Freedom and liberty are two very important words in the American lexicon. They are engraved in our national consciousness and figure prominently in our trinity of founding documents, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. They have also served as the basis of powerful ideologies which have shaped domestic policy in the United States since its founding.
At their best, these ideologies served to inspire. In the mid 18th century, they inspired Americans to take on the most powerful empire in the world and form a nation based on natural rights and liberty, the “woke” ideas of their time. Thomas Jefferson put forth these natural rights in his memo outlining the principles upon which to form a new nation, a memo also knows as the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson envisioned an “Empire of Liberty” spreading across North America and Europe, an empire based on his concept of liberty, which he defined as “unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others.” His definition though, excluded a whole race of people, a disconnect which would persist well into the next century.
In the mid 19th century, a relatively unknown Illinois politician and the infant Republican Party would take Jefferson’s ideology of freedom and liberty and take it one step further. Abraham Lincoln’s perspective on freedom and liberty was an inclusive one and he saw the liberty promised in the Declaration of Independence as including all men, black and white. Freedom and liberty, according to Lincoln, meant that all men should be free to improve their situation, that “each man is naturally entitled to do as he pleases with himself and the fruits of his labor” and that government existed to create the conditions necessary to protect that freedom.
At its worst though, freedom and liberty can create a restrictive and destructive ideology. Until the Civil War, freedom and liberty for white southerners required the enslavement of tens of thousands of black Africans. For most southerners, the Declaration’s promise of liberty only applied to them, and they created a society and economy built on the forced labor of slaves. Their idea of freedom and liberty ultimately ripped a nation apart and brought about four years of bloody conflict.
Where is the disconnect? How can ideologies based on the same concepts take us in two opposite directions? It may seem strange, as Lincoln put it in his 2nd Inaugural Address, “in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces”, but to the whites in the ante bellum south, this was how things were supposed to work. To explain, we need to consider another of Jefferson’s founding principles, equality. Adding equality to the mix allows freedom-based ideologies to lead us down the positive and inclusive path. Remove it and we have a situation such as we have now in the United States where personnel freedom and individual liberty have run amuck. A situation where the concept of the common good or sense of community is cast aside in favor of a warped interpretation of “live free or die.”
In her book on the Declaration, political theorist and professor of government, Danielle Allen maintains that freedom and equality are in lock step, that total freedom or liberty requires total equality. If one reads the Declaration, really reads it, you find Jefferson’s self-evident truths are really one single thought. Equality, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are linked. It is an all or nothing proposition, you have to have them all or you have none. You cannot have a situation where promoting freedom and liberty for one favored group requires denying it to another. When that happens, none of us are truly free.
Writing in Boston in 1747, Samuel Adams expressed his thoughts on liberty. Though he was writing for Boston of the mid 18th century, he could very well have been writing about contemporary America. There was nothing, Adams wrote, which men would fight more passionately for or fear losing more than liberty. The word liberty, Adams wrote, “emitted a charming sound.” Yet, Adams felt that the people of Boston, much like Americans today, admired liberty more than they understood it. Adams wrote, “Men happily extolled it when they meant nothing by it save their own well-being. They unfurled tributes when they intended only to oppress without control or the restraint of laws all who are poorer to weaker than themselves.”
This is where we find ourselves today. The words freedom and liberty are very much in vogue. Politicians use them in almost every sentence. Special interest groups take pains to include them in their group names. They are used to convey to the world the impression that the speaker or the group represents patriotic Americans everywhere and that they are the true inheritors of the founding generation and that to oppose what they say or do is somehow, un-American. Businesses of all types insert the words in their names or in their ads to convey that they are somehow better than those that don’t.
But they are just words, words meant to impress or to mislead. Groups like the Freedom Caucus or Moms for Liberty no more represent the ideas of freedom or liberty expressed by Jefferson or Lincoln than did the Ku Klux Klan. Their idea of freedom or liberty is the dark, restrictive version where individual liberty is supreme, disconnected from equality or any sense of community. Their version is only bestowed on those who look like them or think like them and that those who oppose them are somehow, unworthy of the freedoms and liberties promised to all Americans. Their version rationalizes the denial of rights and liberties of one group as simply protecting the rights and liberties of another.
In the 1964 presidential campaign, Republican nominee, Barry Goldwater told the nation that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” He got it both right and wrong. Throughout our history, Americans have made great sacrifices in defending freedom. When defending the expansive, inclusive version of freedom, we could say no sacrifice is too great. As for defending liberty detached from equality, devoid of any sense of community, the liberty of live free or die and every man for himself, extremism in defense of that form of liberty is very much a vice. Defending liberty for some by depriving it from others is ultimately destructive to liberty. As Lincoln once said, the best defense for liberty is the “spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men.” Destroy this, he said, and we have sown the seeds of liberty’s destruction.