Understanding and Restoring Freedom: A Multi-Dimensional View
Introduction
Here in America I think we have a very serious problem with the way we talk about and understand ‘freedom.’ Freedom is one our most precious words. It is central to our self-understanding as Americans, and how we see ourselves in the world and in history. We invoke it frequently, but often in such a cramped and thoughtless way that we run the risk of misunderstanding what freedom means, how to gain it, and how to preserve it.
To state the problem in its simplest terms, America has two distinct political and intellectual traditions regarding freedom. The first, which is dominant today and has been dominant at various times in our past, understands freedom as the absence of external coercion. Defending individual rights and property rights, with the bare minimum of coercion needed to protect Americans from crime and foreign enemies, is the touchstone for judging government. Good government gives individuals the maximum of liberty to interact with one another and employ their talents in a market system to acquire wealth and develop the economy. I will call this the libertarian tradition. In America this vision is associated closely with Jefferson and Reagan, and finds its finest expression in the Declaration of Independence and its ringing claim that every human being is endowed with inalienable rights.
The second tradition sees freedom embodied in democracy and in the mechanisms for determining the public interest and the well-being of the nation and its citizens. Freedom is realized when citizens act together as equals to further the common good. Good government is actively engaged in developing the economy, helping the disadvantaged, and preventing the concentration of wealth and power in a few hands. I will call this the democratic tradition. In America this vision is associated closely with Hamilton, Lincoln, and both Roosevelts and finds its finest expression in the Constitution and its preamble calling on “We the People” to take collective action to secure the blessings of liberty and promote the general welfare.
Of course both traditions intertwine in American history, and for most Americans it is a matter of course that individual rights and participatory democracy are two sides of a coin. There is a natural pendulum swing between periods when one tradition or the other is ascendant, and Americans are taught that both must be taken into account: the will of the majority is decisive in selecting leaders and making policy and law, but majority will is limited by the need to respect individual rights to free speech, due process, etc. However, there is an underlying tension between the two traditions that can lead enthusiasts for liberty to see democracy as a threat to property and freedom, and enthusiasts for democracy to see a too zealous regard for rights as an unacceptable limitation on popular will.
A touchstone for how you see these traditions is how you interpret the Boston Tea Party. Did American patriots throw boxes of tea overboard to say “don’t tread on me”— we don’t like taxes and we don’t want government telling us what to do—as the contemporary ‘Tea Party’ would have it? Or was the message that we want to impose our own taxes and, with democracy as the vehicle, take charge of government for the public good? Today the former understanding is dominant, but I believe the latter is more accurate.
Today we face a Janus-like challenge from both directions. The first and most far-reaching comes from libertarians who seek to use the power of wealth to entrench an oligarchy protected by legal and institutional limits on democracy. Distrust of government, complacency about the strength of our institutions, and poor understanding of how government contributes to individual liberty, have allowed enemies of democracy to dominate our public discourse. For today’s would-be oligarchs, property rights take precedence over democratic efforts to regulate and tax. They seek to hem in the popular will by lobbying, throwing money at politicians, voter suppression, gerrymandering, control of the courts, and flooding public discourse with subsidized experts. The contemporary libertarian-dominated Republican Party, although it controls and is responsible for the national government, has no agenda for actually governing and is instead at work actively undermining the capacity of the federal government.
The second threat is more recent and takes the form of a reactionary populism energized by anger over ‘political correctness’ and the assertion of equal rights by minorities, women, immigrants, and the LGBTQ community. The personality cult around Donald Trump rests on the white majority’s view that its interests are being thwarted, and its identity demeaned, by an excessive concern for these other groups. An often tone-deaf progressive movement has helped fuel today’s populism by focusing relentlessly on the grievances of excluded groups and America’s sins, without a more inclusive message.
I think we can counter these trends with a three-part liberal agenda.
• Reinvigorating and reforming our democratic institutions to make words like ‘citizenship,’ ‘politics,’ and ‘government’ sources of pride, not the butt of jokes.
• Fighting the partisan divide by putting in place ways, such as a modified draft, to actively mix together citizens from different classes, races, regions and religions.
• Uniting the country behind big ideas for the common good such as universal healthcare.
Government and Freedom
The greatest misunderstanding, in my view, has to do with our view of government. The libertarian tradition focuses most of its attention on government as the number one threat to liberty. Government without question can be one of the prime culprits and great attention and skill are needed to devise political systems that prevent abuse. But a single-minded focus on guarding against government overreach ignores the ways freedom can be threatened from many other directions. Our neighbors, our families, our churches, our employers—all these can be sources of coercion. Good government is often the only means to defend ourselves and create the conditions for a free life. If government is too strong and uncontrolled, it restricts freedom and undermines other key institutions; but if too weak, it allows those institutions and individuals to become threats to freedom in their own right. Every system and institution, whether family or church or market or government or whatever, needs to be checked by other independent systems and institutions.
Freedom is also at risk when we live as slaves to necessity and want. The classical view was that to be free meant first and foremost to have enough wealth and means to have leisure, free time to devote to public affairs or philosophy or private interests. No one could really be free who had to spend all their time focused on survival. Given pre-modern conditions, only an elite few could afford freedom—most people were peasants, one bad harvest away from starvation. Greeks and Romans justified their use of slaves, in part, as the necessary means for a privileged few to be free.
Here too our view of government is crucial. For libertarians, government is the enemy of prosperity, always prone to strangle individual initiative and burden entrepreneurs with taxes and regulations. But a supportive government is essential to modern capitalism, and without government intervention to shift resources from the haves to the have-nots, many Americans would live in poverty, and few could afford the education and training needed to advance.
Freedom is also in jeopardy if the fruits of economic growth are captured by a self-perpetuating oligarchy. Some version of oligarchy, rule by the wealthy and those who control the acquisition and perpetuation of wealth, has been the norm for most of human history. The American Revolution was first and foremost an experiment in creating a “new order” without oligarchs. But, as Thomas Piketty showed convincingly in his surprise bestseller Capital in the 21st Century, free markets and capitalism have not changed the powerful human forces that tend to create a small class that captures a disproportionate amount of society’s wealth. Government must be strong enough and autonomous enough to prevent this, a task that, given the rising levels of wealth inequality in the United States, our government is not doing very well. (The United States ranks 32nd in inequality out of 35 developed states).
Dealing with Coercion
Even hard-core defenders of individual rights are prone to misunderstand the central role of government in ensuring those rights and guarding against other, equally dangerous threats. What are the other sources of coercion that we need to guard against? Four stand out: other people; family; religion; and markets.
Other People. In fact, every other human being can constrain freedom. It was Hobbes who invented modern political thought by asking, what is the most important task of government, and answering: to protect us from our fellow man. Left to ourselves in a state of nature, every neighbor, every person we encounter, is a potential threat. Hobbes is careful to stress that even a small and weak person can attack and kill someone much stronger. This war of all against all can only end if we give up our natural freedom to a powerful state capable of punishing and preventing this violence.
Anyone familiar with movies about asteroid strikes, or the zombie apocalypse, knows what Hobbes is talking about. When civilization collapses, there is a terrible fight for food and shelter and the minimum of security. Previously friendly neighbors turn into snarling enemies. Well short of this extreme, we see the same phenomenon in parts of the world—including parts of the United States—where police and the law are weak or nonexistent.
I had lunch in the early years of the Iraq war with the journalist George Packer, who wrote the book Assassin’s Gate about the American occupation of Iraq. After exchanging vivid stories about the collapse of order in Baghdad, I asked—rhetorically—why no one in the Bush White House seemed to remember the basic teachings of Hobbes. “They’re all business majors there; no one knows anything about politics,” was his scathing response.
The Hobbesian solution, an all-powerful state, probably seems extreme to most of us. It prioritizes security and protection against other human beings over every other good, and lacks what most of us would consider minimal barriers to abuse of state power. But reflection and experience tell us that some kind of authority strong enough to ensure personal security, and security of property and property rights, is essential for liberty. It is misleading to think of this as ‘giving up’ some of our freedom in exchange for security. We give up our ‘right’ to use violence against others (except in self-defense), and in return are provided a secure space within which we can plan for the future, build institutions, improve our property, raise families, and in short live like human beings. We have seen more than enough recent examples in places like Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan of what happens when this authority disappears, even when it is grossly imperfect.
In his recent book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Steven Pinker makes a convincing case that in most of the world we have seen a tremendous drop in levels of violence, both domestically and between countries. Murder rates in Europe are a fraction of what they were several hundred years ago. So are rates of robbery, rape, and all manner of inter-personal violence. Our norms and expectations have shifted, so that punishments such as burning heretics at the stake or putting people to death for petty crimes, that seemed normal to our ancestors, are now beyond the pale.
Why this tremendous change? Pinker says a critical factor for Europe was the growth of strong centralized states that, while not (initially) democracies, had an interest in advancing the conditions of their populace. These stronger states brought to heel the hundreds and thousands of semi-independent fiefdoms, petty nobles, landlords, and wealthy churchmen who produced in Europe something close to the state of nature. The first police forces were created in London only 200 years ago. Before that no permanent institution was tasked with preventing crime or capturing criminals. Ad hoc posses, often organized by local landowners or nobles, might go after criminals, often acting as judge, jury, and executioner.
Does this growth in law enforcement and state power mean we are less free? For the vast majority, clearly not. They have moved from being constant victims of crime, random violence, arbitrary punishments, and abuse by their social superiors, to being citizens with expectations of a peaceful life and protection from threats and violence. Those who feel most aggrieved are the rich and powerful, who under weak states were free to do as they pleased. Now they see strong central government as a burden. Just as America’s first wave of robber baron capitalists was devoted to laissez faire liberalism, many of today’s billionaires advocate some form of libertarianism, not because of any devotion to individual freedom, but because government redistributes some of their winnings and (sometimes) stands in the way of their schemes.
At first glance a large group of Americans seems eager to weaken the protection provided by government and take on the job of security for themselves, in effect returning to pre-modern conditions. Being “pro-gun” is often shorthand for being suspicious of the state and happy to trade off less security for an expansive right of self-protection. On closer inspection, however, most 2nd Amendment enthusiasts are not really looking for a weaker government—in fact, they usually extol the military and police, the armed face of Leviathan. They would like those institutions to have more money and more authority. What they don’t like is that the state isn’t doing enough to put down minorities and immigrants and other perceived threats.
Family. Families nurture and protect, and extensions of family—clans and tribes—are how most people provided security and gathered resources to stay alive before the development of the state. Families remain central components of all human society. Clans and tribes have waned in the modern West in favor of the nuclear family, but still matter in much of the rest of the world.
Families, however, are not sources of individual freedom. For most of human history they have sharply constrained individual choices—about marriage, work, dress, faith, friendships and much else. Romeo and Juliet brings vividly to life how family and tradition can conspire to destroy human happiness. Patriarchal families, clans and tribes have subordinated and, often, abused women. Families are not democratic, and are the conveyers and enforcers of traditional norms. In most societies sons and daughters have been expected to subordinate their own ambitions to family interests. Tribes seek ferociously to channel power and wealth to fellow tribesmen, without regard for competence or any broader public good. Shielded from outside scrutiny, it is all too easy to hide exploitation and abuse of children and spouses, and reject children who are gay or ‘abnormal.’
When family goes bad, what recourse is available? Other institutions can intervene; a priest or minister, a benevolent neighbor. But in many societies tradition gives the heads of families tremendous leeway. Exposing and preventing abuse within the family is hard. Think about women living in a society that practices genital mutilation, or the burning of widows, traditions enforced by a woman’s own mother and close relatives. Impartial laws, backed by police and investigative resources and enforced by a strong state, are a necessary option when people face intimidation or violence from a spouse, or a parent.
The ‘state’ as an institution can be understood as the method of governance devised to replace the family/clan/tribe as the source of authority. Francis Fukuyama gives a clear account in his recent multi-volume analysis of the Origins of Political Order—the state comes into being when merit and achievement (and sheer force) replace blood ties as the criterion for leadership, and when membership in a political community derives from living in a given territory rather than kinship. The symbol of this shift is the Chinese exam system, first developed over 2000 years ago, where administrators are chosen from those who master classic texts and key elements of culture rather than bloodlines.
In America and most modern states, government interferes in the family in myriad ways. It requires that parents educate and vaccinate their children. It prohibits polygamy and child marriage. Children can be put in foster care for neglect or criminal behavior by parents. Nepotism is frowned upon and restricted by law. These interventions are justified in the name of individual rights, which trump family considerations for adult citizens. Without this government activism to weaken and counterbalance families it is hard to imagine that most individuals would be free in meaningful ways.
Religion. Religious teachings and leaders—prophets, ministers, saints—can be a critical check on corrupt and tyrannical governments. Religion is the source of law, rules that bind earthly governors as much as the governed under a god or gods from whose lofty heights the difference between kings and commoners means little. Law is not the same thing as freedom, but it is a necessary condition if we want to constrain leaders and neighbors.
The force of divine law speaks through Old Testament prophets who warn the princes of Israel against abuse and corruption. Christianity in Europe gave rise to Catholic and then Protestant churches that were in principle independent of particular rulers and could, on occasion, call them to account. Fear of divine punishment might restrain kings and princes, or lead them to see a common spark of God in their subjects or potential enemies. Religion can be a check on arbitrary power.
The power wielded by religious figures, however, can easily be abused. Recently we heard excruciating details of how the Catholic Church in Pennsylvania fostered and protected sexual predators. The truth was revealed by an investigation from the attorney general of Pennsylvania, acting to penetrate the veil of secrecy and intimidation that had kept thousands of victims from speaking up.
Where would we be if our government, instead of investigating the Catholic Church, was joined with it, was its champion? Who would reveal the truth then? This has been the norm throughout history, with religion and secular power working together to reinforce one another. Only the separation of church and state, achieved first in the United States, has succeeded in keeping these two sources of authority apart and ensuring that state power is not used to put down rival faiths and enforce compliance to the particular beliefs and moral codes of one religion or sect. Religion cannot be used to justify racial discrimination or child sacrifice. No one can be forced to submit to religious restrictions against their will. The essential condition is for the legitimacy of the state to rest on a secular foundation—in the case of the United States, one based on reason and universal principles. Where this separation has not taken hold, as in much of the Muslim world, freedom is severely limited.
Around the world we see attempts in countries with secular traditions to re-combine church and state: Hinduism in Modi’s India, Orthodoxy in Putin’s Russia, Catholicism in Orban’s Hungary, Islam in Erdogan’s Turkey. Aspiring dictators see religious fervor as a way to oust rivals and rally supporters; leaders of the major religion are happy to see state power deployed to put down their religious rivals. Often this is accompanied by vicious campaigns against homosexuals and others who don’t meet ‘traditional standards.’ While not yet at the same level, determined forces in the US want to redefine America as a Protestant Christian nation rather than a religiously neutral one. Almost half of Americans now say that their identity as a Christian is more important than their identity as an American. Any movement in the direction of re-defining America’s basic principles as inseparable from Christianity is a terrible threat to freedom—and also to Christianity.
This is not to deny that Jerusalem was a source of the vision of individual human dignity and freedom that has animated the United States since its founding. Christianity was arguably a necessary condition for liberal democracy. Necessary—but far from sufficient. The key thinkers and doers who set the stage for the American Revolution and made it happen did not, in my view, act as Christians or for the sake of Christianity. They understood, correctly, that what they were attempting was made possible only by a free exercise of reason unconstrained by dogma, and was contrary to longstanding Christian traditions and the role of Christian churches and leaders in politics.
Markets. In no area it seems to me is there greater misunderstanding of freedom than our discussion of markets. Acolytes of free markets are the most outspoken critics of government for interfering with market forces and, supposedly, reducing wealth and efficiency. Corporations and entrepreneurs often argue that their freedom is diminished by taxes and regulations and unions. Contemporary market fundamentalists dream of returning to the era exemplified by the 1905 Lochner decision by the Supreme Court, which struck down a state law that limited working hours on the grounds that it violated the ‘freedom’ of employers and workers to engage in contracts. Since then our views have evolved to allow government to intervene to protect employees and the public from corporate exploitation.
Markets, however, depend on government in myriad ways: to create a medium of exchange; to enforce contracts; to define and protect property rights; to prevent and punish thievery and fraud, and much more. Most of this is not controversial. More disputable are other ways government arguably makes modern capitalism possible and keeps it from being destructive: preventing monopoly, regulating working conditions, keeping our air and water clean, insuring banks, preventing overly-risky financial practices, etc.
Laissez-faire advocates like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek have tried to argue that much of this can be done by individuals acting freely in accord with market forces. Government is needed, barely, for the first set of goods, not the second. Government efforts to regulate capitalism are counterproductive at best, a slippery slope to communism at worst.
But actual American experience doesn’t bear this out. We can start with slavery, perhaps the ultimate expression of laissez-faire thinking. Attempts to end slavery were resisted ferociously by slave owners on the grounds that they violated their freedom to dispose of their property as they saw fit. Other periods in America when we have been most in love with laissez-faire policies—the Gilded Age, the Roaring 20s, the Greenspan Era—have led to terrible crashes and corrosive economic inequality. The period of our greatest sustained prosperity, a time when the rising economic waters really did lift all boats, was in the 1950s and 1960s when unions were strong, taxes were high, and government programs (the GI Bill, the interstate highway system) took hold to grow the economy and cushion Americans from capitalism’s excesses. Starting in the Progressive Era, government began to see it had a responsibility to restrain the private sector for the benefit of all, and over time developed tools to analyze and direct our market system.
Teddy Roosevelt’s “malefactors of great wealth,” however, have continued to fight fiercely to undermine the legitimacy of public, democratic intervention in the economy. During the 1950s and 60s they wrung their hands about the threat to freedom from socialism and big government, exploiting Cold War fears of international communism to equate all government intervention with Marxism. Few listened until the stagflation of the 1970s, brought on by a foolish unfunded war and OPEC’s manipulation of oil prices, gave them an opening. Wealthy individuals and foundations—the Koch Brothers, the Scaifes and Adelsons and many more—have funded countless think tanks, institutes, university departments, conferences and publications dedicated to free market and libertarian ideas. Their message was embodied in Reagan and his transformative Presidency, whose message was that government itself was the problem. Largely as a result, today many Americans instinctively think that the ‘private sector’ is more virtuous and efficient than anything that involves government. The market is equated with freedom, government with coercion.
But nothing is more inimical to individual freedom than unrestrained markets. Left to itself, capitalism generates huge concentrations of private wealth—an oligarchical system that rests on severe restrictions of individual rights. Marx was wrong about many things, but on this one big thing he was correct: capitalism left to itself will concentrate wealth—and power—in a few hands. Something competing corporations can agree on is limiting the rights of workers and consumers by weakening collective bargaining, labor laws, individual bankruptcy options, environmental protections, class-action lawsuits, and other political and legal protections in hiring and the workplace.
Unfortunately a growing body of legal scholarship, funded by wealthy market fundamentalists, has emerged to defend the rights of corporations on First Amendment grounds, ‘weaponizing’ the right to free speech as a way to limit other rights. This radical new doctrine is well-represented on the Supreme Court, especially with the confirmation of Justice Kavanaugh. Justice Kagan’s dissent, in a recent case that overturned the right of public sector unions to require workers to contribute union dues, is eloquent: “Speech is everywhere—a part of every human activity (employment, health care, securities trading, you name it)… For that reason, almost all economic and regulatory policy affects or touches speech. So the majority’s road runs long. And at every stop are black-robed rulers overriding citizens’ choices. The First Amendment was meant for better things.” 1
The blunt truth is that many of the rich see democracy as a threat—it was Aristotle who warned that under democracy the people would try to take the property of the rich—and therefore have fought tenaciously to secure the right to use money freely to buy political influence. As explained persuasively and at length by historian Nancy MacLean in Democracy in Chains, the libertarian right under the guidance of the Koch network has used its money to reshape the rules of politics to make sure that their wealth can offset votes. The United States today is already a semi-oligarchy, where wealthy individuals and corporations easily fund candidates, create fake ‘grassroots’ movements, control major media, and lobby elected officials. These efforts are usually sold as ways to enhance individual freedom for everyone, but are in fact designed to enhance the freedom of the haves at the expense of the have-nots.
Freedom and Want
The debate over free markets leads to a second aspect of freedom. The first was freedom from coercion, the second is freedom from want. People who live in poverty and chronic economic uncertainty struggle to be free, even if they have formal political and legal rights. All their time and energy is taken up by ensuring survival for themselves and their family. Their neediness makes them vulnerable to coercion by employers or landowners. This was the normal condition for the vast majority before the modern era.
It is no coincidence that the success of democratic government has coincided with the historically unparalleled growth of wealth from modern technology and industrial capitalism. Today the United States and other advanced economies are rich enough to free most citizens from grinding poverty and provide them with education and literacy. Most have enough wealth and economic security to use their freedom meaningfully in leisure activities, intellectual pursuits, private passions, and public life. We have largely overcome the pre-modern divide between the impoverished and enslaved many, and the wealthy few. The strength of America’s civil society, the multiplicity of associations that are the way most citizens participate in public affairs, noted by Tocqueville and others, rests on both the country’s wealth and its equitable distribution.
Since the 2008 financial crisis, however, Americans have received a crash course in the problem of economic inequality. Inequality has been growing sharply since the late 1970s; income and wealth for the top 10%, and especially the top 1% and 0.01%, has been going up remorselessly. Almost all the gains in national wealth over the past 40 years have gone to a small class, while for the bottom income has been largely stagnant. To the apparent surprise of some, cutting marginal tax rates sharply in the Reagan (and again in the Bush II) administrations ended up making the rich richer while producing disappointing economic growth, much lower than in the 1950s-60s.
As a result many Americans who thought of themselves as solidly middle-class and living the American Dream have become economically and socially insecure; they no longer expect their children to do better than they did. They are angry at the contrast between the wealth and status of the few, and the declining prospects of the many. Condescending lectures from both liberals (go to college!) and conservatives (work more!) ring hollow when college is more and more expensive, unskilled jobs pay less, and in many families both partners are running flat out and not getting ahead.
The meaning of ‘poverty’ is slippery in a country as wealthy as the US. Even those at the bottom typically have enough to eat and a roof over their heads, not to mention cellphones and flat-screen TVs. But a significant number of Americans still live only a stone’s throw from poverty, bankruptcy, and homelessness. Their lives are dominated by the fear of foreclosure or eviction, losing a low-paying job, being denied government benefits, going to jail for minor fines they are unable to pay, bankruptcy for medical expenses they can’t afford, and an endless array of other challenges. These challenges are of course greater for African-Americans and other minorities. A recent Atlantic article showed that nearly half of Americans would have difficulty raising $400 in cash for an emergency. 2 Continue reading “Understanding and Restoring Freedom”