One year when I was in elementary school our entire class performed the song "Freedom," from the play "Shenandoah," a musical, improbably, about the Civil War. Like many advertising jingles from my childhood, I've never forgotten the words. "Freedom ain't a state like Maine or Virginia, freedom ain't across some county line, freedom is a flame that burns within ya, freedom's in the state of mind." |
I assume we were taught this song because freedom seems to be a foundational American concept, a truth we hold self-evident, like "all men are created equal." And yet efforts to define freedom divide along ideological lines. |
"No one has ever conclusively defined it — especially in the United States," Elisabeth Anker, a professor of American Studies and political theory at George Washington University whom I've known as both a colleague and a friend for many years, told me. "We use it all the time to describe what our politics are, what our country stands for, what we value as citizens and yet many of us would have a different definition of what freedom is. In the history of political thought there is a 2,000 year debate about what freedom is, and who gets to qualify for freedom." |
Elisabeth, who wrote the recent guest essay "The Exploitation of 'Freedom' in America," has a new book out called "Ugly Freedoms." Ugly freedoms, she explains, are in using the cover of freedom to demand an end to mask mandates in the name of individual liberty, in the state legislatures launching Freedom caucuses to protest the teaching of critical race theory, and any ideology deemed "dangerous," and in "freedom" bills pushing anti-democratic policies. |
"These are not merely misunderstood freedoms, or even just a cynical use of the language of freedom to frame bigoted policies," she writes. "They manifest, instead, a particular interpretation of freedom that is not expansive, but exclusionary and coercive." |
Approaching both the book and this essay, says Elisabeth, "I was thinking about how people use freedom so differently and I started noticing the violence in contemporary uses of freedom especially as we started to see a deepening polarization of the American electorate." |
Particularly alarming, she says, is "how a robust language of freedom and especially individual freedom is often used to justify dismantling group support, group benefits and social structures." But none of this is new. Ugly freedom, she notes, permitted slavery, the rights of men over their wives and employers to union bust. "It is true the language of freedom was central to emancipation, suffrage and democratic movements of all kinds, but it has also justified violence and discrimination," she writes. |
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