Freedom's the Liberal Ticket

“Taking Liberty” by William A. Galston, in The Washington Monthly (April 2005), 733 15th St., N.W., Ste. 520, Washington, D.C. 20005.

Here’s a remedy for liberals despondent at their low standing with the American public: Stop going against the American grain, and put freedom back in liberal thinking and discourse. Not the conservatives’ flawed notion of freedom, in which government is usually seen as a threat, but rather the evolving liberal conception, championed by 20th-century progressives from Theodore Roosevelt to John F. Kennedy, in which government can act to advance freedom.

“Government is [not] the only, or always the gravest, threat to freedom; clerical institutions and concentrations of unchecked economic power have often vied for that dubious honor,” argues Galston, interim dean of the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy and a former deputy assistant to President Bill Clinton for domestic policy.  The free market, left unrestrained, often works to undermine “the moral conditions of a free society.” And economic, social, and even familial dependence can damage character just as much as long-term dependence on government can.

Liberals became disenchanted with the cause of freedom during the Vietnam War, which led them to reject all efforts to extend freedom abroad. Conservatives picked up the fallen banner and won the public over to their conception of freedom. In response, liberals turned to the courts and redefined the liberal agenda in terms of fairness and equality of results. Most Americans remain unpersuaded—and liberals remain out in the cold.

“In the real world,” contends Galston, “which so many conservatives steadfastly refuse to face, there is no such thing as freedom in the abstract. There are only specific freedoms.” Franklin Roosevelt famously identified four: freedom of speech and of worship, freedom from want and from fear.

In contrast with freedom of, which points toward realms where government’s chief role is to protect individual choice, freedom from points toward a responsibility to help citizens avoid unwanted circumstances. When Social Security was introduced, for example, Roosevelt justified it as promoting freedom from want and protecting citizens and their families against “poverty-ridden old age.”

“Liberals seldom talk about Social Security or other programs in terms of freedom,” notes Galston, but they should. Take universal health care. It would free countless people now trapped in their jobs by the need for health insurance to pursue other opportunities. Or take individual choice. Liberals should embrace it when it serves their principled purposes—by supporting individual retirement savings accounts, for example, not as part of Social Security but as additions to it.

In foreign affairs, says Galston, President George W. Bush’s “faith in the transformative power of freedom . . . is not wholly misplaced.” But “contemporary conservatism, with its free-lunch mentality,” has a hard time admitting that freedom requires sacrifices, such as higher taxes in wartime.

Liberals have pined too much for a culture less individualistic than America’s really is, according to Galston. “As FDR did three-quarters of a century ago, we must mobilize and sustain a popular majority with the freedom agenda our times require.”