The standard retort to boys’ locker-room brags of sexual conquest is that those that talk about it the most do it the least. The same applies to those who toss around freedom and liberty the mostest and the loudest. That their flags (or their trucks) are the biggest does not make their support for this nation the sincerest.
What they defend using those words is, in fact, a particular social hierarchy that favors them and theirs, be it racial, religious or economic.
Jamelle Bouie cites the late historian of France, Tyler Stovall, who believed “that to its defenders hierarchy is a matter of freedom and liberty.” Specifically:
… it means that we should think of freedom in at least two ways: a freedom from domination and a freedom to dominate. In “White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea,” Stovall shows how both are tied up in the history of race and racial thinking. In societies like those of the United States and republican France, he writes, “belief in freedom, specifically one’s entitlement to freedom, was a key component of white supremacy.” The more white one was, he continues, “the more free one was.”
This “white freedom” is not named as such because it is somehow intrinsic to people of European descent, but because it took its shape under conditions of explicit racial hierarchy, where colonialism and chattel slavery made clear who was free and who was not. For the men who dominated, this informed their view of what freedom was. Or, as the historian Edmund Morgan famously observed nearly 50 years ago in “American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia,” “The presence of men and women who were, in law at least, almost totally subject to the will of other men gave to those in control of them an immediate experience of what it could mean to be at the mercy of a tyrant.”
As an ideology, Stovall writes, white freedom meant both “control of one’s destiny” and the freedom to dominate and exclude. And the two moved hand in hand through the modern era, he argues, both here and abroad. In the United States during the early 19th century, for example, the right to vote became even more entangled with race than it had been. “Not only was suffrage extended to virtually all white men by the eve of the Civil War, thus breaking down traditional restrictions based on property and class, it was also and at the same time increasingly denied to those who were not white men,” Stovall writes. “The early years of America as a free and independent nation were thus a period when voting was more and more defined in racial terms.”
Today, what freedom means for those who shout it the loudest is “to be free to dominate” on the basis of traditional hierarchies. For others, it means to be from domination and hierarchy.
“We all declare for liberty,” Lincoln said in April 1864, “but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing.”
With some, he continued, “the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor, while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor.”
That business should be free to do as it pleases unbothered by the needs and desires of workers, or by concern for their health, safety, and financial stability (or for equitable wages), is the animating force behind conservatives’ efforts to sustain and enforce the traditional hierarchies Lincoln described in the latter half of that statement. Neither does election integrity mean the same thing to all of us.
From the same Lincoln speech Bouie quotes:
“The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty,” he said.
Bouie concludes, “We all want freedom. The question is what we each want to do, for ourselves or to others, with it.”
But turning freedom and liberty into shibboleths leaves some of our neighbors mindlessly pursuing more for more’s sake. Because as Americans, we assume more is always better. More freedom. More liberty. But to do what? Or do they even think ahead that far?
Sen. Raphael Warnock (D) of Georgia addressed this week on the floor of the Senate its failure to defend voting rights. He questioned elevating bipartisanship into the same political firmament as freedom and liberty.
“When colleagues in this chamber talk to me about bipartisanship, which I believe in, I just have to ask, at whose expense? Who is being asked to foot the bill for this bipartisanship? And is liberty itself the cost?