Selected Excerpts from Whose Freedom?
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From Part I, Section 2:Why Freedom is Visceral
Much of everyday thought is metaphorical, and we scarcely notice it. We think of time in spatial terms with the future as ahead of us and the past as behind us. We “look forward” to an event in the future and “look back” at an event in the past. One event may be “farther in the past” than another event. The inference is that it happened first.
Even thought itself is commonly understood using metaphors. Knowing is metaphorically thought of in terms of seeing, as in, “Do you see what I mean?” This is not mere wordplay. It is a way of understanding what thought is in terms of what vision is. If my writing is “unclear,” you won’t know what I wrote. If a comment is “enlightening,” it helps you understand. If a sentence is “opaque,” you don’t know what it means. Someone who kept you from knowing something can be said to have “pulled the wool over your eyes.” Reasoning about knowing uses reasoning about seeing—via metaphorical thought. It is indeed “eye opening” to realize that our idea of something as apparently nonphysical as knowing is grounded firmly in the physical realm.
Metaphorical thought is tied to embodied experience—the experience of space in the first case above and the experience of vision in the second. Metaphorical thought links abstract ideas to visceral, bodily experiences.
From Part II, Section 4: The Nation-As-Family Metaphor
Though the history of our country is progressive overall, there have always been partial conservatives—financial, social, and religious. There have also always been pragmatists—partially progressive and partially conservative in various ways, but wanting things to work: our economy, our educational system, our public health system, our system of national parks. The radical conservatives are reducing the number of pragmatists.
The radical conservative movement has not merely formed coalitions among the various types of conservatives; it is creating a real ideological movement based on strict father morality and the conservative version of freedom. By having a single system of values and their own idea of freedom, radical conservatives are slowly but surely creating an overall fusion of types of conservatives: a blend of the libertarian, financial, social, religious, and neoconservative.
From Part III, Section 9: Economic Freedom
Try to imagine what life would be like if all the people who could not afford health care suddenly went on strike. The lifestyles of the top three-quarters of the population could not be maintained. The American standard of living depends on the people in the cheap labor trap. This thought experiment gives us a good idea of just how very much those caught in the cheap labor trap contribute to American society as a whole—not just to the people who pay their wages.
Fairness is a central value to Americans, and part of that is fair compensation for work done. Correspondingly, there is outrage when compensation is seen as too high—like CEO pay hundreds of times the salary of an ordinary worker. There is a sense that what you make should be in proportion to your contribution to society. Correspondingly, nobody complains when a Nobel Prize–winning biologist gets a million-dollar award. If his work is world class and makes a major contribution, then he should be paid well. Similarly, those in the cheap labor trap whose labor is essential to society as a whole should be making a decent living. The labor market is failing the fairness test.
From Part IV, Section 12: Bush’s Freedom
Bush’s second inaugural address was a work of rhetorical art. More than half of the time, the use of “freedom,” “free,” and “liberty” was in a context neutral enough to fit the simple, uncontested sense—or either the progressive or conservative senses. The words could mean whatever one wanted them to mean, depending on one’s political leanings. Many of Bush’s phrases could have been said by a Democrat with the opposite policies.
Sentence by sentence, they sounded like traditional patriotic language. Even a liberal as sophisticated as Elaine Kamarck was taken in. But Bush was speaking in the context of defending his controversial policies. This made it seem as if his policies fit the traditional sense of freedom—which, as we have seen, they clearly do not.
While much of the time Bush was using a vague idea of freedom, he also made specific references to right-wing freedom, evoking the frames of the radical conservatives. There is the reference to “the force of human freedom,” linking freedom to the use of force. He warns us that freedom faces a dangerous threat: The “survival of liberty” reinforces his claim that the Iraq War is part of a war for our survival. The use of “liberty” within the American context is an appeal to conservative populists and an inherent attack on liberals who criticize the war and, in Bush’s view, threaten our survival. The “survival of liberty” also evokes the idea that liberals who oppose the war are enemies of America.
The association of democracy and freedom with fundamentalist Christianity and creationism is made by reference to “the Maker of Heaven and earth,” followed up by “the imperative of self-government,” where “imperative” suggests obedience to God’s commandments. The fundamentalist battle of good against evil is echoed in “life is fragile, and evil is real . . .”
Right-wing economic freedom and the economic liberty myth are evoked in the section implicitly attacking Social Security through reference to “the ownership society.” The curious phrase “preparing our people for the challenges of life in a free society” suggests that we are now economic slaves to the government, implicitly echoes the right-wing cry for “economic freedom,” and touches on the theme that discipline is required for prosperity. The right-wing idea that only the disciplined deserve prosperity and the freedom it brings is reinforced by the use of the code word “character”: “the public interest depends on private character.” The suggestion is that liberal elites are destroying the fabric of morality in America. Then, the heart of strict father morality: “Self-government relies, in the end, on the government of the self,” as we discussed. Neoconservative missionary foreign policy is then telegraphed in the important sentence “America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one.” And, nearing the end, creationism is tied to patriotism by invoking “the Author of Liberty.”
There are mostly uncontested uses of “freedom” and “liberty” in support, via context, of a highly contested policy, sprinkled through with the full range of right-wing uses of “freedom” and
“liberty.” The effect is to help commandeer both the word and the idea.
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