The Ugly Vilification of ‘Freedom’ By David Harsanyi
https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/02/the-ugly-vilification-of-freedom/
Pundits are attempting to cast the fundamental value as a ‘far-right’ code word, reinventing the notion of liberty itself.
T he Canadian Broadcasting Corporation recently set out to explain why the word “freedom” has become a “useful rallying cry” for protesters in the trucking convoy. Freedom, it added, “has become common among far-right groups, experts say.”
It’s worth noting here that the addendum “experts say” is perhaps the laziest scam run by contemporary political journalism. It is little more than columnizing by proxy, or what Kyle Smith calls, “opinion laundering.” Journalists scan the websites of think tanks, advocacy groups, and universities to find some credentialed ideologue who will repeat every tedious bit of liberal conventional wisdom the reporter already believes. While we may need experts to explain quantum computing or synthesize complex mathematical data for us, we hardly need them to smear political adversaries. Reporters are already aficionados in that field.
Take Gary Mason, a national affairs columnist at the Globe and Mail, who contends that truck-protest supporters such as Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre “have weaponized” the word “freedom” — a “word that gets bandied about a lot these days, but has mostly been co-opted by the alt-right, both here and in the U.S.”
The problem isn’t merely that Mason insinuates that anyone using the rhetoric of liberty is on the “far right,” or that he doesn’t seem to comprehend the difference between negative and positive liberties. Mason takes the authoritarian position — shared by Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, who says that protesting truckers hold “unacceptable views” — that speech is no longer a genuine liberty if it is used for allegedly “selfish, malicious purposes.”
Freedom isn’t contingent on Mason’s notions of selflessness, nor does it need to be sanctioned by the expert class to be enjoyed. You may disagree with them or their tactics, but truckers who oppose the state’s compelling individuals to inject themselves with a pharmaceutical are by definition protesting for personal “freedom.”
CNN correspondents will derisively note that while concerns regarding Covid mandates may have sparked the Canadian trucker protests, they have now “devolved” into “anger” over “too many government restrictions and they want their freedom back, whatever that means.” This reminds me of the habit journalists have of placing the phrase “religious liberty” between quotation marks to insinuate that the idea is either misleading or a loaded term (never do we see the same done for “social justice” or “women’s rights” or any other similarly debatable phrases). They know well what it means. They simply don’t appreciate the freedom in question.
One way around such inconveniences is to simply reinvent the idea of “liberty” as a wholly subjective concept — either “ugly” or good. This is what Elisabeth Anker, a professor of American studies at George Washington University, attempts in her New York Times piece, “The Exploitation of ‘Freedom’ in America.”
In Anker’s conception, freedom would comport seamlessly with the progressive Left’s ambitions. She laments the use of words such as “liberty” to describe policies that, for instance, allow parents to reject racial-identarian curriculums in their local school districts or states. “Freedom,” says Anker, is when “women maintain control over reproduction and childbearing,” and taxpayers foot the bill. Freedom, she says, is “unionization efforts that fight for freedom in the workplace” and voting without ID. These are, of course, simply contentious political issues.
“The ugly freedoms in American politics today increasingly justify minority rule, prejudice and anti-democratic governance,” she goes on. Yet, in most of her examples — namely, Virginia, Georgia, and Iowa — Republicans have won elections and are implementing democratically approved policies, so the very foundation of her argument is somewhat confusing. Unless, that is, Anker believes centralized federal government eliminates the need for state legislatures and governorships or local control.
I’ve long harped on the importance of making distinctions between “democracy” and a republican form of government that protects individual liberties. People mock this rhetoric as pedantic and juvenile. Everyone knows, they’ll tell you, that democracy is merely shorthand for set of a liberal ideas and institutions.
Do they care, though? Anker seems to be under the impression that “democracy” means that 51 percent of Americans, no matter where they live, should be able to dictate how the other 49 percent think and act. Let’s find “democratic alternatives to ugly freedom,” she argues.
To prove her point about “ugly liberty,” Anker offers a litany of historic examples in which bigots and authoritarians appropriate the word “freedom” in the same way she does for different purposes. Anker writes that the “freedom for the white master extended to torture, rape and lifelong control over the humans he (or she) owned.” Indeed, these are examples of a nefarious disregard for decency, liberalism, and individual freedom by Southerners who argued that the institution of slavery was necessary for the collective good. Anker’s examples only demonstrate that “freedom” must be a neutral idea, with an enduring definition; otherwise, it means nothing.
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