Whose Freedom? The Battle Over America's Most Important Idea

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In the Name of Freedom

Ideas matter. Perhaps no idea has mattered more in American history than the idea of freedom. The central thesis of this book is simple. There are two very different views of freedom in America today, arising from two very different moral and political worldviews dividing the country. The traditional idea of freedom is progressive. One can see traditional values most clearly in the direction of change that has been demanded and applauded over two centuries. America has been a nation of activists, consistently expanding its most treasured freedoms:

• The expansion of citizen participation and voting rights from white male property owners to non-property owners, to former slaves, to women, to those excluded by prejudice, to younger voters
• The expansion of opportunity, good jobs, better working conditions, and benefits to more and more Americans, from men to women, from white to nonwhite, from native born to foreign born, from English speaking to non-English speaking
• The expansion of worker rightsÑfreedom from inhumane working conditions–through unionization: from slave labor to the eight-hour day, the five-day week, worker compensation, sick leave, overtime pay, paid vacations, pregnancy leave, and so on
• The expansion of public education from grade school to high school to college to postgraduate education
• The expansion of knowledge through science from isolated figures like Benjamin Franklin to scientific institutions in the great universities and governmental institutions like the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health
• The expansion of public health and life expectancy
• The expansion of consumer protection through more effective government regulation of immoral or irresponsible corporations and class action suits within the civil justice system
• The expansion of diverse media and free speech from small newspapers to the vast media/Internet possibilities of today
• The expansion of access to capital from wealthy landholders and bankers to all the ways ordinary people–more and more of them–can borrow money today
• The expansion, throughout the world, of freedom from colonial rule– for the most part with the backing of American foreign policy.

These are among the progressive trends in American history. Progress has not always been linear, and the stages have been far from perfect, but the trends have been there—until recently. The rise of radical conservatism in America threatens to stop and reverse these and other progressive trends together with the progressive ideal of freedom that has propelled them all.

Indeed, the reversal has proceeded at a rapid pace. Voting rights are being threatened, good-paying jobs eliminated or exported, benefits cut or eliminated. Public education is being gutted and science is under attack. The media is being consolidated, corporate regulations eliminated, the civil justice system threatened, public health programs cut. Unions are being destroyed and benefits taken away. There are new bankruptcy laws limiting access to capital for ordinary people. And we are seeing the promotion of a new form of free-market colonialism in the guise of free-trade agreements and globalization, and even the use of military force to support these policies.

But for radical conservatives, these developments are not movements away from freedom but toward their version of freedom. Where most Americans in the last century have seen an expansion of freedoms, these conservatives see curtailments of what they consider “freedom.” What makes them “conservatives” is not that they want to conserve the achievements of those who fought to deepen American democracy. It’s the reverse: They want to go back to before these progressive freedoms were established. What they want to conserve is, in most cases, the situation prior to the expansion of traditional American ideas of freedom: before the great expansion of voting rights, before unions and worker protections and pensions, before civil rights legislation, before public health and environmental protections, before Social Security and Medicare, before scientific discoveries contradicted fundamentalist religious dogma. That is why they harp so much on narrow so-called originalist readings of the Constitution—on its letter, not its spirit—on “activist judges” rather than an inherently activist population.

We will be asking three questions:

• How are radical conservatives achieving their reversal of freedom?
• Why do they want to reverse traditional freedoms?
• What do they mean by “freedom”?

Freedom defines what America is—and it is now up for grabs. The radical right is in the process of redefining the very idea. To lose freedom is a terrible thing; to lose the idea of freedom is even worse.

The constant repetition of the words “liberty” and “freedom” by the right-wing message machine is one of the mechanisms of the idea theft in progress. When the words are used by the right, their meaning shifts—gradually, almost imperceptibly, but it shifts.

The speeches at the 2004 Republican National Convention constantly invoked the words “freedom,” “free,” and “liberty.” George W. Bush, in his second inaugural address, used these words forty-nine times in a twenty-minute speech—every forty-third word. And if you take into account the opposites—“tyranny,” “dictatorship,” “slavery,” and so on—as well as associated words like “democracy,” the proportion rises higher. From freedom fries to the Freedom Film Festival, the right wing is claiming the words “liberty” and “freedom” as their brand: Jerry Falwell’s National Liberty Journal, Liberty University, Liberty Counsel, Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom, and the list goes on.

To many progressives, the right’s use of “freedom” is pure hypocrisy, and George W. Bush is the leading hypocrite. How, liberals ask, can Bush mean anything at all by “freedom” when he imprisons hundreds of people in Guantánamo indefinitely with no due process in the name of freedom; when he sanctions torture in the name of freedom; when he starts a preemptive war on false premises and retroactively claims it is being waged in the name of freedom; when he causes the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians in the name of freedom; when he supports oppressive regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan, while claiming to promote freedom in the Islamic world; when he sanctions the disenfranchisement of African-American voters in Florida and Ohio in the name of freedom; when he orders spying on American citizens in America without a warrant in the name of freedom; when, in the name of freedom, he seeks to prevent women from making their own medical decisions, to stop loving couples who want to marry, to stop families from being able to remove life supports when their loved ones are all but technically dead.

How can Bush mean anything by “freedom” when he works against Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s four freedoms: freedom of speech and religion and freedom from want and fear? His policies work against freedom from want by pushing more Americans into poverty, by denying even a minuscule increase in the minimum wage, by seeking to end Social Security. By promoting a siege mentality—announcing orange alerts and talking relentlessly about “terror”—he creates and maintains a sense of fear, virtually a permanent state of emergency, rather then offering freedom from fear. The U.S.A. Patriot Act, passed at the height of this fear, provides new police powers to the government, abridging personal freedoms. He works against freedom of speech by encouraging media consolidation, by spying on telephone calls, by having the IRS threaten the tax status of groups that speak out against him, by requiring all attendees at his public speeches to sign oaths of loyalty to him, and by classifying more government documents than any other recent administration. He works against freedom of the press by secretly paying journalists to promote his policies and by denying access to reporters who criticize his policies. And he works against freedom of religion by seeking to impose school prayer upon those who don’t want to pray, by allowing federal funds to be used to promote one religion (Christianity), by tacit support of bringing a religious idea—“intelligent design”—into the classroom, and by pushing faith-based governmental programs of all kinds, programs that put taxpayer money and social control into the hands of churches approved by his administration. How, progressives ask, can he possibly mean what he says when he claims that such actions promote “freedom”? The conclusion of many progressives is that the use of the word in the face of these policies tends to make the word meaningless.

Yes, Bush’s acts do contradict the progressive idea of freedom—my idea of freedom. But progressives are engaging in fantasy when they assume that their idea of freedom is the only possible one and thereby deny that the radical right has any idea at all of freedom. This form of denial results in the view that Bush is saying nothing when he speaks of “freedom,” that he is just degrading the language, that he is no more than a cynical and opportunistic propagandist who doesn’t mean what he says.

In thinking this way, progressives are blinding themselves to the real and constant progress by the radical right toward cultural and political domination. It is tempting to dismiss Bush and members of the radical right as liars and hypocrites—but this is too easy. It is much scarier to think of Bush and others on the right as meaning what they say—as having a concept of “freedom” so alien to progressives that many progressives cannot even understand it, much less defend against it. Even more troubling is that the right’s gradual takeover of the idea of freedom is going by unnoticed by a great many people.

Most Americans believe that “freedom” has only one meaning. It serves the purposes of the right when the public believes that conservatives and progressives are using the same idea, disagreeing only over which side is its more vigorous champion. It serves the purposes of the right to say that there is no theft, not even a challenge, going on. The longer the attempted theft remains invisible, the better its chance of succeeding.

Even Democrats with impeccable liberal credentials are helping the radical right by engaging in denial. I was a guest on an NPR program just after Bush’s second inaugural, discussing the remarkable repetition of the word “freedom” in the speech. The guest who followed me was the brilliant and articulate Elaine Kamarck, an important figure in the Clinton administration, now at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. She denied that there was, or could be, more than one meaning of freedom. “Freedom is freedom is freedom,” she declared with utter assurance, echoing Gertrude Stein’s “A rose is a rose is a rose.” The right-wing talk-show host Rush Limbaugh soon echoed Kamarck: There’s one idea of freedom and only one. If Bush-Limbaugh freedom is the only idea of freedom in America, then the radical right has won.

But they have not won, not yet!

If they had won, if freedom had been redefined throughout America in their terms, if our freedom were gone and theirs were in its place, then there would be no need for them to repeat the word over and over and over. The point of repetition is to change not just people’s minds but also their very brains. If they had succeeded in getting their view of freedom into the brains of all, or even most, Americans, then they could simply take freedom as they define it for granted.

The Mind and Freedom

I will be approaching the idea of freedom from the perspective of cognitive science—the interdisciplinary study of mind.

There are many excellent books on freedom written from various intellectual perspectives: intellectual history, political science, public policy, sociology, law, philosophy. The history of attempts to understand the idea of freedom has a great deal to teach us, and I am deeply grateful for the important scholarship in these areas. Nonetheless, these studies have limitations. Freedom and other political ideas are products of the human mind. They are inescapably the results of human mental processes. Cognitive science and cognitive linguistics, as these fields have developed in the past three decades, have given us a new and deeper understanding of mental processes and the ideas they generate, including political ideas

Cognitive science has produced a number of dramatic and important results—results that bear centrally on contemporary politics, though in a way that is not immediately obvious.

• We think with our brains.

  The concepts we think with are physically instantiated in the synapses and neural circuitry of our brains. Thought is physical. And neural circuits, once established, do not change quickly or easily.

• Repetition of language has the power to change brains.

  When a word or phrase is repeated over and over for a long period of time, the neural circuits that compute its meaning are activated repeatedly in the brain. As the neurons in those circuits fire, the synapses connecting the neurons in the circuits get stronger and the circuits may eventually become permanent, which happens when you learn the meaning of any word in your fixed vocabulary. Learning a word physically changes your brain, and the meaning of that word becomes physically instantiated in your brain.
  
  For example, the word “freedom,” if repeatedly associated with radical conservative themes, may be learned not with its traditional progressive meaning, but with a radical conservative meaning. “Freedom” is being redefined brain by brain.

• Most thought is unconscious.

  Because thought occurs at the neural level, most of our thinking is not available to conscious introspection. Thus, you may not know your own reasoning processes. For example, you may not be aware of the moral or political principles that lie behind the political conclusions that you reach quickly and automatically.

• em>All thought uses conceptual frames.

  “Frames” are mental structures of limited scope, with a systematic internal organization. For example, our simple frame for “war” includes semantic roles: the countries at war, their leaders, their armies, with soldiers and commanders, weapons, attacks, and battlefields. The frame includes specific knowledge: In the United States, the president is the commander in chief and has war powers; war’s purpose is to protect the country; the war is over and won when the other army surrenders. All words are defined with respect to frames.
  
  Thus, declaring a “war on terror” against an elusive and amorphous enemy gave President Bush special war powers that could be extended and used indefinitely, even against American citizens. The Iraq War framed Iraq as a threat to our nation, making anyone against the war a traitor; when the United States marched into Baghdad, the war frame said the war was over—“Mission Accomplished.”
  

• Frames have boundaries.

  Iraqi soldiers, tanks, and planes, and Iraq’s leader, Saddam Hussein, were inside the war frame, since they fit the semantic roles of the frame. Outside the war frame were ordinary Iraqis—killed and maimed by the tens of thousands—the resentment in Iraqi families caused by those deaths and maimings, the damage to the Iraqi infrastructure, the Iraqi jobs lost because of that damage, the resistance to the American occupation, Iraqi culture and religion, the “insurgents,” the ancient artifacts in the Iraqi museums, the relatives of American soldiers, American social programs cut, the mounting American deficit, the attitudes toward Americans around the world. When you think within a frame, you tend to ignore what is outside the frame.

• Language can be used to reframe a situation.

  The Bush administration first framed the Iraq War as “regime change,” as though the country would remain intact except for who ran the government. Saddam Hussein would “fall”—symbolized by his statue falling, an image played over and over on American TV—and a new democratic government would immediately replace the old tyranny. As the insurgency began to emerge, it became clear that the old frame was inoperative, and a reframing took place: Iraq became “the main front in the war on terror.”
  
  Fox News used the headline “War on Terror” whenever footage of the insurgency was shown. During the 2004 election, Republicans were advised not to say “Iraq War” but to use “war on terror” instead, whenever possible. At the time of the election, three out of four Bush supporters believed that Saddam Hussein had given “substantial support” to al-Qaeda terrorists, as shown in a poll a few weeks before the election by the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes. The reframing worked.

• Frames characterize ideas; they may be “deep” or “surface” frames.

  Deep frames structure your moral system or your worldview. Surface frames have a much smaller scope. They are associated with particular words or phrases, and with modes of communication. The reframing of the Iraq War as a “front in the war on terror” was a surface reframing. Words are defined mostly in terms of surface frames. Examples are labels like “death tax,” “activist judges,” “frivolous lawsuits,” “liberal elites,” and “politically correct,” which are used by the right to trigger revulsion.
  
  In politics, whoever frames the debate tends to win the debate. Over the past thirty-five years, conservatives have framed most of the issues in American political discourse.

• Deep frames are where the action is.

  The deep frames are the ones that structure how you view the world. They characterize moral and political principles that are so deep they are part of your very identity. Deep framing is the conceptual infrastructure of the mind: the foundation, walls, and beams of that edifice. Without the deep frames, there is nothing for the surface message frames to hang on.
  
  As we shall see, the conservative reframing of “freedom” is a deep reframing. The surface frames that go with slogans and clever phrases are effective only given the deep frames.

• Most thought uses conceptual metaphors.

  Metaphorical thought is normal and used constantly, and we act on these metaphors. In a phrase like “tax relief,” for example, taxation is seen as an affliction to be eliminated. Moral and political reasoning are highly metaphorical, but we are usually unaware of the metaphors we think with and live by.

• Most thought does not follow the laws of logic.

  Thinking in frames and metaphors is normal and gives rise to inferences that do not fit laws of logic as mathematical logicians have formulated them. Political and economic reasoning uses frames and metaphors rather than pure laws of logic. Since metaphors and frames may vary from person to person, not all forms of reason are universal.

• The frames and metaphors in our brains define common sense.

  Commonsense reasoning is just the reasoning we do using the frames and metaphors in our brains. The conservative domination of public political discourse has been changing what Americans mean by common sense.
  
  Our commonsense ideas may not fit the world. Frames and metaphors are mental constructs that we use to understand the world and to live our lives, but the world does not necessarily accommodate itself to our mental constructs.

• Frames trump facts.

  Suppose a fact is inconsistent with the frames and metaphors in your brain that define common sense. Then the frame or metaphor will stay, and the fact will be ignored. For facts to make sense they must fit existing frames and metaphors in the brain. Facts matter, and proper framing—both deep and surface—is needed to communicate the truth about our economic, social, and political realities.
  
  Important national policies are made on the basis of deep frames, which characterize our most abiding values and define who we are morally, socially, and politically, and facts, that is, realities made urgent by those values. If facts are to make sense and be perceived as urgent, they must be framed in terms of the deep values that make them urgent.

• Conservatives and progressives think with different frames and metaphors.

  In Moral Politics, I showed in great detail how complex conservative and progressive systems of thought are organized via metaphor around idealized models of strict father and nurturant parent families. This is hard to see when you think issue by issue, but it becomes clear when we understand how issues are organized across issue areas.

• Contested concepts have uncontested cores.

  Important ideas like freedom that involve values and have a complex internal structure are usually contested—that is, different people have different understandings of what they mean. In general, contested concepts have uncontested cores—central meanings that almost everyone agrees on. The contested parts are left unspecified, blanks to be filled in by deep frames and metaphors.
  
  For example, coercion impinges on freedom. But different people mean different things by “coercion.” In the uncontested case, “coercion” is not further specified; it is left vague, a blank to be filled in.

• Rational thought requires emotion.

  It used to be believed that emotion mostly interfered with rationality. But when people lose the capacity to feel emotions, they also lose the capacity to think rationally. Conservatives have learned far better than liberals how to take advantage of the links between emotion and rationality. They are especially adept at using fear to influence voters.

* * *

What does all this have to do with freedom? Everything.

As will become clear, freedom, like any other social and political concept, is composed of frames and metaphors. It is also what is called an “essentially contested concept”: There will always be radical disagreement about it. It has an uncontested core that we all agree on. But it is a vague freedom; all the important blanks remain to be filled in. When the blanks are filled in by progressives and conservatives, what results are two radically different ideas expressed by the same word, “freedom.” Currently, radical conservatives, as part of the “culture war” they have declared, are fighting to fill in the blanks and thereby redefine freedom in their way. Currently the right is winning this battle.

Americans need to know what is happening to their most precious idea.

A Higher Rationality

I have two roles in this book. On the one hand, I am a linguist and a cognitive scientist. In this role, I am examining two very different forms of reason, in the service of a higher rationality that the tools of cognitive science provide. I believe it is vital to know how we think and to understand our forms of political discourse, to step outside of our own political beliefs and to see how moral and political reasoning work for both ourselves and others.

At stake here is the deepest form of freedom—the freedom that comes from knowing your own mind. If you are unaware of your own deep frames and metaphors, then you are unaware of the basis for your moral and political choices. Moreover, your deep frames and metaphors define the range within which your “free will” operates. You can’t will something that is outside your capacity to imagine. Free will can operate only on ideas in your brain; it cannot operate on ideas you do not have.

Free will is thus not totally free. It is radically constrained by the frames and metaphors shaping your brain and limiting how you see the world. Those frames and metaphors get there, to a remarkable extent, through repetition in the media.

If this sounds a bit scary, it should. This is a scary time.

Cognitive science, by making us at least aware of alternative frames and metaphors, acts in the service of extending the range of free will.

Beyond writing as a scientist, I am also an advocate. I believe that one version of freedom is traditional and important to keep for the deepest moral reasons. I believe that the other version of freedom is dangerous to our democratic ideals and to the moral system behind the founding of our nation.

My task in this book is to open up a discussion of these two views of freedom, to describe them as accurately as possible, and to discuss how to take back the progressive view of freedom that lies at the heart of our democracy—and to do so honestly, using framings, both deep and surface, that we really believe and that reveal the truth about our social, economic, and political realities.

* * *

Traditional American freedom still reigns in the American mind. Nonetheless, the right has made serious inroads: Tens of millions of Americans now think about freedom through the right wing’s framing of the idea, and the evidence of that is in elections, in polls, in legislation, in judicial decisions, and all around us on radio and TV. There is a real danger that the right will succeed. They have control of all branches of government. They have a tight control on political infrastructure. They have the bully pulpit of the presidency. They have control of an important segment of the media (Fox and Clear Channel). And they have framed just about every issue in public debate so thoroughly and invisibly that even very intelligent, well-educated, savvy journalists don’t notice. No, they haven’t won, but they are making steady progress—and virtually without discussion.

The danger is not just a matter of words, a quibble over semantics. This is a war over an idea. If the idea of freedom changes radically, then freedom as we have known it is lost. The reason is that people act on their ideas. Ideas are not abstract things. They are components of action. They define ideals. They create norms of behavior. They characterize right and wrong, and accordingly change our understanding of the past and the present, our vision of the future, and even the laws of the land. Ownership of the word means ownership of the idea that goes with the word, and with it, domination of the culture defined by that idea.

Moreover, that domination does not end at our borders. The United States is the most powerful country on earth and it is dedicated to spreading its idea of freedom. Whose freedom will that be? If conservatives define foreign policy and control the definition of freedom itself, then the idea that they spread will not be the traditional American idea of freedom, but in many ways the very opposite.

The radical right knows the stakes. The culture war they have declared is real. All the outrages I listed above are real: the Iraq War and its death and destruction, the destruction of our environment, the shrinking of our civil liberties, the devastation of our economy, the weakening of our educational system—all real, too real.

The Progressives’ Mystery

What progressives see as outrages conservative extremists hail as actions promoting freedom. Many progressives explain this by saying that conservatives are just greedy and mean. For the most part, I disagree. Some may be greedy and mean, but mostly they understand themselves as moral—but with a different morality.

Freedom, as they are redefining it, is the keystone at the base of this morality and its political agenda. It unifies radical conservative positions on issues across a wide spectrum of domestic and foreign policy. Progressives tend to fight issue by issue, while for the right, Bush’s favorite phrase, “defending freedom” galvanizes the fight on many issues at once. Progressives are at a disadvantage against this worldview if they don’t recognize it—and then counter it with a coherent and articulated vision of their own.

To illustrate this alien worldview, consider a line from George W. Bush’s second inaugural address: “Self-government relies, in the end, on the government of the self.” What does it mean? Why should it have a prominent place in his inaugural address?

I am not here to discuss mysteries for mystery’s sake. If Americans are to hold on to freedom as they grew up with it, as they have come to know it and love it, then they have to understand that there is a radically different and frightening notion of what extremists on the right call “freedom” shaping our culture and our political life.

You can’t stop it if you don’t see it.