Rethinking views on freedom

We Americans have come a long way in our attitudes about freedom.

Back before Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection, a teenage neighbor at a block party in my comfortable West Hartford neighborhood told me he was a Republican, excited to cast his first vote for Mitt Romney. “Really? Why?” “Because I want freedom.” “Don’t you feel free now?” I asked. He gave me an odd look, paused, and changed the subject.

That conversation has stayed with me over the years. “Freedom” was clearly an abstraction for him. Why did he associate it only with the political right?

Even earlier, during the debate about “Obamacare,” I spoke with an older protester at a demonstration in my town, in a conversation that seemed to duplicate what people were saying all over the country. “I want to be free,” she said. “No government should ever interfere in my personal health.”

“How about Medicare?” I asked.

“I earned my Medicare,” she said, turning away.

So much has changed since those discussions! The idea of “freedom” remains a shifting political battleground, but it’s getting increasingly fraught. Katherine Stewart pointed out recently in the New York Times (“The Roots of Josh Hawley’s Rage, Jan 11) that Sen. Josh Hawley once described his idea of freedom as, “the freedom to conform to what he and his preferred religious authorities know to be right.” Oh, so the opposite of freedom is freedom?

Suzanne Schneider reflected last week in the Washington Post (“The Far Right Embraces Violence Because it has No Political Program,” Jan. 15) about the Capitol rioters’ view of freedom as having “violence at its core: freedom to carry a weapon and use it at will, to infect others around you during a pandemic, to die of preventable disease rather than submit to a national health care system.”

Those views make the oldfashioned right-wing view, the one I think my teenage neighbor had in mind — resistance to having the government impose things like taxes and welfare; desire for keeping one’s own money and not having to share — seem extremely quaint.

Americans often define ourselves through the lens of “freedom,” but do we think enough about what that means? Do we want to be so independent that we get rid of traffic lights and emergency rooms? No, even the most libertarian people want many of the markers of civilization to be right there when we need them. But they don’t seem to want to admit that none of us is free in an absolute sense, and furthermore that very few of us would want to be free that way, not unless we want to live in the wilderness and grow our own food.

I remember the day I discovered, years after reading “Walden” in high school, that Thoreau’s mother lived less than two miles away from his wilderness shack on the pond. Hahaha: he could go home for dinner! We’ve praised his freedom to live alone in the woods for well over a century, but we know now: he too never had the “freedom” of absolute independence.

Our American fantasy of some kind of ultimate freedom is almost funny, looked at from a certain angle. Most of us, in both parties, couldn’t in any way live the lives we want without the government, and our belief that we can or should is one reason why people outside the United States sometimes describe Americans as naive. We haven’t come to terms with the reality that in fact it’s good not to be 100 percent free. It’s good, no, it’s great, to have a government whose goal is to oversee and support our pursuit of independent lives — working with us to provide structures, funds and hope.

Sure, that’s an easy statement, given my political position as a Democrat. As George Lakoff has said, Democrats see government as a “nurturing parent” in contrast to the Republican view of it as a “strict father.” The strict father fosters our freedom by making us do everything for ourselves. But does that really make us more free?

President Trump, of course, never helped us understand a thing about freedom. Now that we’re finally free of him, I’m hoping President Biden will help us experience more fully how a responsible government can work as a responsible body aimed at fostering interdependence right along with independence, for each of us.

Fingers crossed.