The right doesn’t
“When the state says to a woman that you cannot have an abortion after six weeks, what the state is doing is seizing that woman’s womb for its own purposes,” said Carlos Lacasa. “That’s scary to me.”
Lacasa is a Cuban American from South Florida, and a former Republican state representative. “Freedom-loving” Cuban Americans are keenly aware of Fidel Castro’s curtailing of freedom for Cubans and remain on high alert for state encroachments on it. That includes the freedom “to possess a firearm, even with a high-capacity magazine, or … to choose whether or not to be vaccinated in the case of a pandemic.” And to restrict a woman’s access to abortion.
Lacasa backs the referendum on Florida’s November ballot to reverse the state’s ban on abortion after six weeks. It went into effect May 1 (Politico):
The fate of a November referendum to reverse the six-week ban now rests largely on how many other Republicans feel abortion should be legal, even if they wouldn’t choose it for themselves. The constitutional amendment restoring legal abortion up to the point of fetal viability — around 24 weeks — would have to clear a 60-percent threshold in a state with nearly a million more registered Republicans than Democrats. One recent poll shows 57 percent support for the measure statewide, though another puts support below 50 percent. (“There is no path to passage without 2 out of 5” Republicans, Anna Hochkammer, a leader in the pro-referendum coalition, texted me.) And the referendum’s supporters know the path to passage runs through places like [Hialeah], where many residents or their recent ancestors fled from autocracy, and are Republican precisely because they value freedom and limited government.
Freedom is a contested value Democrats have failed to contest for too long. So long that some on the left may feel uncomfortable using a word so identified with Republican tropes. This is a mistake, Anat Shenker-Osorio has long argued, and as Lacasa’s declaration illustrates. (She advocates using freedoms, plural.) Freedom means different things to different Americans, Kathy Gilsinan illustrates in her reporting from Florida. “This doesn’t necessarily mean these voters feel abortion should count among those freedoms or that they’d prioritize a political freedom over a religious value.”
Over at The New Yorker, John Cassidy speaks with Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz about his new book, “The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society.” A play on Friedrich Hayek’s famous polemic against socialism, Stiglitz argues that the negative concept of freedom peddled by neoliberalism has hoarded it for the few while restricting it for the many. He illustrates by repeating a quote from the late Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin: “Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep.”
Stiglitz observes, “The current conservative reading of what freedom means is superficial, misguided, and ideologically motivated. The Right claims to be the defender of freedom, but I’ll show that the way they define the word and pursue it has led to the opposite result, vastly reducing the freedoms of most citizens.”
Cassidy explains:
Gun violence and the spread of diseases by people who refuse to abide by health guidelines are examples of what economists call externalities, an awkward word that is derived from the fact that certain actions (such as refusing to wear a mask) or market transactions (such as the sale of a gun) can have negative (or positive) consequences to the outside world. “Externalities are everywhere,” Stiglitz writes. The biggest and most famous negative externalities are air pollution and climate change, which derive from the freedom of businesses and individuals to take actions that create harmful emissions. The argument for restricting this freedom, Stiglitz points out, is that doing so will “expand the freedom of people in later generations to exist on a livable planet without having to spend a huge amount of money to adapt to massive changes in climate and sea levels.”
In all these cases, Stiglitz argues, restrictions on behavior are justified by the over-all increase in human welfare and freedom that they produce. In the language of cost-benefit analysis, the costs in terms of infringing on individual freedom of action are much smaller than the societal benefits, so the net benefits are positive. Of course, many gun owners and anti-maskers would argue that this isn’t true. Pointing to the gun-violence figures and to scientific studies showing that masking and social distancing did make a difference to COVID-transmission rates, Stiglitz gives such arguments short shrift, and he insists that the real source of the dispute is a difference in values. “Are there responsible people who really believe that the right to not be inconvenienced by wearing a mask is more important than the right to live?” he asks.
As in the debate over gun ownership, “responsible” is also a contested concept.
As an economist accustomed to thinking in theoretical terms, Stiglitz conceived of freedom as expanding “opportunity sets”—the range of options that people can choose from—which are usually bounded, in the final analysis, by individuals’ incomes. Once you reframe freedom in this more positive sense, anything that reduces a person’s range of choices, such as poverty, joblessness, or illness, is a grave restriction on liberty. Conversely, policies that expand people’s opportunities to make choices, such as income-support payments and subsidies for worker training or higher education, enhance freedom.
Ask “freedom-loving” Americans if they love their jobs, how many will say yes? Then ask them if they feel free to quit, to move and try something else somewhere else? Even with a closetful of AR-15s?
What the right and wealthy elites are selling is the cowboy myth of rugged individualism, where there is no common good and every man (of course) is a law unto himself, where freedom is personal and something to hoard in a threatening world against bandits, communists, and, well, THEM.
What the American left advocates, even if it fails to broadcast it to the heavens, is something breathtaking, Anand Giridharadas explained last year, something reactionaries and conspiracy theorists fear:
We are trying something hard and awesome. And at the risk of kind of mixing progressivism with patriotism, it is an awesome pursuit in history. Most of our ancestors lived in small, little monocultures in all kinds of different places in the world where they never met anybody who was different.
We are building an entire country on the idea that human beings are enriched through encounters with difference. And, even though there is this incredibly scary movement, it is not the protagonist of this drama. We are the protagonist of this drama. We have won victory after victory after victory to get here.
Look at this room. Most places in the world do not look like this room, right? And [opponents of the American experiment] are a barnacle on our progress. They are not prosecuting some awesome new revolution that is a cool, new idea. They have fought against every major advance of extending freedom to more people. They have lost virtually every time. They will lose again.
And I think we have to buck up, get our act together, talk and think like winners, and remember that the cause of the country we’re trying to fight for is an attractive cause, and make it attractive — joyous, your word [to a panelist] — and bring people in, not keep anyone out.
How much does the right fear that expansive vision, one based more in cooperation than ruthless competition? Fear the left talking, thinking and acting like winners?
On May 1, conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat argued that President Biden should stop campaigning as if he is ahead in the 2024 presidential contest. He should consider stepping aside in “a patriotic recognition of his own limits, physical and political.” He should stop “running on progressive autopilot.” Stop a phase-out of internal combustion autos. Stop a “new student loan forgiveness program that could cost over $1 trillion in the teeth of stubbornly high inflation.”
The flop sweat in Douthat’s insistence that Biden is “gliding toward defeat” by not boldly quitting the race almost dripped off the page.
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