As Elizabeth Nolan Brown rightly notes at Reason, Kamala Harris has shed her failed progressive persona from 2020 in favor of a new quasi-moderate stance, a linchpin of which has been “freedom.”
Over the summer, Harris’ evolutions kept on coming, with her campaign issuing rapid-fire disavowals of many of her previous positions. Because she ran her failed 2020 presidential primary bid on an ultraprogressive, big-government platform, many of her new positions are noticeably more oriented toward the mainstream—and freedom.
After all, who doesn’t like freedom, right? What’s not to like?
Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, have even embraced “freedom” as a central theme of their 2024 campaign. The word is emblazoned all over their rally sites. Lyrics about freedom pulsed over and over again between speeches at the Democratic National Convention (DNC). But what do Democrats mean by “freedom”? At best, it’s an inconsistent vision. At worst, it’s an attempt at radically redefining what American freedom means.
Most of us think of freedom as the right to be free from government interference and prohibition. We have free speech not because others don’t get to despise us for what we say, but because the government can’t prevent us from saying it. We can pray to the god of our choice, or not, because the government is prohibited from telling us which god is the one true god. But that’s not the “freedom” the Harris campaign is selling.
As part of the Green New Deal Harris supported, the federal government would have “guarantee[d] a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the United States.” The Harris ’24 campaign has since said she does not support a federal job guarantee.
It’s long been a mantra of the empathetic left that people should have a right to a laundry list of things that most people want, from healthcare to housing to a college education to jobs to jobs that pay well enough to sustain a decent lifestyle. This, too, has come under the rubric of “freedom” from sickness, poverty, homelessness and hopelessness. Most of all, there’s the freedom of living in a world where no one feels unsafe.
Harris says the words freedom and future “more than four times as often as Biden did,” according to a Washington Post analysis published August 8. In her first official campaign video, released in late July, images of Trump and his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio), flash across the screen while a Harris voice-over says, “There are some people who think we should be a country of chaos, of fear, of hate. But us? We choose something different. We choose freedom.”
Much as we love the word “freedom,” is living in a country without chaos, fear or hate “freedom”?
Herein lies the paradox of Democrats’ freedom rhetoric. Some of it embraces negative liberty, a freedom from other people—especially the state—using force to compel or prevent people from taking some action. But much of it centers on good things that people allegedly have a right to enjoy or access, or bad things that they allegedly have a right to avoid.
In Harris’ first campaign ad, she speaks of “the freedom not just to get by, but get ahead,” “freedom to be safe from gun violence,” and “freedom to make decisions about your own body.” Only one of these three things—the bodily autonomy plank—is plausibly a call to get the government out of “telling [people] what to do.”
This isn’t to say that the things Harris is trying to promote aren’t good things, and the things she claims to be fighting against, chaos, fear and hate, aren’t bad things. Rather, they don’t bear upon freedom. Granted, government prohibition of abortion is very much an issue of freedom, depending on where you stand on the issue. Some will frame it as a woman’s freedom to make decisions as to her own body, while others will frame it as a fetus’ freedom to survive and be born. I pick the former, but that’s me.
Another example is tolerance of sexual orientation and identity. We no longer criminalize sodomy, and you can be as gay as you want to be or change your appearance to suit whatever gender feels right. There’s no law prohibiting you from doing so. But is it freedom for the government to prohibit other people from not embracing your choices? But if people don’t embrace, or at least openly accept, their choices, will they feel “safe”?
“The right to be safe is a civil right,” Harris said in June. But the federal government cannot guarantee everyone’s individual safety any more than it can guarantee individual happiness, or marital satisfaction, or ponies. Authorities can make basic rules to help protect life and property, but these already exist and any further insistence on guaranteeing “safety” is generally a coded call for policies that infringe on privacy and freedom.
Years ago, it became increasingly clear that people, particularly young people, not only expected safety as a protected component of their everyday lives, but expected the government to provide it for them. If there was a problem, government should fix it. After all, wasn’t that the purpose of government, to give you everything you wanted because it was your right? Not just a safety net in the most extreme of circumstances, but a duty to fulfill the promise of “happiness” in whatever form that happiness took.
There’s a similar boundlessness to a “right not just to get by, but get ahead.” From a negative liberty viewpoint, we already have this right. There is no law mandating we all merely “get by,” and no law making it illegal to “get ahead.”
The problem is that getting ahead took effort, just like people used to have to get off their couch to get takeout or bend over to put on their shoes. If it takes effort, then it’s not a right and as we’re reliably assured, freedom is our right.