Title: How the Left is Redefining Freedom

Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Have you noticed that on the campaign trail, Vice President Kamala Harris is leaning into the word freedom?

Kamala Harris: And it is a fight for freedom. Across our nation, we have been witnessing a full-on assault on hard-won, hard-fought freedoms and fundamental rights. The freedom to vote, the freedom to be safe from gun violence, the freedom to love who you love openly and with pride, and the freedom of a woman to make decisions about her own body and not have her government tell her what to do. They fight for freedom.

Brian: Harris at a recent rally with a litany of kinds of freedom, as you hear there, that she says are in danger that she wants to protect. Interesting choice of a word that in recent times has been highlighted more by republicans. For example, the most right-wing group in Congress calls itself what? The Freedom Caucus. 40 years ago, Ronald Reagan, as president, defined freedom as getting the government off your back.

He used that phrase domestically and fighting the Soviet Union in the name of freedom internationally. A decade ago, the Republican Tea Party movement released a manifesto with the words, "Lower taxes and less government," on the cover. That was their core goal with the word freedom. Remember the landmark Supreme Court decision, Citizens United in 2010, which that conservative group won on freedom of speech grounds?

It was the freedom for corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money, really, unlimited amounts of money, supporting their favorite candidates in election campaigns. That was a core freedom for them. Here's a clip of Republican Senator Rand Paul speaking to a Citizens United conference after that decision in 2014.

Rand Paul: But the question remains, will you be sunshine patriots? Will you shrink at the first sign of privation, or will you stand? Will you stand like men and women of courage and fight for your freedom? The question is, will you, will you fight for your freedom?

Brian: Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky contrasting security and freedom. His implication? Your freedom is being taken away for someone else's security. We even have a quote from the conservative Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter Thiel, a big financial backer of JD Vance. Thiel has actually written in print that, "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible". So the right is juxtaposing freedom and security and even juxtaposing freedom and democracy.

But the Kamala Harris campaign is trying to take the word back from the right. So if Rand Paul, in that clip, was adamantly calling on Citizens United members to fight for freedom over security, Kamala Harris is also asking her supporters to fight for the freedoms they care about. Here's another clip from that August 10th rally where she gets the crowd vocally involved.

Kamala: You are battle born. And if Donald Trump wants to pick a fight over our most fundamental freedoms, we say bring it on. Bring it on. Bring it on.

Crowd: Bring it on. Bring it on. Bring it on. Bring it on. Bring it on. Bring it on. Bring it on. Bring it on.

Kamala: We're ready. We're ready.

Brian: So in the 2024 election campaign, freedom and what the word even means are in play. Both parties seem ready to "bring it on" as the crowd was chanting there. So let's talk about freedom as a concept in american history and culture and the politics of today. With us now, City College of New York political science professor Carlo Invernizzi Accetti. He's also the executive director of the Moynihan center.

That's the public policy and scholarship center at City College, named for the former senator from New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. And he's the author of a forthcoming book, 20 years of rage, How Resentment Took the Place of Politics. Professor, thanks for joining us for this. Welcome back to WNYC.

Carlo Invernizzi Accetti: Thank you, Brian. It's a pleasure to be here.

Brian: We have more clips to play as we go from left, right, and Beyonce. But with different people using the word in such different ways, how do you, as a political scientist, begin to define the word freedom?

Carlo: The thing about freedom is that it has always been the site of a political struggle. A struggle over defining its meaning throughout its history and from antiquity. But I think in today's political landscape, a useful way of framing this controversy is in terms of two different concepts of freedoms that I think are better understood as poles in a spectrum where you can move along in this spectrum. On one hand, is what political theorists call a negative conception of freedom.

And by negative, they mean that freedom exists when there is not something else, and that something else is usually interference, interference with your own actions. And the great theorist of this idea of freedom is John Locke, who famously inspired also the Declaration of Independence in the United States. And he understood freedom very much on the model of private property. Freedom is the space you have, like inside your fence, inside your garden, where others cannot come in, and within which you're allowed to do whatever you want.

The alternative side of the spectrum, the other pole, is what political theorists call a positive idea of freedom, where freedom is defined not as the absence of something, but as the presence of something, as the existence of self-determination, as the capacity to rule oneself. And this is a much thicker idea because it is not a property, it is not something that you have, but it's more an activity. It's something that you do. Freedom is something that you partake in as an activity.

And as such, it's not something that can only be had but may require some thicker conditions. So, for instance, from a positive idea of freedom, you have to have, of course, the right to vote, but also other rights that enable you to engage in the activities of freedom. So, for instance, social rights, having healthcare might be an essential condition for being able to engage in self-determination.

So the operative distinction here between negative and positive freedom is, on one hand, the freedom from, which would be negative freedom, and it's the absence of interference, or a freedom to, a freedom to self determine yourself, which has conditions and may require other more social rights, like healthcare, like the right to vote and things like that. That is the polarity of the debate.

Brian: So you would say one of those kinds of freedoms lives more on the left and the other more on the right?

Carlo: Well, traditionally, historically, at least, actually both were on the left. The concept of freedom in modernity emerges as a concept of the left. In the French Revolution and in the American Revolution, the slogan of the French Revolution was freedom, equality, and fraternity, which was opposed to the slogan of the right, which was authority, tradition, and religion. So traditionally, freedom was a concept of the left.

It's actually only during the Cold War that when the left found itself on its back foot defending freedom because of its connection with the tradition of socialism, that the right, in a polemical way, took up the idea of freedom against the left but in this very negative way. They sought to deflate the idea of freedom. In fact, these concepts, positive and negative freedom, emerged from the Cold War.

From an author named Isaiah Berlin when 1956 writes an article called Two Concepts of Freedom defending a negative idea of freedom as absence of interference from the government, primarily, in a polemical way against the right. And the left found itself on the defensive, especially in America, and lost, let's say, it's ownership of the concept of freedom, giving it over to the right up to what you mentioned before, people like Reagan or Thatcher, that really made freedom the battle cry of the right. It actually has been--

Brian: And--- Go ahead. It actually has been.

Carlo: It actually has been a little while that the progressive side of the democratic party in the United States has been seeking to reclaim the concept of freedom from the right, at least for a decade, that they've been pushing for a thicker idea of freedom. Because, as the historian of United States, Eric Foner, has noted in the United States, there is a particular history where freedom has always been the centerpiece of American politics. It's like a flag. Everybody wants to have it.

If you can own the concept of freedom, you're probably going to be doing well politically. So the left has for a while launched this attempt to reclaim it that now is bearing fruit in the presidential campaign with Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, who have made it a strategic decision to reclaim it from the right. And also in so doing, also redefine it in a more expansive way. In all the quotes that you mentioned from Kamala Harris, you can always note that she always says freedom to, the freedom not just to get by, but to get ahead, the freedom to be safe from gun violence.

So they're trying to give a thicker idea that involves also more expansive rights like health care, paid family leave. Some of the things Tim Walz has advanced as governor of Minnesota as a redefinition and reclaiming of the concept of freedom.

Brian: So, listeners, what do you think of when you think of the word freedom? 212-433-WNYC. 212-433-9692. If you identify as more on the left or more on the right or anything else, do you think certain freedoms are more important to you than others in that context? Or the freedom from as opposed to the freedom to, as our guest has been laying it out? 212-433-WNYC for self-identified liberals, conservatives, progressives, independents, anyone else on the word freedom and the idea of freedom, what that conjures for you.

212-433-9692, call or text with that or any comments, questions or stories you have about the concept of freedom in the context of the 2024 elections or any time in your life. 212-433-9692 for political science professor from City College, Carlo Invernizzi Accetti, who's also executive director of the Moynihan Public Policy and Scholarship Center there. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. And we have some other interesting contemporary and historical clips around this coming up as we go.

But professor, I did a word search for the word freedom going all the way back to the text of the US Constitution this morning, and I saw the number of times the word freedom appears in the Constitution. Do you happen to know the number?

Carlo: I do not off the top of my head.

Brian: Exactly once. In the First Amendment where it says, "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press or of the right to people to peacefully assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." That's a lot of freedoms in that little one sentence, but the word appears only once. The word free also appears in the Second Amendment, but not with respect to individuals.

It says, "A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." And also, in the constitution, the word free is in the First Amendment, and free exercise of religion. And the constitution counted enslaved people for purposes of the census, as you know, as three-fifths of what it called free persons. So the concept of free and freedom was there. So how do you analyze the place of the word freedom or the concept of freedom at the nation's founding?

Carlo: It's very interesting because already in the three or four mentions that you referred to, there are different meanings. The freedom of religion, the First Amendment, or the freedom of speech, is one that can be understood actually in both ways as a negative right, freedom from interference in your speech, but also as a political right, the freedom to speak, the freedom to practice one's religion. Whereas the Second Amendment is much more clearly a negative right.

It's the right of freedom from interference by the government. In fact, it's very self-consciously a right against the government of militias to protect all the other freedoms. And then there's this third mention, which is very interesting that you refer to, which refers to a much older idea of the concept of freedom that goes back all the way to antiquity, which opposes the concept of a free person to a slave. There it's neither the freedom from or the freedom to but it's a juridical status.

A free person is one who is entitled to rights, whereas an unfree person doesn't have rights, and in fact, can be owned by other persons. So even in the Constitution, based on the references you see, we can see Eric Foner's point that freedom is the terrain of struggle of politics in the United States, and these different conceptions. A more positive idea that I would associate with the First Amendment, the freedom to speak, which is essentially the freedom to participate in politics.

And even the freedom to practice your religion. The freedom of the press, are positive freedoms, they involve an activity, are opposed to the Second Amendment, which is a more negative idea. And then, of course, the longstanding American question of who gets to have these freedoms, who gets to have rights, which, as we know at the time in which the Constitution was written, was not everybody.

And so there is a prior question to all of the others, which is who gets to have freedoms, whether they're positive or negative. So this, for me, it reiterates the point that freedom is a terrain of struggle in the United States, like a blanket that people fight over and want to pull to their sides in a more right-leaning or a more left-leaning direction.

Brian: Rebecca in Cambridge, Massachusetts, you're on WNYC. Hi, Rebecca.

Rebecca: Hi, Brian. I called because my cousin is in Minnesota and he's a famous conservative blogger. And in his margins, on his blog, he has a quote from Winston Churchill, and it says, "Let us take our stand and arise for freedom as in the ancient times." And this has been on his blog for-- I think I misquoted it, I paraphrased, but it's been on his blog for 20 years.

And it's annoyed me personally for 20 years because it's always appeared to me that he was trying to constrict my freedom, and I feel the same way about the current political contest. And I'm really excited that Kamala is asserting her right and what I consider my rights to freedom. Sorry, I don't talk on the air very much.

Brian: No, you're doing great, Rebecca. What comes to your mind when you read your cousin's blogging tag there? Repeat it for me. If he's referring to freedoms of ancient times.

Rebecca: It's the Churchill quote. It's a beautiful quote. "Let us now arise and take our stand for freedom as in the ancient times." And I'm, again, paraphrasing.

Brian: As in the ancient times is the interesting part to me there, because certainly there wasn't probably, I don't know, maybe in ancient Greece or something, but there wasn't a lot of democracy in ancient times when you go back to a lot of places in the world. So why do you think your cousin--?

Rebecca: I challenge cousin John on that, but when Churchill said it, he was trying to fight Nazis and the terrible war that England won with our American help. Sorry, emotional.

Brian: No, that's okay.

Rebecca: All right. But for my cousin to claim it as something of the right, because this was part of-- And by the way, your guest did mention that in the ancient times, it was more a term denoting slavery or freedom, not the kind of political freedom that I consider this word because I have almost a romantic attitude toward the word of freedom and words of liberty. And, you know, I'm a very patriotic, very lefty, liberal, old-fashioned old lady.

Brian: Rebecca, thank you very much for a great start. Do you know that Churchill quote, professor?

Carlo: No, I'm sorry, I'm not familiar with this quote, but I do share very much Rebecca's confusion over the right's appropriation of it because, as a matter of fact, conservatives are quite latecomers to this struggle over the meaning of freedom. Traditionally, as I mentioned, the conservatives, which emerged as an ideology against the French Revolution, were opposed to the idea of freedom. They were opposed to it in the name of the idea of authority, the authority of religion, the authority of tradition.

And in my opinion, it's also because of this complicated relationship between conservatism and freedom, conservatism's traditional defense of authority over freedom, that now there is an opening for the left to reclaim it. Because the Republican Party has been going in this very conservative direction with Donald Trump, they're actually far less interested in freedom.

Donald Trump is, to the extent that he's a conservative, defends the authority of religion, but also he's a protectionist against the freedom of movement, against the freedom of trade. So while the Republican Party is giving into its more conservative wing, it is becoming less interested in the idea of freedom, which gives an opening to the Democratic Party to reclaim it in a more liberal way, just like Rebecca was saying.

So I share her confusion at conservatism's attempt to appropriate that term. There was always a tension in conservatism because of its defense of authority, which doesn't chime well with its defense of freedom. It was a Cold War strategy which proved very effective, but which now may be ending as the right goes towards a more nationalist conservatism rather than a free market liberalism.

Brian: Listener writes in the text message, "I think of freedom most fundamentally as a quality of human evolution, consciousness, and expression that is seen most through imagination, creativity, culture, and artistry. Thinking of music, movement, paintings on cave walls. These are human faculties that are empowered through education and community support structures. So I suppose this is a positive idea of freedom, that our systems of government must empower these experiences for all people so they can have high qualities of life." Writes that listener. Charlie in Westchester. You're on WNYC. Hi, Charlie.

Charlie: Hey, good morning, Brian. Thanks for having me on. I just wanted to make a comment. I heard briefly you were talking about religion earlier, but I just wanted to bring up Margaret Atwood's book, The Handmaid's Tale. I believe there's a scene in there, if not, it's definitely in the series on Hulu, where one of the aunts, who's a person who's in charge of all the handmaids, talks about freedom from versus freedom to.

And that the handmaids in this religious situation, being given a sacred task, has freedom from specifically, namely, freedom from sin, freedom from debauchery, even though their freedoms are most certainly restricted. So I thought that's a very interesting irony when you talk about freedom from, is it really freedom, right?

Brian: Professor?

Carlo: Well, I actually think that if you lean too hard on this distinction between freedom from and freedom to, it kind of tends to break down, like in the example that you were pointing out in the sense that you can have defenses of a form of freedom that actually look quite oppressive. And there's a whole tradition precisely because freedom has such prestige in our tradition, everybody wants to claim it, even the authoritarians. So rather than thinking of it in terms--

I introduced this distinction, freedom from, freedom to, as a schematic way, but I did say it's a spectrum. And if you lean too hard, it breaks down. A more useful way of thinking about it is in terms of thickness. How thick is your idea of freedom? The idea of freedom that the previous listener wrote in about was very thick. It involved imagination, it involves creativity, and as Brian pointed out, it involves the necessity of the government enabling certain kinds of creative activity.

And that requires, if you're working all the time or if you're hungry all the time or if you're owned by somebody else, you don't have freedom to engage in these creative activities. So that's a thicker idea. The right strategy from the Cold War onwards in its appropriation of freedom has always been to try to thin it out and ultimately to reduce it to what is was forelock, which was an idea of private property, and ultimately to freedom being the freedom of the market, absence of government interference.

So maybe it could be useful for a conversation and to clarify where freedom from and freedom to kind of get muddled with one another. Do we want a more expansive idea of freedom like the one that people like Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are trying to put forward, or do we want a thinner one, which basically reduces to absence of interference from the government, which people like the Tea Party Movement or Ronald Reagan were advocating for?

Brian: We'll continue in a minute, folks, to talk about freedom in the American mind and in the 2024 presidential campaign. We'll play a very classic 83-year-old clip from a seminal speech about freedom. See if you can figure out what that is before we play it. We'll play a hit music track about freedom that's now in the campaign conversation and how some conservatives actually say out loud that democracy competes with freedom rather than secures it. We have an audio example of that and more of your calls and texts about what freedom means to you. 212-433-WNYC. Stay with us.

Song: I break chains all by myself. Won't let my freedom ride in hell. Hey. Imma keep on running cause the winner don't quit on themselves.

Brian: No, that's not The Bian Lehrer Show theme. It's Freedom by Beyonce, which Kamala Harris is using on the campaign trail with the artist's permission, as we're talking about freedom and the Kamala Harris campaign, trying to take that word back from the right with City College political science professor Carlo Invernizzi Accetti, and your calls and texts at 212-433-WNYC. Professor, any thoughts on the Harris campaign featuring that song, or is it just self-evident and we'll move on from there?

Carlo: No, I think it's a very interesting decision for a number of reasons. First of all, the song came out in 2016 and was explicitly, by Beyonce herself, framed as a political song. And she even related it, even at the time, and then again in 2020 to the Black Lives Matter movement. So which can be and should be understood as a struggle for freedom in this more expansive sense. It's not just freedom from interference, but it's the freedom of having a life that can matter in the sense in which the previous listener, in my opinion, beautifully pointed out.

The freedom to be creative, the freedom to work, all these freedom tools that I think the song captures as part of the struggle for black liberation in our country. So there is a reference to that. It's also a beautiful song about not giving up and about continuing the struggle. And it captures the broader theme of the Harris-Walz campaign, which is this rediscovery of joy, this rediscovery of joy as a category, a political category against the fear that Trump campaign stands for. The fear and the rage.

I have written about fear and rage, about the emotions in politics. This is a campaign very much on the emotions, where on one hand, we have fear and rage, and on the other hand, joy and hope. Kamala Harris has very much attempted to polarize emotionally this campaign, and this beautiful song by Beyonce captures the joy, the freedom, and the broader sense of freedom that she wants to stand for. So I think it's an inspired choice.

Brian: Here's a clip of another Democratic Party politician who used the word freedom prominently. This is an archive clip from 83 years ago. And some of you may have figured out this is President Franklin Roosevelt. He gave a very famous speech in 1941 that became known as the Four Freedoms Speech. And in this 48 second clip, he lists them.

Franklin Roosevelt: The first is freedom of speech and expression everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants everywhere in the world.

Brian: FDR, from his Four Freedoms Speech in 1941. Professor, to me, the innovative part, the one that may have been new in political rhetoric in 1941, was number three, freedom from want. But you know a lot more about this than I do. So talk about the Four Freedoms Speech.

Carlo: No, this is a beautiful speech. And absolutely, that is the most interesting one, in part because it gets back to a point we were making before that if you push on it too hard, the distinction between freedom from and freedom to breaks down. Because the point that Roosevelt was making in that, when he was talking about freedom from want, was the idea that in order to be free, you have to actually have certain social conditions that enable you to act and be self-determined and be autonomous in the way in which the American Constitution and the American project want you to be that requires certain social conditions.

And the new deal was, in many ways, about guaranteeing those conditions. So, for instance, having an unemployment insurance scheme or having other forms of protections for work are part of freedom because they are the freedom from want. Everybody, I think, has this experience. If you're hungry, you cannot think about anything else. You will do anything to find food. And in that sense, you are not free. You are a slave to your own hunger.

If you want to engage in those broader activities of self-development, self-determination, creativity, self-expression, you have to be free from certain unfreedoms, which are, for instance, hunger, poverty, oppression, political oppression. And so I think very much in Roosevelt's speech, the concept of freedom that is at play is similar to the one of Harris's campaign, which is a thicker idea of freedom that involves government action to secure the conditions for enabling people not to be hungry, not to be poor, and not to be oppressed.

And therefore be able to express their true personality. I might be free from the government if I'm hungry, but I'm not going to be free to do what I could be doing, what I have the potential of doing unless I'm fed. So the reduction of poverty, Kamala Harris is right, is a fight for freedom. When she says, again, beautifully, "Not just the freedom to get by, but the freedom to get ahead." That's freedom.

There are material conditions to freedom. If you're poor, you're unfree. And this is the left-wing idea of freedom. This is the democratic idea. This, I dare say, is the social democratic idea of freedom that somebody like President Roosevelt was appealing to.

Brian: A couple of texts that have come in. Listener writes, "Harris has also spoken to and written about in her book, concept of freedom from violence and crime. Having been a prosecutor, so she's able to speak to the broad notion of freedom, freedom from crime, to vote, from government interference and rights, etcetera, in a way that resonates, perhaps feels deeper than those just responding to the right in a political context." That's an interesting text.

And another one. "It seems to me that a discussion of freedom should include the influence of the French encyclopedists who had considerable influence on the founding fathers. I consider Jean Jacques Rousseau's two books, The Social Contract and Discourse on Inequality. Any man should have the right, should have the freedom, righteous listener, to do what he wants," putting it in gender terms here, "as long as it does not interfere with the rights of others, other men.

"Inequality is measured in terms of property rights or the lack thereof." And the listener continues. "Of course, Rousseau did not include women, nor did the founding fathers, and they did not include the enslaved as equals. Differential statuses and rights in action prevail today." So there's a pretty thick comment on freedom. Helene in Otis, Massachusetts, is calling in on this. Helene, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Helene: Yes. I think that it's too narrow to talk about freedom as either positive or negative because almost every freedom implies both. If I have the freedom to practice my religion, I also have the freedom not to have your religion imposed upon me. If government is not supposed to impede my speech, I have the right to talk. So I'm not really sure of the point of the narrow definition of either positive or negative. Some fit into that characterization, but many of them are just double-sided. They're both the freedom to do and the freedom to be oppressed from.

Brian: Professor.

Carlo: I completely agree with this point. And I mentioned, which is why I think the left-right struggle over freedom is more a struggle over the thickness or thinness of it. In the language of political theory, it's often framed as a negative versus positive freedom debate. But I agree that actually all freedom tos involve some freedom froms. So especially if you want a thicker conception, you cannot get rid of the thinner ideas. We need to have a space of action in order to act.

So I agree with the listener in this regard. I also wanted to get back to one other comment that was made prior, because I think it's very important and in some ways related to this. When Kamala Harris talks about the freedom from crime, again, it goes in the last listener's direction because it points to the idea that even freedom from is a very important concept. But I think it's also strategically a very smart move because it inverts from within what is maybe the right's most important appeal to freedom, which is the Second Amendment. And the idea that freedom involves the freedom to have guns.

And that is, of course, of all of them, the most negative freedom because nobody wants to say that we have the freedom to shoot. It's about having the freedom to possess guns, so freedom from government interference in guns. What this idea of freedom from crime does and freedom from school shootings does is take that negative idea of freedom and turn it on its head and say, "Yes, but even though we respect the Second Amendment and freedom to have guns, we have to have regulation in order to protect the freedom to be free from crime."

And this is a very French idea, in fact, a very Rousseauian idea, to go back to the other listener, the idea that regulation can be a form of freedom. From a minimalist, negative, or if you want to say, thin idea of freedom, all law is the opposite of freedom. Another philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, famously said, liberty is the silence of the law. And this is the negative, liberal, minimalist idea of freedom, that freedom is the opposite of regulation.

From the point of view of a thicker idea of freedom, a more positive idea of freedom, actually, it's not enough to have this freedom from, you have to have more to it. So this is the interesting point that regulation can be a form of freedom, government intervention can enable freedom. Government is not the opposite of freedom, government can be a condition or even a vehicle for freedom-enhancing actions.

Brian: For the last stretch of this segment, I want to get into this notion of some on the right who see freedom and democracy as competitive with each other and who even declare that they see freedom as they define it as, "More important than democracy." There's the case of Silicon Valley tech mogul Peter Thiel, guy who created PayPal and Palantir. He's a big JD Vance financial supporter. I've read he's been JD Vance's biggest financial benefactor in Vance's political career.

Vance, obviously Trump's running mate. I'm going to read an excerpt from a recent Atlantic magazine article that contextualizes Thiel's shocking quote, Renouncing Democracy. The article, by Barton Gellman written last year in the Atlantic says, "Something changed for Thiel in 2009, the first of several swings of his political pendulum." That year, he wrote a manifesto titled The Education of a Libertarian, in which he disavowed electoral politics as a vehicle for reshaping society.

"The people," he concluded, "could not be trusted with important decisions." He wrote, quote, "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." I'll repeat that because it's so shocking. You probably didn't believe it when you first heard it. "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible," Peter Thiel wrote. And the article says it was a striking declaration. An even more notable one followed. He wrote, "Since 2020--"

I'm sorry, Peter Thiel wrote, "Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise voting to women, two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians, have rendered the notion of capitalist democracy into an oxymoron." And thats pretty thick and ill ask our guest to decipher it. But the Atlantic article points out, "He elaborated after some backlash that he did not literally oppose women's suffrage, but neither did he affirm his life support for it."

So that from the Atlantic last year. Professor, that is just one rich businessman. But is the idea that he's espousing there that freedom competes with democracy and he's losing faith in democracy a rising one, not just particular to him?

Carlo: Well, I actually say it's quite an old idea. It's a Cold War idea. It was a mainstay of Cold War discourse because the idea there was precisely to reduce freedom to the freedom of the markets, to the freedom of private property, and to oppose democracy as any kind of regulation. So this thinning out of freedom to just mean freedom from intervention by the government was a key argument made throughout the Cold War, for instance, by people like Friedrich von Hayek.

An ideologue of neoliberalism who was famously skeptical of democracy precisely because he knew that if the people have a role and have a say in running how the government regulates the economy, there will be more redistribution, there will be more social rights because people want healthcare, people want rights. And he was very afraid of the idea of people having a say in government because he knew that might interfere with the free market.

So here, we really have the stark opposition between the two ideas of freedom. If freedom is only freedom from and is essentially a free market, it is opposed to democracy because the people want to regulate, often the market. But if you have a more expansive idea of freedom as self-determination, I refer to the Rousseauian ideas that are encapsulated in the first three words of the US Constitution, "We the people," in order to create a more perfect union.

If we want to govern ourselves, and we think that that act of governing ourselves is an exercise of freedom, then you're right, Brian, that it looks absurd to think that freedom and democracy might be at odds with one another. The idea that freedom and democracy are at odds is a longstanding Cold War idea that only makes sense if you have the most minimal possible idea of freedom as private property, i.e. freedom of the market.

Brian: Yes because if you're juxtaposing freedom and democracy and saying freedom is the more important value, you actually have to restrict people's freedoms in order to put that into practice. You have to restrict people's freedom to vote, which is in tension with the other part of that idea. And to. Eli--

Carlo: And I dare say, it's--

Brian: Go ahead.

Carlo: Sorry. And it's not a coincidence it's a billionaire saying this because he doesn't care, he already has power in his life individually, but what he wants is lower taxes. That's what freedom is reduced to, is absence of interference from the government, absence of redistribution. So it's not a surprise that it's billionaires who are latching on to that conception of freedom today.

Because they have an interest in thinning out our idea of freedom and excluding from it the very idea of political participation, to the extent that it might lead to forms of government regulation, redistribution, and all the other things that the government can do to enable people to be free in this broader sense.

Brian: And here's one more example. The Trump economic adviser, Stephen Moore, long an activist for free market conservatism before he joined the Trump administration said this in 2009. And by the way, interesting that it was the same year that Peter Thiel renounced democracy in the quote we read before 2009. So there was a lot of that going around just as President Obama was taking office. Interesting, no?

Carlo: Of course. As we know, many people on the far right were very afraid of Obama in a similar way of the way in which they're afraid today of Kamala Harris because they come with this more expansive idea of freedom that is tried, that is tied to many things that belong to American history. First of all, the expansion of the range of people who have rights or whose lives matter.

And also the expansion of what freedom itself actually means when you have a right to it. Which might mean the right to have healthcare, the right to have paid leave, various other more substantive rights. So, absolutely. Obama was the beginning of a trajectory that Kamala Harris is trying to continue of bringing to the fore a different idea of freedom and, of course, hope.

Brian: And maybe a racial component, at least implicitly, to the fear that they are expressing at that time, which we should say out loud. But Stephen Moore said this in a documentary that year, 2009. Here it is.

Stephen Moore: Capitalism is a lot more important than democracy. I'm not even a big believer in democracy. I always say that democracy can be two wolves and a sheep deciding on what to have for dinner. Now, look, I'm in favor of people having the right to vote and things like that, but you know, there are a lot of countries that have the right to vote that are still poor. Democracy doesn't always lead to a good economy or even a good political system.

Brian: So maybe not too much more to be said about that than you've already said about the thinning out of the notion of freedom being market freedom.

Carlo: Yes, but-- Okay, that becomes explicit because he says it's about protecting capitalism. But I did want to comment on something else about this example of two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner because that is another strategic rhetorical move by the right. While they want to thin out the idea of freedom, they also want to simplify and maximize the idea of democracy reducing it to majority rule, reducing the idea of democracy to majority rule.

Actually, democracy has never meant the simple majority rule. It is always the rights of the majority in the respect of the minority. Respecting minority rights is an essential condition of democracy because you cannot have a majority if you don't respect the minority. If the majority abolishes the minority, it ceases to be the majority to begin with.

Therefore, to the extent that democracy contains the necessity of defending the rights of minorities, even that idea of a tyranny of the majority is a red herring invented by the right, invented by conservatism, simplifying and maximizing democracy in order to make this opposition between freedom and democracy more tenable. In reality, the thicker idea of freedom, as a previous listener correctly pointed out, positive and negative freedom go together.

In order to have majority rule, you have to respect the rights of the minorities, and therefore freedom, too, supposes freedom from, and they go together in this more expansive idea that Kamala Harris and Governor Walz defend.

Brian: So, last question, in our last 30 seconds. Do you think any of this that we've been talking about for the last 45 minutes even matters? Or is it too abstract and people just want to know who's going to bring down inflation and who's going to protect their abortion rights when we're talking about what matters to who's going to win the election?

Carlo: I actually don't think that it is irrelevant. I agree with Eric Foner that a lot of American history has been a struggle over the meaning of the concept of freedom. And Americans care very much about the concept of freedom. Even immigrants like me who come and get citizenship in this country come here because it is the land of freedom. And so for Americans, old Americans or new Americans like me, freedom matters very much and which is why people fight over it.

I think, in fact, people care more about these mood, emotional, ideological questions than the nitty gritty of policy that both Trump and Kamala Harris, I think rightly so, have been quite thin on because it's actually, as Kamala Harris has said, a choice over the future of the country. Do you choose freedom or do you choose protectionism, the government interfering with your affairs?

Brian: City college political science professor Carlo Invernizzi Accetti. And he's executive director of the Moynihan Public Policy and Scholarship Center, at City College as well,and author of a forthcoming book, 20 Years of Rage: How Resentment Took the Place of Politics. Professor, please come back when your book comes out. That's an advance invitation.

Carlo: I'd love to. Thank you so much. Brian.

 

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