Kamala’s Five Freedoms and FDR’s Four
What “freedom” looks like to a “brat”.
A benefit of not being paid for blogging is that I don’t have to apologize for taking a month off, or even explain why. I’ll just say that “real life” has been very, very busy. Furthermore, it seemed otiose to comment on the season’s most conspicuous topic when the omnicompetent Robert Graboyes has posted the definitive pre-post mortem on the results. Now that I have more leisure (or less unleisure), I hope to return to my irregularly scheduled programming.
So let me begin.
“Freedom” is such an attractive shibboleth that every office seeker tries to get his tongue around it. Some, however, like the Biblical Ephraimites, can’t get it quite right (Judges 12:6). The philosopher George Santayana opined of the liberals of his day that the only bond that they wanted to loosen was the marriage bond. Kamala Harris falls squarely within that tradition of twisted meaning. Chuck Chalberg, writing at American Thinker web site, has distilled from the candidate’s recent appearance at the intellectual forum known as the “Oprah Winfrey Show” her counterpart to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms”.
Kamala goes FDR’s freedoms one better; she has five, to wit –
“freedom to make decisions about your own body”,
“freedom to be safe from gun violence”,
“freedom to have access to the ballot box”,
“freedom to love who you love openly and with pride”, and, summing it all up,
“freedom to be who you are and just be ...”
That is quite a bit narrower and more verbose than Roosevelt’s freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear. Conservatives often sniff at Roosevelt’s list, knowing that his administration embarked on an historic contraction of freedom. Nonetheless, as generalized objectives for government, the Four Freedoms can scarcely be disputed. A regime in which all four were realized would be near to a Golden Age. There is, of course, much disagreement over how to bring them about.
Now let us turn to Kamala’s Five Freedoms. If she indulged her passion for Venn diagrams, she would find very little overlap between the Five and the Four. “Freedom to be safe from gun violence” is a subset of “freedom from fear”, and that’s about it.
Some of the rest could, with a bit of stretching, be assimilated into “freedom of expression”, understood not as the expression of ideas but the acting out of behavioral impulses. Stretching even further, “freedom to make decisions about your own body”, interpreted primarily as an unlimited right to abortion,1 might be thought of as part of “freedom from want”; children are demanding and expensive and can make it hard to get the things that one really wants.
Even if one gives the Vice President the benefit of every conceivable overlap, the diagram’s circles barely intersect. “Freedom of speech and expression” in the normal sense of that term gets not a whit of notice. That’s unsurprising. When Donald Trump was still President, Senator Harris demanded that Twitter shut down his account. In a CNN interview, she explained why:
He has lost his privileges and it should be taken down. And the bottom line is that you can’t say that you have one rule for Facebook and you have a different rule for Twitter. The same rule has to apply, which is that there has to be a responsibility that is placed on these social media sites to understand their power. They are directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation, and that has to stop. [emphasis added]
That was a few years ago, before Elon Musk bought Twitter and converted it to “X”.2 Is it at all likely that the change in Twitter has led Kamala to see the value of unpoliced dialogue? Last month, Musk did a Twitter interview with Donald Trump. The Candidate of Joy™ reacted with a screed to her mailing list with the subject line, “The two worst people you know are live this evening”. (Yahya Sinwar, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un didn’t make the cut for “worst”.) She has also been Vice President in an Administration that has flexed government muscles to pressure social media to silence disapproved opinions. If she dissents from that policy, she has kept very quiet about it.
“Freedom of worship” is likewise absent. That is even less of a surprise than her coldness toward free speech. As a famous Roman Catholic politician used to say, “Let’s look at the record.” Here is an enlightening snippet:
In December 2019, Senator Harris confronted judicial nominee Brian Buescher about his membership . . . in the Knights of Columbus. The California senator asked Buescher pointedly if his membership in an “all-male society comprised primarily of Catholic men” that affirmed teachings of his church disqualified him from sitting on the federal bench.
Someone who believes that membership in a Roman Catholic organization makes one unfit to hold public office cannot be expected to have much regard for FDR’s second freedom. Nor is her hostility limited to a faith notable for its opposition to the sacred cause of abortion. Mrs. Emhoff has also been notably insouciant about the past year’s rising tide of Jew hatred. She speaks often about suffering in Gaza, never about the intimidation of Jewish students by pro-Hamas campus mobs.
It’s a slight surprise, given the salience of economic issues to the Presidential race, that the Five Freedoms don’t include something on the lines of “freedom from price-gauging gouging”. FDR and LBJ thought that the road to “freedom from want” was paved with bureaucrats and handouts. Experience has shown otherwise, but the laudators of “bold, persistent experimentation” (Roosevelt’s words, echoed by Kamala a few days ago) pay no attention to experiments that turn out inconveniently. Vide their enduring admiration for the New Deal and the War on Poverty. Those consort well with progressive preferences, but Kamala doesn’t proclaim even bother to package an ode to the welfare state among her “freedoms”.
One suspects that “want” is an abstract concept to her. She grew up in what she calls “a middle class family”, consisting of a tenured professor (Stanford) as father and a prominent biomedical researcher as mother, got her start in politics as la horizontale of the most powerful politician in California, was a DEI hire for the Vice Presidency and lucked into the Presidential nomination when the incumbent’s mental frailty became undeniable at too late a moment to replace him with anyone else. People who drift upward through life sometimes have trouble taking seriously the economic struggles of the less favored. “Inflation” is just a word, not a phenomenon that has ever inconvenienced them.
Finally, “freedom from fear”. The most conspicuous contemporary fear is crime, which has increased markedly over the past four years. A call for “freedom to be safe from gun violence” addresses a part of that fear, but only a tiny part. Most crimes – and particularly the crimes that most citizens encounter most often – have no firearms involved. “Freedom from street gangs”, “freedom from drug dealers”, “freedom from lenient sentences”, “freedom from prosecutors who favor criminals over their victims”: I doubt that the Democratic candidate will advocate freedoms like those. Her call for donations to bail out the George Floyd rioters is at this moment (September 27, 2024, 9:37 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time) still up on Twitter.
How, then, can one summarize Kamala Harris’s concept of freedom? Like every other part of her thinking, it is hazy. What is most important, if one takes her at her word, is freedom to do what “feels good” at the moment. “Freedom to be who you are and just be ...” implies the absence of responsibility to make oneself better. It is the lazy philosophy of the “brat”.
Certainly not as a right to gather voluntarily with others during an epidemic.
But I won’t give up the old name. X is such an overused letter in corporate branding. If the platform had to go monoliteral, “Q” would have been interesting (“cue”, “queue”, James Bond’s tech wizard, the bomb in The Mouse That Roared ...). “X” long ago faded to the light of common day.