Liberty or Freedom

The subtle difference between two sides of the same coin

"The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing."

—Abraham Lincoln

Freedom! Freedom! I can't move
Freedom, cut me loose! Yeah
Freedom! Freedom! Where are you?
'Cause I need freedom, too!

—Beyonce

Is there is a difference between liberty and freedom? I didn’t think about it very much until the Democratic National Convention last week, when the use of “freedom” was everywhere. The two words certainly overlap; they are near-synonyms. But perhaps we should pick them apart, just a little. Freedom seems a rather Democratic word, just as liberty sounds rather Republican to me (at least, in the current iteration of the party; (Lincoln’s Republicans were different).

Thesauras.com doesn't provide much help: “liberty (n), as in freedom.”

And then: freedom(n) as in independence, license to do as one wants.

Bur rhat doesn’t seem quite right to me. In fact, it’s something of an inversion. To my mind, liberty tends to be individual; freedom, more social and institutional, implying a mutuality. And when you dig down into the etymologies, you find that liberty has its roots in Latin:

from Latin libertatem (nominative libertas) "civil or political freedom, condition of a free man; absence of restraint; permission," from liber "free" (see liberal (adj.)). At first of persons; of communities, "state of being free from arbitrary, despotic, or autocratic rule or control" is by late 15c.

And Freedom has its roots in Indo-European German:

Old English freodom "power of self-determination, state of free will; emancipation from slavery, deliverance;" see free (adj.) + -dom. Meaning "exemption from arbitrary or despotic control, civil liberty" is from late 14c. Meaning "possession of particular privileges" is from 1570s. Similar formation in Old Frisian fridom, Dutch vrijdom, Middle Low German vridom.

Actually, the German vridom has the same root as vrij…or friend. Well, there’s a clue. It isn’t about one person’s assertion of independence. There’s the mutuality, the subtle implication that freedom is something granted by organized society. And when you get down to third-level definitions in Webster’s, freedom becomes “the quality or state of being exempt or released usually from something onerous,” while liberty becomes, “an action going beyond normal limits.” Again, the difference between mutuality and individuality.

As in, I desire the liberty to write what I want…and I require the freedom to do it.

But what does this have with the election of 2024? A lot, it turns out. In his masterful history of English colonial migrations to America, Albion’s Seed, David Hackett Fischer describes the stark difference between the way the Scots-Irish, who settled Appalachia, and the New England Puritans saw the liberty/freedom question. The Scots-Irish, he wrote, were:

“a society of autonomous individuals who were unable to endure external control and incapable of restraining their rage against anyone who stood in the way.”

The Puritans were the opposite, as I wrote in an appreciation of Fischer’s book a few years ago in the New York Times:

The Puritans practiced an “ordered freedom” with the state parceling out liberties: Fishing licenses allowed the freedom to fish. This was a concept that would seem laughable in the Southern hill country — and would predict our current struggle over gun control. Puritan order also predicted two of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms: The state provided “freedom from want” and “freedom from fear” — that is, freedom maintained by government regulation.

Actually, FDR’s Four Freedoms deserve a closer look—because Kamala Harris has announced Four of her own. He identified them on the cusp of World War II, in a January, 1941, speech. They were: Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Religion, Freedom from Want and Freedom from Fear—a very New England notion that Kamala Harris, in large part, has resurrected. Her “Four Freedoms” are:

• The freedom to get ahead economically, not just get by

• The freedom to make decisions about one's own body

• The freedom to vote

• The freedom to be safe from gun violence

Three of those four involve state actions; the fourth—abortion rights and, perhaps, sex-change—is a more libertarian strain. Or, as Tim Walz says, “Mind your own damn business.”

The strength of Harris’s formulation is that it represents a true consensus of Democratic Party beliefs, even if those beliefs constitute a rather uneven philosophical sense of where and when the state can intervene. The Republicans have no such consensus. They are divided between libertarians and evangelicals. We have seen in the past week the contortions of Donald Trump when it comes to abortion rights. All of a sudden, he says he won’t sign a national abortion ban—after giving us the Justices who overturned Roe. But the contradictions go all the way back to the Scots-Irish settlers. As I described David Hackett Fischer’s definition of hillbilly liberty:

Their sense of “natural freedom” was deeply libertarian. You moved to the backcountry so that you could do what you wanted — within, of course, the ethos of the border culture. “Natural liberty was not a reciprocal idea. It did not recognize the right of dissent or disagreement,” Fischer writes. Scots-Irish leaders were charismatic — Andrew Jackson was the paragon — and their religion was evangelical, “illiterate emotionalism,” an aristocratic governor of South Carolina sniffed. Honor was valor, a physical trait (among the Puritans and Quakers, honor was spiritual). The American military tradition, and a disproportionate number of its soldiers, emerged from the descendants of Scots-Irish warriors in the Appalachian highlands.

And so, we are seeing this year a fundamental, traditional culture clash. The complicated Democratic notion of state-granted freedom is classic New England Puritan; the conflicted Republican notion of individual liberty is classic Scots-Irish. The contest between Harris and Trump is dramatic and historic, but it is the same old American story.

The Dead Armadillo Caucus

My old friend Jim Hightower once said, “There’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos.” I was, at that point, moving with all deliberate speed from the left to the middle—the journey was governed by belief, not pragmatism. The left, I believed, had gone berserk, abandoning equality for identity; it hadn’t learned the most important lesson of the twentieth century—that too much government control of the economy was stifling and stupid; that socialism—state ownership of the means of production—was a comprehensive failure. (Again: the Scandinavian model isn’t socialism; it is free enterprise with good health care.)

The Democratic Convention was a triumph for those of us in the Dead Armadillo caucus. There was a preponderance of black speakers—more than a third, I’d estimate, in a country where blacks represent 12% of the population—but there was very little, if any, identity-based special pleading. And the economic ideas propounded by Harris seemed more out of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s playbook than Bernie Sanders’. No new government bureaucracies were proposed; cash incentives—the child tax credit, the housing tax credit—were offered. (The dwindling Republican Sanity Caucus, people like Mitt Romney, favor those, too.) Bernie Sanders retreated from Medicare for All, in favor of eyeglasses and hearing aids for the elderly. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez—her Squad eviscerated by the Democratic electorate this summer—gave every indication that she was joining the mainstream. Latino activists were replaced by border-control Latino pragmatists. There was no pronoun posturing, with the exception of one sad Trans activist during the roll call.

It had to be a phony right? That’s what Republicans would like you to believe—and that’s what Perry Bacon of The Washington Post would like you to believe, too: it was just pandering. This was an echo of George McGovern’s 1992 fantasy, that Bill Clinton’s moderation was a Trojan Horse. It may well be that Kamala Harris is camouflaging her inner leftist. We’ll have to wait and see how she answers tough questions like: Do you favor DEI programs? What do you think of Charter Schools? Do you believe that minors have the right to sex-change operations? But let me offer this hope: Her political posture is not pandering, but maturity. That she learned in her disastrous 2020 presidential campaign that the left positions she took were not merely unpopular, but also wrong. That she learned, in her years as vice president, that ideology is a mug’s game, that rational, practical assessment of any given issue is the only way to make progress in a democracy.

I understand her campaign’s skepticism about offering her up to the panjandrums of the press, though she will have to do that sooner or later. But I would prefer that she make an aggressive effort to take questions from the public, especially hostile questions, in a series of weekly town meetings between now and the election—and after the election, too, should she win. The media have a tragic weakness for gotcha and process questions; the public is more interested in policy and substance.

Speaking of Which…

I watched most of the convention on CNN, with occasional visits to Fox and MSNBC, both of which are profoundly biased, but at least Fox has some liberal commentators like Donna Brazile and moderates like Harold Ford. MSNBC, sadly, has become a cult operation. (I miss the Nicole Wallace I used to know before Trump.)

As for CNN, well….I am just so tired of the partisan political talking heads that overpopulate the network. Some, like David Urban, Alyssa Farrah Griffin and Van Jones, are smart and reasonable, and can transcend their prejudices at times—but there is a endless parade of talking-point warriors, especially those formerly associated with various political campaigns. They state the partisan obvious ad nauseam. The most nauseam was the Republican Scott Jennings who “joked” that he was surprised to see a sea of American flags at the convention because…Democrats were more likely to be burning them. This is reprehensible: I’ve embedded in places like Iraq and Afghanistan with heroes, who happened to be Democrats, who fought and were willing to die for that flag.

There are plenty of smart journalists and historians—analysts who may trope left or right, or center, but who have the experience and authority to comment intelligently about politics. (Brit Hume at Fox is one.) They tend not to be as good-looking as the youngsters CNN throws at us. But they know stuff. That should be the only criterion.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/08/27/kamala-harris-pandering-democrats-center-2024/