Do we really need another essay on freedom? When’s the last time you read one? It’s good to be reminded occasionally of meaningful basics. We get accustomed to being unfree, so it’s a good idea to be reminded of what freedom is. It’s also useful to be reminded that freedom, in the form of unfree people, is at the root of the American birth defect. We fought a Civil War over that idea. It’s also useful to note that there are fake or faux freedoms, like the desire, effort, and ability to overthrow free and democratic elections, as Trump supporters and many Republicans attempted after the November 2020 elections. Jefferson Cowie in his book Freedom’s Dominion: A Sage of White Resistance to Federal Power, noted that the Right has turned “freedom” into a dog whistle.
Freedom does not mean taking away the freedom of other people. Other fake freedoms include the saying, “I disagree with what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it.” I know of no one who has actually died doing that. The Whites opposed to the introduction of federal civil rights laws in the 1960’s claimed that their freedom to choose whom they associated with, lived next to, traveled with, and served would be impeded by these laws giving rights to African-Americans. Their version of freedom required a belief in the inferiority of another group of people. Gov. George Wallace of Alabama said in 1967 on national television, “When a central government bureaucrat or judge takes from us our right to run our schools, to determine the destiny of our own children, to run our labor unions, our businesses, our hospitals and our very lives, I do not call that freedom, I call that abject slavery to government.” As Eric Herschthal noted in The New Republic, “Wallace’s new message resonated with many White Americans outside the South precisely because he did not explicitly endorse racism but cloaked it in the language of freedom against an overbearing federal government.”
History professor Timothy Snyder has written of his fear that we are descending to lack of freedom in this book, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America.
Definitions of Freedom
Freedom is hard to define. Its meaning lies in oppositions. What is not free? Is freedom the inherent state of people, or is it granted? Philosophers see it as the absence of constraint on action and will. The extreme end of political freedom is anarchy. But even there, the actual anarchists imposed their ideological beliefs on others, for example the Spanish Civil War anarchists who executed people who wore glasses or hats as being bourgeois. The English philosopher Isiah Berlin said that freedom consists in throwing off a bad master, whether that master is sin, one’s baser self, class prejudices, or imperfect desire.
The famous rock singer Janis Joplin sang in Me and Bobby McGee, “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.” Before that, in the 1950’s, Lesley Gore had a hit song, You Don’t Own Me, with the words “don’t tell me what to do/Don’t tell me what to say/ I’m free and I love to be free/To live my life the way I want/To say and do whatever I please. During the Viet Nam War, Country Joe and the Fish sang, “One two three four what are we fightin’ for?” As my high school friend Bill T. wrote in 2024, “considering my military time spent in Vietnam I well understood even back then the two sides of the story and had enmity for both. It did not take long (probably seconds after being shot at) to ask WTF am I/we doing here?”
Freedom requires knowing. What have you lost? What have you never had? Why is it that rock n’ roll bands have been so articulate about freedom? For example, the band Devo sang, “Freedom of choice, that’s what you have; freedom from choice, that’s what you want.”
Paradoxically, freedom requires rules—emancipation proclamations, manumission, Constitutional amendments, due process, equal rights, equal protection, fair trials, juries of our peers, freedom of speech, the right to bear arms, civil rights, checks and balances.
In his Gettysburg Address, President Lincoln described the Civil War as a struggle for “a new birth of freedom”–his vision for a nation that provides equality for all of its citizens, creates a unified nation no longer dominated by states’ rights, and defines democracy in terms of “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”
The Civil Rights Movement wanted “freedom now.” Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in his 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail that “freedom is never given voluntarily by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” In his famous I Have a Dream speech at the 1963 March on Washington, at the end he invoked the old Black spiritual, ““Free at last, Free at last, Thank God almighty we are free at last.” He repeated the phrase three times. But this was aspirational. Here’s the origin:
“FREE AT LAST”
from “American Negro Songs” by J. W. Work
Free at last, free at last
I thank God I’m free at last
Free at last, free at last
I thank God I’m free at last
Some come crippled an’ some some lame,
Thank God almighty I’m free at last.
Some come walkin’ in my Jesus’ name,
Thank God almighty I’m free at last.
Way down yonder in the graveyard walk
I thank God I’m free at last
Me and my Jesus going to meet and talk
I thank God I’m free at last
On my knees when the light pass’d by
I thank God I’m free at last
Tho’t my soul would rise and fly
I thank God I’m free at last.
Some of these mornings, bright and fair
I thank God I’m free at last
Goin’ meet King Jesus in the air
I thank God I’m free at last.
Here’s a nice rendition of the song: https://foundations1.wordpress.com/2014/09/14/free-at-last/
While the song book was published in 1940, the collection of songs stemmed from 1902. The musicologist Work was affiliated with the Fisk University Jubilee Singers, who were singing it in the 1870’s. Work collected slave songs and spirituals. His father had been born into slavery and was a church choir director, whose members were part of the original Fisk Jubilee Singers.
It’s very hard to determine the origin of this hymn, but it appears to originate in Romans 6:22-23, “But now having been freed from sin and enslaved to God, you derive your benefit, resulting in sanctification, and the outcome, eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Why, one might ask, did so many enslaved African-Americans put their faith in the white man’s Christian religion, which was also used to enslave them?
The White Christians ignored their own Bible which said at Leviticus 25 that every seventh year, the Jubilee Year, that Israelite slaves are to be set free. Both the land and the people belong to the Lord, and both are released in the Year of Jubilee from any illegitimate claim on them. Isaiah 61:1-2 says: “The spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the LORD’s favor, and the day of vengeance of our God.”
The French philosopher Jean-Jacque Rousseau said “Man is born free and everywhere is in chains.” But North American enslaved people were not born free; they were born enslaved. Alas, people believe a great many things that make them less than free. A current example is political cults, though there is a long history of people subverting their will to cult leaders.
There are plenty of constraints on freedom, many from physics and natural law. I am not free to fly by flapping my arms. I am unwise to step in front of an onrushing bus, even if I feel free to do so.
There are also debates about whether free will exists. A number of thinkers today say it does not. For example, see Daniel Wegner, The Illusion of Conscious Will. The world is a complicated place, with many influences including physiology, geography, climate, environment, religion, ideology, politics, etc. This is not to say that will is not important. For example, in contrasting the resistance of Afghan citizens to the Taliban with Ukrainians resistance to Russians, it is clear that the will to resist is very important. The Ukrainians value their freedom highly, and one could hypothesize that their desire for freedom enhances their will to resist.
“The terms ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’ are normally used interchangeably by political and social philosophers. Although some attempts have been made to distinguish between liberty and freedom (Pitkin 1988; Williams 2001; Dworkin 2011), generally speaking these have not caught on. Neither can they be translated into other European languages, which contain only the one term, of either Latin or Germanic origin (e.g. liberté, Freiheit), where English contains both.” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Weaponizing Freedom
The concept of freedom gets weaponized. For example, the American historian Eric Foner has noted that most Americans view our nation as the “embodiment of freedom,” but the contest to define and act on that idea “has been used to convey and claim legitimacy for all kinds of grievances and hopes, fears about the present and visions of the future.” Conservatives have remade the idea of freedom in their own image and deployed it as a central weapon on the front lines of everything from the war on terror to the battles over religion in the classroom and abortion. UC Berkeley professor George Lakoff explains the mechanisms behind this hijacking and shows how progressives have not only failed to counter the right-wing attack on freedom but have failed to recognize its nature. Lakoff believes that Democrats, progressives, liberals, and moderates should emphasize the importance of freedom in political discussions. He recommends that we reframe our discourse in terms of freedom.
The American Dream. The American Creed
For most Americans, the Dream lies not in wealth, but in economic security, pursuing one’s passions, and looking toward the future. “The American dream that we were all raised on is a simple but powerful one,” Bill Clinton used to say. “If you work hard and play by the rules, you should be given a chance to go as far as your God-given ability will take you.” As Teddy Roosevelt put it, “equality of opportunity means that the commonwealth will get from every citizen the highest service of which he” — or she — “is capable.” The phrase “American Dream” was originally coined in the wake of the Great Depression by historian James Truslow Adams, when he wrote a book titled The Epic of America. (He originally called it The American Dream, but his publishers didn’t think the title catchy enough.) The phrase “American Dream” was first used in 1931 by the historian James Truslow Adams in his book The Epic of America. It meant, he wrote, “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone.”
Here are some common definitions of the American Dream:
Opportunity, liberty, freedom, privacy, mobility (social and physical). The principle of equal opportunity is a symbol enshrined in American history and in the politics of a nation that espouses its democratic principles throughout the world. One of the cries of the American independence movement was “no taxation without representation.” Free speech. It includes the myths of social mobility, upward mobility, self-reinvention, a can-do spirit, rugged individualism, progress, and the possibility of rags to riches. The American work ethic is that hard work can get you ahead.
An affordable home is a key element of the American Dream. A chicken in every pot. A nice car in the driveway. “[T]hat dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement” (Adams 1931). This strong commitment to an ideal that anyone should be able to get ahead leads us to celebrate cases of upward mobility. “Democracy is defined by a simple morality: We Americans care about our fellow citizens, we act on that care and build trust, and we do our best not just for ourselves, our families, and our friends and neighbors, but for our country. Americans are called upon to share an equal responsibility to work together to secure a safe and prosperous future for their families and nation.” (George Lakoff)
The classicist and philosopher Martha Nussbaum has enunciated the “capability approach,” which entails two claims: first, that the freedom to achieve well-being is of primary moral importance and, second, that well-being should be understood in terms of people’s capabilities and functioning. Capabilities are things people can achieve if they choose , their opportunity to do or be such things as being well-nourished, getting married, being educated, and travelling; functionings are capabilities that have been realized. The choosing is a form of liberty, and, as discussed elsewhere in this article, liberty is very closely associated with freedom.
On my refrigerator in San Francisco is a magnet showing the Revolutionary War divided and coiled snake with the caption, “Nobody’s treading on you, Sweetie.”
Freedom has its enemies. Feliks Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret police, the Cheka, wrote, “The fact that you are free is not your achievement, but rather a failure on our side.” Charles Peguy, French political philosopher, wrote, “Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.” Is that because freedom has elements of chaos, randomness, and entropy?
The Four Freedoms
In his State of the Union Address on January 6, 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt presented his reasons for American involvement in World War II, making the case for continued aid to Great Britain and greater production of war industries at home. In helping Britain, President Roosevelt stated, the United States was fighting for the universal freedoms that all people possessed. As America was on the verge of entering the war these “four freedoms” – freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear – symbolized America’s war aims and gave hope in the following years to a war-wearied people because they knew they were fighting for freedom.
The ideas enunciated in the Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms were the foundational principles that evolved into the Atlantic Charter declared by Winston Churchill and FDR in August 1941; the United Nations Declaration of January 1, 1942; President Roosevelt’s vision for an international organization that became the United Nations after his death; and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations in 1948 through the work of Eleanor Roosevelt. Contrast this with the view of US soldiers in the Viet Nam War.
James Baldwin wrote in terms of love and society: “Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover’s war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real.”
The French existentialist Jean Paul Sartre wrote of freedom as authenticity: “Being what one is not” is an abdication of freedom; it involves turning oneself into an object, a role, meant for other people. To remain free, to act in good faith, is to remain the undefined, free, protean creatures we actually are, even if this is an anxious way to live.”
Where Do We Go From Here?
August Wilson’s play “Two Trains Running” takes place in 1969 on the heels of the civil rights movement, but the production couldn’t be more timely. “Freedom is heavy,” says Memphis, the main character. “You got to put your shoulder into freedom. Put your shoulder to it and hope your back hold up.”
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Greetings Marc! Thanks for the essay. Democracy and freedom are at the top of anybody’s agenda this year considering that we are facing the super conservative Supreme Court and the possibility of DONALD Pinocchio Trump once again being in the White House.
Stay safe and stay well and keep on pushing!!