Liberty, Freedom, Etc.
How has “liberty” become the inspirational code word of conservatives rather than liberals? (A prominent example is radio host Mark Levin’s book “Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto,” which was No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list for nearly three months without receiving major reviews, including in the Times.) I always thought that the Democratic Party is the freedom party — but I must be living in the nostalgic past. Remember Bob Dylan’s 1964 song “Chimes of Freedom,” made famous by the Byrds? And here’s Richie Havens electrifying the audience at Woodstock with “Freedom! Freedom!” Even Linda Ronstadt, in the 1967 song “A Different Drum,” with the Stone Ponys, provided a soaring motto for that decade: “All I’m saying is I’m not ready/ For any person, place or thing/ To try and pull the reins in on me.”
But affluent middle-class Democrats now seem to be complacently servile toward authority and automatically believe everything party leaders tell them. Why? Is it because the new professional class is a glossy product of generically institutionalized learning? Independent thought and logical analysis of argument are no longer taught. Elite education in the U.S. has become a frenetic assembly line of competitive college application to schools where ideological brainwashing is so pandemic that it’s invisible. The top schools, from the Ivy League on down, promote “critical thinking,” which sounds good but is in fact just a style of rote regurgitation of hackneyed approved terms (“racism, sexism, homophobia”) when confronted with any social issue. The Democratic brain has been marinating so long in those clichés that it’s positively pickled.
That’s a lot to unpack. I’ve certainly got an overlapping critique of academia. But let’s focus on whether liberals or conservatives are the party of “liberty and freedom.” Ms. Paglia suggests it is the latter. My friend Jaime, who blogs over at Federalist Paupers, agrees. “…liberty hasn’t been the provenance of the left since the late 60s,” he writes. “It was the Goldwater inspired and eventually Reagan led conservative revolution that truly brought liberty back on the table as a national concern. This is the sentiment that Levin taps into in his book “Liberty and Tyranny” and it is perhaps the most powerful motivator in American politics. There is a reason why, despite his off-putting overly theatrical public demeanor, that Mark Levin is such a powerful voice for the right – he speaks of THE core value of American society. No one on the Left, and very few on the Right, do this anymore.”
I am grateful to liberty loving folks on the right who’ve stood against central planning, advocated for markets, insisted that the Soviet Union had a morally inferior system of government, resisted campus speech codes, safeguarded private property, insisted on an expansive reading of the 2nd Amendment, pushed for school choice, litigated to expand religious liberties, and otherwise advanced the cause of freedom.
But I am also grateful to the liberals who helped end prohibition, opposed Senator McCarthy, were at the forefront of the Civil Rights movement, expanded the number of immigrants able to come to the United States legally, instituted basic protections for criminal defendants, stood up for free speech in political protests and the arts, opposed gay people being thrown in jail for sodomy, and fought to ensure the availability of contraception.
Even that incomplete rundown is sufficient to demonstrate that neither the left nor the right has a monopoly on expanding freedom — and on opposing its expansion. The right rallies around “Liberty and Tyranny” and the left rallies around “The American Civil Liberties Union.” In the decade prior to the September 11 attacks, I would’ve argued that the right did a better job advocating for freedom than the left, partly due to the left’s prior successes, and I remain quite uncomfortable with much of the left’s domestic agenda.
But I now feel as though the liberty loving American hasn’t anywhere to turn. Given its druthers, the liberal left would further regulate political speech, redistribute ever larger chunks of wealth as an end it itself, expand the federal role in most aspects of American life where federalism currently reigns, ignore illegal immigration despite duly enacted restrictions by democratically elected governments, maintain speech codes on college campuses, outlaw guns in many jurisdictions, institute a carbon regime that forces the hand of the state into far too many economic transactions, continue to push the commerce clause far beyond any reasonable reading, regulate fatty foods — and the list goes on and on.
The conservative right, left to its druthers, would allow warrant-less wiretapping, unchallengeable presidential declarations that American citizens are enemy combatants, the torture of detainees absent any reliable process to distinguish the innocent from the guilty, ongoing prohibitions against gay marriage, gay adoption, and gays in the military, the arrest of cancer patients who avail themselves of medical marijuana, an ever-expanding incarceration complex that imprisons people for years on end when they merely possess marijuana (and where too many prisoners are raped and assaulted), foreign wars of choice that will ultimately result in either tax hikes or inflation, rampant misconduct by police and prosecutors, an immigration regime that allows fewer people to enter the country legally, and a death penalty regime whereby an innocent man can die in a state like Texas without the pardon board even familiarizing themselves with the evidence establishing his innocence, even as a conservative Supreme Court Justice argues that there is no constitutional prohibition against executing a demonstrably innocent man. (It isn’t any longer clear to me that a liberty loving citizen should prefer conservative Supreme Court appointments. Much as I disagree with affirmative action and gay marriage by judicial fiat, they impact liberty far less negatively than an executive with all the powers Dick Cheney sought, plus death row prisoners executed despite strong evidence of their innocence.)
You’d think that a book called “Liberty and Tyranny” would grapple with some of those conservative shortcomings, and that an organization called “The American Civil Liberties Union” would oppose all the liberty lessening policies on the left, but until that is the case, it is silly to pretend that either the right or the left is the clear victor here — that Americans presently enjoy more freedom than they did several generations ago is due to liberty loving folks on both sides doing their utmost to expand it, and triumphing over some of their ideological fellows who are utterly blind to the liberty impinging actions of their own side.
UPDATE: I should add that liberty and freedom aren’t the only concerns in American life — and that neither the right nor the left has a monopoly on wisdom when it comes to where to draw those lines.
Paglia is too silly and vacuous to be worth refuting. I say this as one who found Sexual Personae enjoyable and thought-provoking; sadly, she has not written a worthwhile word since. Normally one who cites Mark Levin as an apostle of liberty would be open to the charge of tendentiousness. But I think Paglia simply doesn’t pay close enough attention to the controversies, which she only cares about as jumping-off points for her own untethered riffing.
— kth · Sep 10, 05:08 AM · #
“The conservative right, left to its druthers, would allow warrant-less wiretapping, unchallengeable presidential declarations that American citizens are enemy combatants, the torture of detainees absent any reliable process to distinguish the innocent from the guilty”
And that’s all you really need to say. The stuff lined up on the left is legit debate for reasonable people who disagree. On the right, especially the above, you have what separates a modern liberal democracy from a rogue state, what separates western societies from brutish theocracies.
It blows my mind that an equivalence can be drawn between the two sides. If those are my choices then I’m gonna get religion on this wealth redistribution thing real quick (Medicare for all? Sure! Carbon tax? That too, what else you got?)
— Steve C · Sep 10, 06:15 AM · #
Good article. After all the human rights abuses of the Clinton years I thought conservatives had learned to become the party of liberty. Then came Bush and they turned around and defended a lot of those same abuses when done by their own side. It was one of the two main periods of political disillusionment of my life. It was similar in effect to what happened around 1970 when I came to realize that far too many conservatives hadn’t opposed civil rights legislation on federalist principles after all; it was just a ruse to cover their racism.
But at least this time around I didn’t make the mistake of becoming a lefter because of it.
— The Reticulator · Sep 10, 07:54 AM · #
I agree that both parties have drifted into government interventionism, each for their pet purposes, and until we can limit government power, the temptations of each party to favor special interests will be too great to resist. That’s the purpose of limitations, to safeguard freedom from imperfect human beings. The prevailing assumption, it seems, in each party is that if only they had the power, they could lead fairly and intelligently, but when special interests begin to pressure politicians, some in society are inevitably favored over others, and we fall back to the rule of men/women over rule of law.
— mike farmer · Sep 10, 11:57 AM · #
Care to explain why the right should be thankful to the left for the successes of the right…what the hell are you talking about?
— jd · Sep 10, 12:16 PM · #
Thanks for the link, Conor.
I didn’t intend to say that the right has a monopoly on liberty, just that the language of the modern left is more concerned with wealth redistribution and further government regulation than protecting and expanding liberty in the areas you identified. Notice how since Obama was elected the number of protests and criticisms of the attacks on liberty started by the Bush Administration have fallen silent (and its hard to deny that many of these acts are still policy). I don’t see much movement from Democrats on expanding rights for Gays or ending marijuana prohibition, etc. I also do not think that “Liberty and Tyranny” is by any means a perfect analysis of the true struggle for freedom in America, but it does identify the struggle between liberty and statism as the chief struggle of modern democratic life.
In the end I think you correctly identify the real problem – the modern lover of liberty often finds himself at a loss with both parties. I would make the case that economic liberty is a necessary condition for almost all other freedoms and thus those chiefly concerned with liberty should make common cause with the right.
— Jamie Lockett · Sep 10, 02:38 PM · #
This post clarifies something that I have been thinking for a while about Conor. I know Conor doesn’t like labels, but to me it seems he frequently fashions himself an idiosyncratic conservative reformer. But these words are the words of an idiosyncratic conservative, but a conventional libertarian. That’s fine, and it doesn’t make Conor any more or less right about anything. But it is worth considering, when Conor talks about a better Republican party*, apart from apolitical issues of tone, 1.) that he wants it to look rather like the Libertarian party, if we take his post as a manifesto, and 2.) the success of said party.
Also, wasn’t Prohibition largely the program of American Progressives?
— Blar · Sep 10, 05:47 PM · #
I don’t see much movement from Democrats on expanding rights for Gays or ending marijuana prohibition, etc.
And for that, the Obama administration has come under quite a bit of fire from the liberal wing of the Democratic Party.
Obama is not particularly popular among the liberal base right now, for precisely the reasons you articulate, and there are any number of voices on the left making that heard.
— Travis Mason-Bushman · Sep 10, 07:53 PM · #
Jamie wrote:
I would agree with that. However, that’s a long way from the kind of stuff Conor is saying in this post. He is not only damning both parties, he is damning both the left and the right. (And just looking at his post, you can see that the paragraph criticizing the right is twice as long as the one criticizing the left. Just sayin’…)
Judging by what he wrote in this post, I don’t see that Conor could agree with you on that. He really seems to think that right and left simply balance each other. They are equally good and equally evil—morally equivalent.
His last paragraph is telling. I would like to know what issues trump freedom and liberty. Because without freedom and liberty, all the other issues are simply moot.
— jd · Sep 10, 10:03 PM · #
“But I now feel as though the liberty loving American hasn’t anywhere to turn.”
Now? Now
As an ersatz radical libertarian for some twenty years, I have to tell you that now is as it’s always been. The answer to jd’s question is simple: Order trumps freedom and liberty, except when it doesn’t. And the plain fact is that most people value order over liberty; certainly the liberty of others, and usually their own liberty as well. The concern for liberty will always be a minority concern.
— Tony Comstock · Sep 11, 02:12 PM · #
Tony:
Can you expand on your notion that order trumps liberty and freedom? My first reaction to your comment is that you’re not talking about order, you’re talking about comfort. My second reaction is that you’re saying most people prefer totalitarianism. Care to explain yerself.
— jd · Sep 12, 01:02 AM · #
jd,
My wife and I spent about an hour talking about this this morning, and I’m not sure I can boil it down in a way that is cogent.
The nugget is that the liberty/freedom to do what everyone else is doing is a pretty trivial liberty. For example, the freedom to be a Christian in a dominantly Christian country is not a powerful testament to the esteem we have for the First Amendment. But the freedom to where a head-covering to school or not to vaccinate your children might be.
What I mean is that liberty and freedom only have real meaning at the margin; the boundary between anormative and illegal, and by definition, that’s an area that is going to be well outside of popular practice and generally on the wrong side of popular opinion.
On the other side of this tension, if there is no order, there is no freedom or liberty, save the freedom to be preyed upon and exploited by the fellow who can bring more and bigger guns to the fight; and order is enforce by laws and norms both.
To my mind these forces exist in tension, each trumping the other, except when they don’t.
I think that it’s helpful to spend some time in lawless places and see what that looks like. A rough neighborhood in the US is a start, but to get a real feel for it you have to go overseas.
— Tony Comstock · Sep 12, 02:10 PM · #