The Wages of Freedom

The Harris campaign test drives a potentially powerful new theme

As has been *very* widely reported, Vice President Kamala Harris has adopted Beyonce’s “Freedom” as her campaign theme song. That’s part of a push to use the idea of freedom as a larger rationale for Harris’ nascent presidential run. As Anand Giridharadas describes in his newsletter today, Harris is articulating a view freedom of that is not merely “negative freedom,” freedom from, but also as freedom to: “The freedom not just to get by, but to get ahead. The freedom to be safe from gun violence. The freedom to make decisions about your own body. We choose a future where no child lives in poverty. Where we can all afford healthcare….”

Giridharadas and many others have observed that American liberals long ago ceded the term freedom to the American right. A central figure in that trajectory was Ronald Reagan who, in 1964, stirred the GOP convention with calls for a new embrace of freedom in opposition to big government, New Deal liberalism. That speech was in support of Barry Goldwater’s doomed quest for the presidency. But Reagan himself carried the banner of freedom to two landslide presidential victories, in the process reshaping American politics. In his and the right’s telling, freedom suffused all of conservatism’s policy goals. Resistance to civil rights laws? Freedom from government interference. Corporate friendly and union-busting policies? Economic freedom. Supporting dictators in prosecuting the Cold War against the Soviet Union and later in prosecuting its War on Terror? Political freedom. And so on.

To be sure, liberals situationally embraced the term — “reproductive freedom” — for example. But as an animating rationale for governing, liberals looked elsewhere to justify their vision. In the process, Giridharadas notes, “the left committed a blunder, largely accepting the right’s dubious claim to ownership of the concept of freedom. The left pursued other themes. It pursued justice, equality, solidarity, coming together, hope, change, the future. But it somewhat accepted, often unconsciously, that freedom was the right’s thing.”

Freedom also has darker connotations in America’s political history, as I’ve written about before. But it was foundational to the approach of the giant of American liberalism, FDR. It was FDR who in 1941 framed the United States raison d’etre at home and abroad as a fight for freedom, embodied in his Four Freedoms:

1. Freedom of speech and expression

2. Freedom of worship

3. Freedom from want

4. Freedom from fear

FDR’s Four Freedoms, which became the ideological foundation of the postwar international order, was a capacious view of freedom, encompassing fundamental rights to economic security and a world free from deadly armaments, alongside the more “classic” rights embodied in the Bill of Rights. In other words, the idea of freedom has deep roots in modern American liberalism.

Among the frustrations of President Biden and his supporters is that he scored what many agree have been some of the most notable liberal policy successes in decades, without getting credit for what he did. These have included significant expansion of subsidies for and affordable access to health care; meaningful investments in infrastructure; consumer-friendly policies reducing junk fees and banning discriminatory lending; expanding overtime pay for millions of workers; student loan forgiveness for millions more, despite Republican and judicial efforts to block that, to name a few.

Biden’s bet was that if you deliver tangible goods to people — as he has attempted to do, for example, with broad student loan forgiveness — they’ll reward you politically. Biden’s abysmal and sinking approval ratings, a result of the spike in inflation earlier in his presidency and other factors, show that he was losing that bet. So, Harris appears to be trying something different. She will, of course, tout the administration’s legislative successes, while highlighting what Trump would do to reverse those, such as trying to end Obamacare. But her campaign has decided, apparently, that goodies by themselves don’t necessarily translate into votes. You need an animating rationale for your policy approach and you need to draw not only a policy contrast with your opponent, but a visionary one.

And perhaps it’s not surprising that a woman would frame freedom in some of the ways Harris appears to be trying. Women know all too well, for example, the burdens of a lack of child care for their own and their family’s life chances and choices. They know all too well how the threat of violence binds women and perhaps their children to potentially deadly relationships, as well as what it means to be threatened with criminal prosecution if they need to end a pregnancy. Freedom isn’t just the freedom to do whatever you want, the libertarian version of the idea. Harris’ notion of freedom, she seems to be arguing, is to create the policy context in which you can make choices for yourself and your loved ones that allow you to live secure, fruitful lives.

Of course, freedom can be part of a vapid slogan, like any other word. But the concept has such powerful resonance in American discourse that it’s an important political project to try to reclaim it. And if it can be anchored to a substantively progressive policy agenda, it can excite people about those policy aims in ways that just trying to sell people on their improving “pocketbooks” won’t. That’s in part because the idea that Americans vote their pocketbooks is largely a myth. People are more motivated in their political behavior by a sense of how their own circumstances fit within broader narratives of prosperity or deprivation, than they are in a cold calculus of their own bank accounts. Indeed, polling consistently shows that a clear majority of Americans feels good or very good about their own economic circumstances. But they still give “the economy” very poor marks.

Much of the reality of a Harris presidency, if we get there, would be prosaic, compromised and constrained. That’s the nature of the beast. But it’s an interesting early sign that Harris is attempting to provide a narrative framework around the policies she wants to advocate for, one that goes beyond a wonkish recitation of legislative gains that may not motivate ordinary folks to support a candidate.