Not all freedoms accrue to everyone. Some are exclusively held, and they advantage exclusively the groups that hold them. Freedoms claimed by the religious right place their beliefs above ours. Freedoms claimed by the wealthy place their speech above ours. Freedoms claimed by corporations place their rights above ours. Exclusive freedoms come always at the cost of other freedoms: ours. And they have a common champion.
To Republicans, freedom means that corporations don’t have to follow costly rules that protect the public. To Democrats, freedom means not having to bury a child because of tainted medicine or faulty car-seats.
To Republicans, freedom means not having to contribute from your wealth to the common good. To Democrats, freedom means not having to die because you cannot afford available, life-saving measures.
To Republicans, freedom means that whoever can afford it can own government. To Democrats, it means having your vote count regardless of your station or race. It means democracy.
Freedom, to Democrats, means not having to work till you drop dead on the job because your retirement was in the market that bankers just crashed. It means not descending into poverty when you grow old or ill. It means not making the planet’s environment unlivable for short-term gain. It means a government in which rich and poor are on equal footing and in which people, not corporations, have rights.
Republicans have fought every one of these freedoms. Their policies make clear who benefits from the foundational and exclusive freedoms of conservatism, and it’s not us.
Exhibit A is the Republican anti-healthcare bill. It doesn’t matter what final form this cobbled-together, legislative sham takes. It is a declaration of Republican indifference toward human misery. It is a testament to Republican contempt for the common man. It is an indictment of modern American conservatism. And it is being marketed by the only practicable means: lies and scams. One of the latter is the tried-and-true “freedom” scam.
This scam promises to return to the people freedoms usurped by the government. Case in point: since the New Deal, government has usurped both the freedom of corporations to practice predatory capitalism and the freedom of the wealthy to build more wealth at our expense. Conservatives want these freedoms returned. That’s not the scam, mind you. That’s just a power grab.
These, however, are exclusive freedoms. Restoring them would worsen our lives and even imperil us. It is to provide cover that we are introduced to the Republican freedom scam. The scam promises to return to us freedoms that never were or that, under Republican rule, would be reserved for the wealthy few.
We are told, for example, that the goal of the Republican anti-healthcare bill is to return freedom of choice in healthcare to the American people. But the bill restores only one freedom: that of a few rich men to become far richer, and it performs this restoration by wrenching health care away from tens of millions of Americans. The wealthy will prosper; the poor and the middle class will suffer and many will die.
We have done well at bluntly saying how heinous the Republican anti-healthcare bill is. Now, we need to finish the job, and that will require calling out the lies and scams that support it. Call out the “ACA death spiral” lie. Call out the “CBO was wrong before and is screwing up now” lie. But don’t forget to call out the well-worn freedom scam, because that one will be back many times.
Any time you hear a Republican talk about freedom, remind everyone that the conservative concept of freedom has no use for constructs such as the common good or the general welfare or even democracy. Conservative freedom is a veneer, a thin layer of exclusive freedoms covering a cesspool of despotic impulses that would condemn the rest of us to serfdom.
Democrats must be that blunt. Republicans value wealth over people. Republicans value profit over democracy. Freedom, to Republicans, is nothing more than a bludgeon with which to club the unthoughtful into forfeiting their freedoms to enhance the exclusive freedoms of those who would rule us. Democrats must say so loudly and repeatedly.