“How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”
Conservatives do not own freedom. It is a contested value. Or it would be if the left did more contesting. Time to start.
George Packer considers Freedom’s dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power, by Jefferson Cowie, a Vanderbilt historian, in the context of what Packer calls “the new fatalism.” It is the notion that America is trapped in the past and cannot change. Recent, less white-centric histories replace old, self-serving myths but perhaps lead to disillusionment.
Part of the stuckness results from historical white appropriation not only of African bodies but of what white dominance views as an unassailable narrative:
Cowie’s theme is how the sacred American creed of freedom serves to justify racial domination. At every turn in the harsh tale of Barbour County [Alabama], white residents resisted challenges to their supremacy by invoking their birthright as free people. At nearly every turn, the federal government made inadequate efforts on behalf of equal Black citizenship, before yielding to the demands of white “freedom” backed by violence. “Those defending racism, land appropriation, and enslavement portrayed themselves, and even understood their own actions, as part of a long history of freedom,” Cowie writes. In his infamous 1963 inaugural address vowing “segregation forever,” Governor Wallace used the word freedom 24 times. To Wallace and his constituents, the real tyrant was the federal government, issuing its court orders and sending down its marshals and troops to impose its laws against the will of white Alabamians. Cowie quotes a blunt question from the 18th-century British essayist Samuel Johnson that could have been the book’s epigraph: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”
In the uses of freedom, Cowie argues, domination is as central to the American creed as individual liberty and self-government. Freedom as white power “is not an aberration but a virulent part of an American idiom.” The history of Barbour County “was not much different than what happened in the rest of the Black Belt, the South, or the nation.” For proof, Cowie recounts the nationwide appeal of Wallace’s presidential campaigns in 1968 and 1972 (“We’re going to show there sure are a lot of rednecks in this country,” Wallace said before the ’68 election). The stories Cowie has excavated in Barbour County “are not simply regional tales lost in the dark, overgrown thickets of the past. They are quintessentially American histories—inescapably local, yet national in theme, scope, and scale.” The historian concludes: “To confront this saga of freedom is to confront the fundamentals of the American narrative.”
The problem is that the new fatalism offers no way out rather than a “character is destiny” inspiration.
Packer writes, “Politics is a competition between stories—and it’s as politics that the new fatalism leads to a dead end. On a landscape strewn with the deflated remnants of old myths, with the country’s essence distilled to its meanest self, what moral identity is it possible to build?”
Conservative politics may encourage its adherents to embrace their meanest selves and zero-sum politics, but the left’s (and scholars’) loudly pointing out the meanness of the conservative narrative behind wagging fingers does not an offer the country a more attractive alternative. What’s needed is a better story with freedom at its center. And people willing to proclaim it.
Some guy named Obama sold the country on that hope twice.
Maybe it’s time for me to reread Lakoff.