What is the correct definition of freedom?
Getting that right is the necessary starting point for all else we undertake as a society
Nearly anybody at any point on the ideological spectrum is going to speak favorably about freedom. It’s so universally recognized as the indispensable condition for human flourishing that even those who take a dim view of it - and they’re only found at the extreme ends of the spectrum - have to carefully craft their articulations of the ideal society so as to not repel anyone.
It’s true that the further left one looks along the spectrum, the more one finds people willing to forthrightly defend redistribution, which is the employing of government force to take some people’s money to address other people’s needs or wants. Still, their appeal is to the notion that some agent in this universe - think the aforementioned government - can guarantee that individuals can enjoy lives free from certain undesirable sets of circumstances. That’s what Franklin Roosevelt’s January 1941 speech was selling; he posited that there could be such a thing as freedom from want or freedom from fear.
Those left of center in more recent decades share with libertarians of a certain stripe an assertion to be free to do any old thing one wants to, as long as it doesn’t cause bodily harm or property damage to one’s fellow human beings. Conservatives, hemmed in by their inherent fealty to tradition, decorum and religion-based morality, are not willing to extend the notion of a freedom to be defended to most of the types of behavior that come to mind when one encounters the if-it-feels-good argument.
I’m more interested here in how much common ground there is or isn’t on the right side of the spectrum with regard to what freedom is and whether there are any qualifications on its importance.
The great area of Venn diagram overlap between libertarians and conservatives is in the area of economic liberty. Both ideologies posit that a good or service is worth what buyer and seller agree that it is worth - period - and that no outside entity, certainly not government, should be party to that agreement. Libertarians would generally tell you straight up that the minimum wage, dairy price supports, public-option health insurance, solar-energy subsidies, and other such market interventions ought to be done away with. Most conservatives would concur, but would couch that concurrence in terms along the lines of, “But we have to be realistic about what precedents have been set and what is therefore politically realistic.” Whether that is a defensible position is interesting to ponder. Is free-market absolutism impossibly quixotic? Or not?
The two main areas that fall outside the overlap are foreign policy and personal behavior.
Libertarians - and I’m speaking broadly here; there are various stripes of libertarianism, and they each bring their own shadings to the discussion - see their vehement aversion to pretty much any military action as an extension of the non-aggression principle. The NAP holds that the individual’s sovereignty means that no one has the right to initiate the use of force.
Extending this to nation-states has some problems, however. Whether a country has a representative-democracy form of government and a robustly pro-freedom political climate, or whether it is a tyranny of the rankest sort, it still is governed by a cast of characters that changes, due to the inescapable passage of time. A country may state a policy about its own sovereignty, or its choice of allies, or its region of the world, but, for national security’s sake, we must know as much as we can about what is going on in its private deliberations. There’s also the matter of the sheer number of countries on the globe. Even some close neighbors are going to see things very differently. We must have a handle on this diversity of agendas. In short, we must have ears on the ground, and be ready to respond to developments that threaten our security.
The question to be put to libertarians is, what kind of a starting point would you establish for wiping the slate clean, for forgetting the untoward designs of certain nation-states? How would it look in reality for two nations with a history of animosity to put it behind them and go forth engaging in trade and living in harmony?
Regarding personal behavior, the basic difference between libertarianism and conservatism is that the former tends not to traffic in shoulds and oughts, whereas the latter is dependent on them for its vision of a desirable society. The libertarian says, “The folks next door may have a lifestyle you find extremely objectionable. Suck it up, pal, it’s none of your business.” The conservative says, “They ought not to be living that way.”
In this day of polemical shrillness and soundbite retorts, one often hears the claim that conservatives want to legally codify that which they find morally objectionable. Think bringing back sodomy laws. That’s almost never true, and, in fact, really serves as an attempt to disqualify the entire conservative interest in asking what a good society looks like.
So what measures would a conservative take to disseminate a collective sense of what ways of living and behaving are right and wrong? Basically, the institutions that have passed along such discernments in all societies throughout history: the family, the neighborhood, civic associations, and, most importantly, religious institutions.
It gets a little tricky along about here, because, yes, the conservative is talking about the collective good. It’s just a very different vision of that from the one embraced by leftists. The conservative is not striving for equity in material circumstances. A relative scale of wealth is inevitable in any society, given people’s differences in abilities and interests. That’s not the kind of playing field you can level - without curbing someone’s freedom. Rather, the conservative is saying that an ideal society is comprised of individuals using their freedom to choose doing what is right.
It gets even trickier once this nationalist-populist phenomenon is introduced, as it has been in the United States in the last few years. Protectionism predates the political rise of Donald Trump, but it had much to do with his getting elected president. The images of hollowed-out rust belt communities fired the collective pent-up frustrations of enough voters to put him over the top.
Some who signed on to what Trump was selling had come from an old-school, look-out-for-the-working-class kind of leftism. Others had come from a classic conservative background, but were swayed by the binary-choice perspective. They took a good look at Hillary Clinton and said that anything had to be preferable to what she wanted to impose. And some of them then got caught up in the cult of personality that has been key to Trump’s success in business and politics.
But it’s not soundly thought-out free-market economics. By definition, the Trumpist approach to economics is devoid of consistency. He and his administration will dismantle regulations, increasing the sum total of human freedom and giving the nation’s animal spirits a shot in the arm with one hand, and impose tariffs (that get paid by the taxpayer, not the country upon which they are slapped) with the other.
The danger here is that, if the populist-nationalist can convince enough of the public of the urgency of the matter, the notion that freedom is just one of many goods contending with each other, and that balancing between them is the task at hand holds sway. This reduces human existence to a state of relativity. It removes the whole notion of a lodestar. It removes freedom from its place above all other aspects of human life - material advancement, fairness, cultural vitality - as the indispensable condition for human flourishing.
The danger in that way of proceeding should be obvious. History is replete with examples of societies deciding that a certain degree of curtailment of freedom is necessary to achieve various collective goals, and then turning into tyrannies or failed states.
What, then, should the basis be for talking about freedom? How can we assume all participants in the conversation mean the same thing when using the term?
That’s never been easy to answer, and these are particularly difficult times for seeing a way to that state of affairs.
It may start with ensuring that freedom is front and center in any discussion of any public-policy initiative, or even cultural trend. How does it affect freedom?
It’s crucial to the other question that is and always has been before us: What are we after, and why?