. concern since the American Revolution gave birth to a nation that called itself, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, “the empire of liberty,” a unique embodiment of freedom in a world overrun by oppression. The Declaration of Independence lists liberty among the inalienable rights of mankind; the Constitution proclaims right at the outset its goal of securing the “blessings of liberty.” As a result, liberty has long been a powerful rhetorical weapon. As educator and statesman Ralph Bunche wrote in 1940, “Every man in the street, white, black, red, or yellow, knows that this is ‘the land of the free.’ … [and] the 'cradle of freedom'.”

But freedom is neither an idée fixe nor an evolutionary advance toward a predetermined goal. The history of American freedom is one of debate and struggle. Often, battles over control of that idea highlight the contrast between “negative” and “positive” meanings of freedom, a dichotomy Sir Isaiah Berlin elaborated in an influential 1958 essay. Negative freedom defines freedom as the absence of external constraints on individual action. Positive freedom is a form of empowerment—the ability to set and achieve one's own goals. As the contrast between FDR and Reagan shows, the former sees government as a threat to freedom and the latter as removing obstacles to its enjoyment, often through government intervention.

The Democratic National Convention built on this history. Positive and negative freedom coexisted and reinforced each other. The frequent calls for “reproductive freedom” – the right to make intimate choices free from government interference (or, as vice presidential candidate Tim Walz put it, the principle of “mind your own shit”) – encompassed and expanded the idea of ​​negative freedom. Never before had the 1960s slogan “the personal is political” been expressed so powerfully at a convention.

Positive freedom also came to the fore, most notably in Bernie Sanders' litany of future government actions against oil and pharmaceutical companies in the name of fighting economic inequality and “corporate greed.” Walz, who was thinking of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, suggested that people without access to affordable housing and health care were not truly free.

There is another crucial element in the ongoing debate about freedom: who is entitled to it? When the Constitution was ratified, there were half a million enslaved African Americans living in the United States. The first laws passed in the 1790s governing how immigrants could become citizens limited the process to “white” persons. It took more than half a century for slavery to be abolished and for blacks to be integrated into the political system—for a brief period during Reconstruction after the Civil War.

This story is an example of what historian Tyler Stovall calls “White Freedom” in a recent book. Fast forward to the civil rights revolution of the 1960s. With its Freedom Rides, Freedom Songs, and the urgent cry of “Freedom Now,” this revolution linked freedom with equality regardless of race or nationality. What is now remembered simply as “the movement” did more to redefine the meaning of freedom than any other development of the last century. Its fruits were visible every night in the remarkably diverse makeup of the Democratic National Convention.

Throughout our history, freedom has been defined to a large extent by its boundaries. This is how the Confederacy could claim to be fighting for freedom. Historian Jefferson Cowie, whose book Freedom's Dominion won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for History, argues that negative freedom, expressed as resistance to federal interference in local affairs, often amounted to little more than the determination of local elites to exercise political and economic power over subordinate groups without outside interference. Civil rights were condemned as a threat to white freedom (the freedom to decide who could live in one's neighborhood, for example). The vaunted independence of men depended on restricting women's freedom.

After the conventions, the election campaign now becomes, in part, a contest over the meaning of freedom. There are historical precedents for such a struggle. In 1936, the New York Times noted that the struggle for the “ideal of freedom” was the central theme of the presidential campaign. Three decades later, journalist Theodore White noted that freedom was the “dominant word” of both civil rights protesters and supporters of conservative Republican candidate Barry Goldwater, but they meant very different things by it. The United States, he concluded, urgently needed “a universally accepted concept of freedom.”

In times of war, freedom is often used as a tool to mobilize support. No president in recent history has used it for this purpose more egregiously than George W. Bush, who made freedom a catch-all justification for invading Iraq. In his first inaugural address, Bush used the words “freedom,” “free,” or “freedom” seven times. In his second, ten-minute speech after the invasion, they appeared no fewer than 49 times.

Bush's blatant distortion of the ideal of freedom seemed to prevent his successors from using the word at all. Barack Obama preferred the language of community and personal responsibility. Donald Trump has also not been a big talk about freedom; he prefers to talk about raw military and economic power. But Trump's long-running campaign to deny Obama's American citizenship and his calls for the deportation of many illegal immigrants have resonated with those who want to redraw the boundaries of freedom along racist and nativist lines.

The Democratic National Convention appears to have set up the 2024 election to be a battle over the meaning of freedom. Whatever the outcome, it will likely shape American freedom for years to come.