Let’s talk about how to make up our minds.
If you’re like me, you have friends strangely calling everybody on the left simultaneously fascist and communist and friends on the left wrongly calling everyone on the right Christian Nationalists. There’s a lot of nonsense out there. And it’s easy to get seduced by it.
If you have a passionate love for our America, you have to sort through a lot of chaff to make up your mind about what’s best for our country, unless you’re one of those partisans who will vote for a yellow dog as long as it’s wearing your side’s jersey.
So, how do we make up our minds?
Here’s how I think about it. We need a criterion to evaluate the visions and policies that fit America’s most important values. The one value that virtually all Americans agree on is freedom. Americans rank freedom higher than any other value and higher than any other country.
Freedom is the perfect moral compass in navigating our current politics.
The problem is that we don’t agree on what freedom is.
There are many ways to define freedom, but two fight for dominance in 2024.
The first sees freedom as non-interference. We are free when no person or government can interfere with our pursuit of prosperity as individuals or businesses. We are free as long as we have free reign in our personal and business lives. So, according to this view, the government has almost no role today except to protect citizens from outright violence and leave us alone to fend for ourselves in the workplace, either by working for ourselves or an employer.
If you don’t think about it too hard, that sounds appealing. Free reign sounds like freedom. But I’d say freedom - understood as non-interference- is insufficiently free. I can give a horse free reign, and she can go wherever she wants. That looks like freedom, but the reigns are still in my hands. I can always reign the horse in and make it go where I prefer.
If I’m only free when someone else or the government says I’m free; if I’m only free if someone else benevolently chooses not to execute their power to interfere with my prosperity, then I’m not free. Freedom - understood as non-interference in my personal or business life - isn’t freedom at all. It’s a facade of freedom.
Let me give you one example. More than half of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, struggling to sustain their families with food and shelter. Let’s not dismiss this with racist tropes: [quote state showing this as a white poverty problem]. How do we love our neighbors who live in poverty? If our answer is to let them rely on charity to stay afloat, then we are saying that those citizens should live in circumstances in which their basic liberties depend on the willingness and ability of others to help them out when in need. We can say they have free reign in their lives and pretend they are free citizens like the rest of us, but they are like horses with free reign, only able to enjoy basic liberties if others act charitably. That’s not freedom at all. It’s a facade of freedom. Those citizens do not share equally in the promises of citizenship.
That’s the conclusion that our forebears reached in the depths of the Great Depression when they imagined a safety net to protect people from extreme poverty in old age. Their conception of freedom as non-domination led them to create the Social Security system we take for granted today. A safety net isn’t about equal outcomes. It’s about equal shares in the people’s sovereignty. It’s the simple principle that the American dream entrusted to us requires constructing a nation where poor citizens are not dominated by the wealthy.
The understanding of freedom I advocate as our moral compass today is much more robust. It’s the concept of freedom the Founding Generation imagined we would achieve one day when they negotiated our Constitution. It’s what they fought for under flags that said Don’t Tread on Me. It’s what they had in mind when they created a nation based on the insight that all of us are created equal.
Our Founding Generation understood freedom as not being mere non-interference with their personal and business lives. They understood freedom as non-domination. They dared to dream of a society in which all citizens live not necessarily as economic or social equals but at least as political equals. Wealthy elites would not be sovereign: we all are together. We share sovereignty. A society where we all share the same political power: a single vote counts the same as anyone else’s. A society in which none of us are subject to anyone else. A society in which no one would legally possess the power to dominate another law-abiding citizen.
For the Founding Generation, freedom meant living in a society where no individual or group was allowed to dominate others. They were not stupid. They knew that they did not achieve that goal in their time. After all, they inherited structures of dominance built into the European ways of being that birthed them. So, they bequeathed to us the task of achieving that American dream of a society where all can live free from domination as we construct meaningful lives.
It’s tough to build that kind of society. We’ve been working at it since 1776, and we’ve not achieved it yet. But freedom - understood as our commitment not to dominate each other and not to tolerate domination by others - remains our moral compass.
How do we make up our minds in 2024? Our moral compass points the way. Which vision you hear asks us to give up on this American Dream? Which vision summons us like Sirens to settle for a freedom that is insufficiently free for all Americans? And which vision asks us to keep pressing forward towards that goal of a society in which every citizen - male or female, of any hue, of any faith - whether rich, middle class, or poor - enjoys freedom from domination of any kind?
If, like me, you commit yourself to construct a society in which no one dominates and no citizen is dominated - if you commit yourself to that robust understanding of freedom as your moral compass, your mind will settle on the choices that are best for America. And your vote will bless the next generation and the one after that.
Let freedom ring!
Pettit, Philip. Just Freedom: A Moral Compass for a Complex World. W. W. Norton & Company, 2014.
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