When President Biden was running for reelection, he repeatedly talked about the dangers Trump and his neofascist buddies in the billionaire class represent to “democracy.” Vice President Kamala Harris and Governor Tim Walz, on the other hand, are using the word “freedom.”
All this week here at the DNC, people have been enthusiastically holding up signs proclaiming “freedom.” The word “democracy,” while not altogether avoided, has been largely absent both from the signage and the presentations of the various speakers.
Vice President Harris’s unofficial theme song has been Beyoncé’s “Freedom”; the three-minute video that preceded her coming onstage Monday night, to that song, even cited, “Freedom from control, freedom from extremism, and [freedom from] fear.”
And last night, Governor Tim Walz threw down the freedom gauntlet: “We also protected reproductive freedom, because in Minnesota, we respect our neighbors and the personal choices they make.… I’m letting you in on how we started a family because this is a big part about what this election is about. Freedom. When Republicans use the word freedom, they mean that the government should be free to invade your doctor’s office. Corporations—free to pollute your air and water. And banks—free to take advantage of customers.
“But when we Democrats talk about freedom, we mean the freedom to make a better life for yourself and the people that you love. Freedom to make your own health care decisions. And yeah, your kids’ freedom to go to school without worrying about being shot dead in the hall.”
Why the emphasis on freedom rather than democracy? What’s the difference—both rhetorically and practically—between the two, and why the shift by the Harris campaign?
Republicans, after all, have been using the word freedom as if it were their own private logo ever since the Reagan years. There’s the Republican Freedom Caucus in the House, the billionaire-funded messaging group Freedomworks, and even the virulently anti-union Freedom Foundation. When Bush lied us into a phony war against Iraq to get himself reelected, Republicans even renamed the French fries being served in the House cafeteria as “freedom fries.”
And who can forget when Mike Pence claimed that Obamacare “took away our freedom,” because, he said, we should simply buy our own private health insurance because that industry was “built on freedom and individual responsibility”? Paul Ryan, when he was House Speaker, backed up Pence, saying: “Freedom is the ability to buy what you want to fit what you need. Obamacare is Washington telling you what to buy regardless of your needs.”
During Covid-19, Republicans organized hundreds of “anti-lockdown freedom rall[ies] and march[es],” saying, “We’re not going to stop until we get our freedoms back.” They’re the same type of folks who argued that lockdowns and mask mandates were unconstitutional violations of their freedom, and spent much of 2020 proudly refusing to wear masks (and dying of Covid) because “freedom.”
They even occupied the Michigan Capitol with assault weapons in a preview of January 6th because, they said, Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s efforts to prevent Michiganders from dying of Covid were assaults on their “freedom.”
And this isn’t a recent phenomenon.
Back in the 1930s, wealthy right-wingers similarly argued that FDR’s proposed Social Security program was a “socialist plot” to destroy America’s “freedom.” Ronald Reagan made a similar argument in the early 1960s against LBJ’s Great Society proposal to start a single-payer health care system for seniors called Medicare: “If Medicare passes into law, the consequences will be dire beyond imagining,” Reagan said. “One of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, what it once was like in America [before Medicare] when men were free.”
What Harris and Walz have done in seizing back the word freedom from Republicans is nothing less than brilliant. Like with their repudiation of Reagan’s neoliberalism, it’s a return to the policies and rhetoric of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the man who created the American middle class and famously said: “We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. Necessitous men are not free men. People who are hungry, people who are out of a job, are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”
It’s a brilliant rhetorical and political strategy, most importantly because it’s true. As Vice President Kamala Harris would tell you:
— If you’re unconscious and on a ventilator because the right-wing media machine told you getting vaccinated was for wimps, you’re not free.
— If you’re hungry and can’t buy food for your family, you’re not free.
— If you’re afraid every day that your child may not come home from school because the GOP has saturated the nation with assault weapons, you’re not free.
— If your landlord threw you out on the street and you’re homeless because you lost your job and can’t afford to pay rent, you’re not free.
— If you’re pregnant and afraid of being thrown in jail, you’re not free.
— If you’re queer in an America where Republican politicians use hate as a political lever, you’re not free.
— If you’re sick and afraid to go to the hospital because you know the bills will leave you broke and homeless, you’re not free.
— If you need to go to college or trade school to get a better life but can’t afford it, you’re not free.
Real freedom requires a foundation that allows people to step away from struggling for survival and toward meaningful activities in life. It’s the soil in which a functioning civil society and a healthy free enterprise system are rooted. It also fosters respect and tolerance for all members of society.
The experience of nations all over the world shows us that freedom grows most rapidly and best flourishes over the long term in societies with a strong democracy with easy and widespread participation, a strong middle class, and a strong social safety net. Just take a look at northern Europe, Australia, South Korea, or Taiwan.
That middle class and its freedom grows with education, a job that pays a fair wage, and access to health care that doesn’t bankrupt you: things that are guaranteed as rights by virtually every developed nation in the world … except America.
Contrary to Republican doctrine, the foundations of freedom are paid for by taxes: good schools and colleges, hospitals that aren’t run on a for-profit basis to rip people off with “surprise billings,” and jobs with pay and benefits that allow for a decent life. Economic security then usually brings tolerance, extending freedom across the spectrum of humanity.
Right-wing billionaires and their Republican shills, on the other hand, want us to think that raising the top tax brackets on people who take in more than $400,000 a year (Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and Harris’s promise) will take away our freedom. In fact, raising those tax brackets is what built the American middle class between 1933 and 1981, when the rate paid by those in the top bracket—imposed by Democrats to enhance freedom—was 74 percent to 91 percent.
President Biden was right about the GOP’s threat to democracy, and it is intrinsic to the American story. But, as Kamala Harris and Tim Walz know, freedom is a word that rings deeply in our psyches and has since the American Revolution. It’s a powerful tool for political communication.
America needs a healthy conversation—a debate, even—about freedom. And Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have kicked it off.
