The Danger of Politicizing ‘Freedom’

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Freedom in the United States is a word that has had more than one meaning. It has meant freedom for some people and the repression of others. In a democracy, freedom also means the right to take part in politics. So how can that freedom best be secured?

This is the fifth episode of Autocracy in America, a five-part series about authoritarian tactics already at work in the United States and where to look for them.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Anne Applebaum: Peter, there is a word that we are hearing an awful lot in discussions of democracy.The word is freedom. Protecting freedom, for example:

Donald Trump: Never forget our enemies want to take away my freedom because I will never let them take away your freedom.

Applebaum: Striving for freedom.

Kamala Harris: But us—we choose something different. We choose freedom.

Applebaum: Sometimes people use the word freedom aggressively, as Michael Flynn did here when he appeared on Infowars last December.

Michael Flynn: We’re moving towards the sound of the guns here, folks. And the sound of the guns is freedom.

Applebaum: Sometimes freedom is meant to be energizing, like when Oprah Winfrey addressed the DNC this summer.

Oprah Winfrey: The women and men who are battling to keep us from going back to a time of desperation and shame and stone-cold fear—they are the new freedom fighters.

Applebaum: But it’s unavoidable as an idea.

Peter Pomerantsev: Freedom seems to be a word that is embraced across America. I’ve seen polling research that shows that, even in this very polarized country, it’s one thing that people across the political spectrum care about. Even though we’re making a series about democratic decline, I have to say, I’m comforted by the fact that Americans love freedom. It means that autocracy is unlikely to get very far.

[Music]

Applebaum: That’s where you’re wrong, Peter. Freedom can be used against democracy. It’s happened before in American history, and it can happen again.

I’m Anne Applebaum, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Pomerantsev: I’m Peter Pomerantsev, a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University.

Applebaum: This is Autocracy in America.

Pomerantsev: This isn’t a show about the future of America. There are authoritarian tactics already at work, and we’re showing you where. There’s the rise of conspiracy theories, widening public apathy—

Applebaum: Yeah, and there are more and more politicized investigations, plans for the takeover of the state. And in this episode: the rhetoric of freedom.

Pomerantsev: Anne, the common conception—the one that I have, anyway—is that freedom is meant to be a good thing. Freedom is meant to be the same thing as democracy. Those two words—I hear them used interchangeably. Freedom means the Bill of Rights, the freedom of the press, the freedom of assembly, the freedom to choose who rules you.

Applebaum: Not quite. There’s another equally old American version of freedom, which is freedom to defy the federal government—you know, the freedom to go out into the Wild West and make up your own rules.

Jefferson Cowie: One of the great sort of struggles throughout American history is: Where does freedom rest? The biggest fight over that was, of course, the Civil War. But I think the entire American history can be seen as a tension between local versus federal realms of authority, with regard to this slippery idea of freedom.

Applebaum: Jefferson Cowie is a historian. He teaches at Vanderbilt University, in Nashville. In his book Freedom’s Dominion, he writes about a place called Barbour County, in Alabama, where the two different forms of freedom have come crashing into one another for two centuries now. He describes how white settlers in the 1830s refused to abide by treaties that the federal government had signed with Native Americans and, instead, would repeatedly steal their land.

Cowie: And so you have this really explosive moment where white settlers were promised, in some broad sense, access to land. They were denied it. And they took their claims of freedom against the federal government that was denying them the ability to take the land of other people—their freedom to steal land, basically.

[Music]

Applebaum: And then, after the Civil War, during Reconstruction, Barbour County also revolted against the federal government’s demand that freed slaves be allowed to vote. They staged this revolt in the name of freedom—their freedom to run their county the way they wanted to. Eventually, they unleashed terrible, horrific violence.

Cowie: And then on Election Day, 1874, as Black people came in from the countryside to vote, white people just pulled guns out of every nook and cranny of downtown Eufaula, Alabama—from sheds, from windows, from underneath porches—and opened fire on Black voters that were lined up to vote and shot them in the streets.

At least 80 were shot. Some say as many as 150. It’s a difficult number to come up with, but 80 confirmed, at least. And that ended Reconstruction violently, in what was essentially a coup d’état in the name of white freedom.

Applebaum: Then in the 1950s and 1960s, this version of freedom, the freedom to defy the federal government, emerges again.

George Wallace: And I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.

Applebaum: George Wallace, born in Barbour County, became governor of Alabama during the fraught civil-rights era.

Cowie: So the irony or the tension in that is: That’s the most iconic speech of George Wallace’s life. He only mentioned segregation one other time, for a total of four, but he invokes freedom or liberty two dozen times.

The more I dug into the local history and how local and state powers saw themselves in opposition to federal power and saw that their freedom was a local ability to control, to dominate, a freedom to dominate others—the land, the political power of others—then you realize, Oh, what Wallace is talking about is a very specific kind of freedom.

We allow the word freedom to work in the political discourse because it appears to be a kind of liberal value, but underneath it is actually a very powerful ideology of domination. And that’s what he’s really talking about there, because it’s at that moment that the federal government is coming in to take away their freedom to control the political power of Black people.

[Music]

Applebaum: Wallace advertised himself as a man of the people. He would say, I’m going to do stuff to help people: build hospitals, build schools, just like Huey Long a generation earlier. But at the same time, Wallace understood that the people in his part of the world also wanted to preserve segregation.

Cowie: He resists federal power in the late 1950s and eventually rides that to the governor’s mansion.

Applebaum: Jefferson Cowie explains Wallace’s style as a kind of neo-Confederate approach to freedom, and he didn’t use it only to appeal to people in Alabama or the American South.

Cowie: He talked about the flaming pioneer spirit of the West and the rock-ribbed patriotic freedom of New England, and he was casting a national vision, that this kind of anti-federal-government idea was a national agenda, and he could run for president, which he did many times.

Applebaum: This careful use of the term freedom did bring more people into the fold.

Cowie: Because if you’re running as a snarling racist, you only get so far, he realized. But if you’re running against the federal government, as freedom from the federal tyranny, now you have yourself a coalition, right? Now you have the anti-taxers. You have people who don’t want to deal with integrated housing. You have people who don’t, you know, want the federal government meddling in their lives. And now that’s a broader group that you can bring together.

Pomerantsev: So this is not what we traditionally think of as freedom—you know, the freedom to vote, to choose your representatives, the freedom to engage in politics. This is something much darker.

Applebaum: Yes—the freedom to dominate and to control in defiance of the law.

Cowie: What happened in Barbour County: The idea of civil rights and the idea of political participation were mobilized effectively in pursuit of the freedom to dominate.

Applebaum: Cowie worries that this idea of freedom can be used to break down democratic institutions.

Cowie: That’s the model that I’m afraid of for the future.

Applebaum: So what you’re saying is: We could elect somebody who would alter the political system.

Cowie: Oh yeah.

Applebaum: So it wouldn’t be that, you know, a dictator comes to power by driving tanks down the street and shooting up the White House but is, rather, elected with the consent of the voters.

Cowie: Right.

Applebaum: So does that mean that freedom to dominate could become a federal idea?

[Music]

Cowie: Absolutely. But my nightmare is that fascism comes to America, but it’s marching under the banner of freedom.

Pomerantsev: When he says, “the banner of freedom,” I have the image of the January 6 protesters, motivated by the Big Lie that the election was somehow stolen from Donald Trump, distorting that word.

Applebaum: Exactly. This was the way the word freedom was being used during the insurrection in 2021. Listen to how Michael Flynn addressed a crowd the night before the attack on the Capitol, in a speech at a place called “Freedom Plaza” near the White House.

Michael Flynn: One of the great things about being an American is our culture. In our DNA, we feel freedom! We bleed freedom! And we will sacrifice for freedom!

[Cheering]

Flynn: It is not something that can be taken for granted.

Applebaum: Cowie sees January 6 as yet another clash between different ideas of freedom.

But this time, the people who want freedom from the federal government are seeking control of the federal government, and they have the endorsement of the former president.

Cowie: The difference now is they’re beginning to capture federal authority, right? So these people who’ve been anti federal government are now tasting federal power. And this is something that people like John C. Calhoun from South Carolina and George Wallace from Alabama actually envisioned, that they could actually eventually take over the federal government, make it their own, and transform federal power into their own vision.

[Music]

Applebaum: “Transform federal power into their own vision”—that sounds like some of the things we’ve been talking about throughout this series. Tom Nichols reminded us of how easy it would be to subvert the military.We’ve seen how a congressional committee can be used to harass its chairman’s enemies, and, of course, the Justice Department could be used in the same way. We know how weak some parts of our system are; there is not a guarantee that the rest of it is stable.

Pomerantsev: This is not about the quirks of this or that presidential candidate. As Cowie makes clear, there’s an American autocratic tradition which has always been present, and it could easily come to dominate the federal government. Yet even as these forms of freedom seem to be winning public support, there is also another way of thinking of freedom in America.

That’s coming after the break.

[Break]

Pomerantsev: In the present day, we often hear about this idea of freedom as being synonymous with freedom from government—or, to be more precise, from democratic government, from checks and balances, from elected officials—that if Americans are just left alone, they’ll be free and achieve their best.

Timothy Snyder: The basic way that this argument about freedom is now run is that people say, The less government you have, the more free you are, which is fundamentally not true. If you have very poor government, the people are not free. People are then subject to arbitrariness and violence. They’re subject to the rule of the wealthy. Just taking away government and imagining people are free is a kind of magical thinking.

[Music]

Pomerantsev: Anne, you know Timothy Snyder. He’s a professor at Yale, and he’s written a new book, called On Freedom. He lays out a different way of thinking about the word.

Snyder: Freedom has been an axe, right? It’s been a blade which has been used to cut through things. And I’m trying to suggest that freedom should be more like a plow. Freedom should be a tool which allows us to cultivate things. Freedom should be something which justifies action.

Applebaum: So Snyder means that you are free to do something, not just free from something.

Pomerantsev: Yes. You live in a society that makes it possible to do things—to become educated, to be creative, to found a company, to be healthy—and that, not the absence of government, makes you free.

Snyder: I really think an argument for a lot of the things that people on the left want, in my view, correctly is freedom. But the argument is usually made in terms of justice or fairness or equality, and those are all good things. But both politically and, I think, morally, just in terms of the correct description, freedom is often very much more central.

Pomerantsev: But this year, Anne, freedom is more front and center. It’s being blasted out of loudspeakers at Harris-Walz campaign rallies.

[Beyoncé’s “Freedom”]

Applebaum: Yeah. At a campaign event earlier this year, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro used the word precisely 30 times in one speech.

Josh Shapiro: We believe in real freedom.

The task of defending our fundamental freedoms—it now falls to all of you.

It’s not freedom to tell women what they’re allowed to do with their bodies.

To do this hard work, to fight for our freedom—

—to freedom-loving Americans all across this great country.

[Music]

Applebaum: So now what you have is these competing ideas of freedom being put in front of voters in this election. Pete Buttigieg put it this way in an interview with MSNBC.

Pete Buttigieg: Yes. It’s important to make sure that people are free from overbearing government. But also, government is not the only thing that can make you unfree, and good government helps make sure you’re free from other threats to your well-being. Trump’s Republican Party has walked away from freedom.

Pomerantsev: I have to say, Anne, I really worry about this—about freedom becoming partisan. It means one party can try to claim a positive vision of freedom for themselves, and it also means the followers of the other party might oppose it reflexively, just for partisan reasons.

Applebaum: There is a similar argument to be made about the word democracy. A recent poll shows that word becoming partisan too, and that’s very dangerous.

Pomerantsev: I think one way to keep democracy is to make sure we use that word a little more carefully than we do now. I hear a lot of Americans say, Democracy is not working. And I know what they mean. We’ve been covering it throughout this series—a political culture of lies that makes people feel facts don’t matter, that you can’t tell fact from fiction, a justice system that people feel isn’t fair.

But that’s not democracy—that’s autocracy at work. Autocratic tendencies are to blame for this sense that democracy is not working. Even the word democracy is becoming so tainted for so many people that you have to almost avoid the term and really show how the growth of autocracy makes life worse for people every day.

At the local level in America, at the state level, you already have places where the outcome of elections are completely predictable. The districts have been so thoroughly gerrymandered that the same party wins ad infinitum. And that means the ruling party is no longer making decisions that matter for you, the voter.

Applebaum: Right. In many places across the U.S., these districts are so manipulated—they fail to reflect the voters so dramatically—that there are politicians who don’t have anyone bothering to run against them in races for state representative or state senate. So race after race is just uncontested.

David Pepper: In some states, like Texas, they literally call it a canceled election. It doesn’t happen.

Applebaum: Peter, I spoke with David Pepper, who’s written several books about how America is becoming less and less democratic. In a recent evaluation of elections in Texas, nearly 70 percent of races were uncontested, and in Georgia, it was about the same.

Pepper: It really changes the entire dynamic of those in power. I mean, think about the incentive system. If you’re in a kind of a competitive race,your incentive system in that kind of system is: You know you can be held accountable by the voters. You better deliver good public results, right? The public outcomes better be good, or you won’t get reelected. You have an incentive to be mainstream because if you were extreme, you’d lose.

Well, in these systems where you literally, for the most part, don’t face an election ever, or a competitive election ever, every incentive in that world is upside down.

[Music]

Applebaum: So autocrats and their enablers craft a dysfunctional system, the dysfunctionality, understandably, makes people disgusted or apathetic, and then they start clamoring for something different, something less democratic, because democracy seems so impossible, so incompetent.

Pomerantsev: When people choose notto engage—not to run for office or vote or participate—that’s actually just the beginning, because apathy, cynicism, and nihilism grow. And as they do, the appetites of those who want to degrade democracy and seize more power grow, too.

I’ve seen it in country after country. I saw it in Russia and Ukraine and Hungary. It’s no accident that Alexei Navalny, the Russian dissident killed, would call his struggle “the final battle between good and neutrality.” He knew that apathy was the enemy.

Applebaum: I have been in rooms with activists from all over the world—from Venezuela, Hong Kong, Burma, Zimbabwe, Russia, Iran—and this is what they talk about: how to inspire people, how to bring them together, and how to persuade them to care.

I’ve also been in crowds of demonstrators in Poland, as recently as a few years ago, surrounded by previously apolitical people who suddenly felt moved to carry signs in protest against the politicization of the judiciary. And I’ve watched a few people from those crowds go on to create organizations, to file lawsuits in international courts, to join political parties, and to help out in campaigns just because they thought this issue mattered, and they had to do something about it.

[Music]

Pomerantsev: But, Anne, these achievements—they don’t happen in a vacuum. People don’t just spontaneously go out and protest, and then great things happen. Movements take planning. You need to create coalitions—this is where a lot of people mess up. Ukrainians brought together urban liberals and rural conservatives in a common cause around fighting corruption, for example. America has had success with coalition building in its history. The suffragettes, for example, weren’t just radical women fighting for the right to vote—they found ways to embrace and engage conservative women and get them to join the movement too.

Applebaum: That’s right. At the time, there were large groups of conservative women—religious women—who disapproved of alcohol, who wanted the right to vote in order to push for local and then national prohibition. And even though the women who came together may not have all felt the same way about prohibition (and, of course, although prohibition ultimately failed), at the time they focused on what they did have in common: the goal to gain access to the ballot box. And partly thanks to that decision, women ultimately won the right to vote.

Pomerantsev: The answer to the authoritarian urge is not a democratic savior. The answer is going to be: lots and lots of people-powered movements working together, because that already is the essence of democracy and central to taking back—truly taking back—control.

Applebaum: That’s how you save democracy.

[Music]

Pomerantsev: When Alexis de Tocqueville came to America in 1831, he was motivated by more than just curiosity. In his native France, a revolution that had been launched, like the American Revolution, with high ideals about equality and democracy had ended badly. Tocqueville’s own parents had nearly been guillotined in the chaos and violence. By contrast, American democracy worked, and he traveled across the country in order to understand why.

Applebaum: Peter, it’s one of the reasons I recently started rereading Tocqueville. Like us and like George Washington putting on his Cato play at Valley Forge or Madison or Hamilton, he was trying to understand how you prevent the decline of institutions, how you prevent the rise of a demagogue. And he found some answers in the traditions of local democracy, in what he called township institutions.

And above all, in what he called associations—the many organizations that we now call civil society—he believed that democracy could succeed not only because of the grand ideals expressed on public monuments or even in the language of the Constitution but also because Americans practiced democracy.

Pomerantsev: Right. They ran local government. They knew their elected officials, maybe attended council meetings and school-administration discussions. They voted.

Applebaum: Right. Because of this practice, this participation, this engagement, they preserved American freedom, not just for the most powerful but for everyone.

Pomerantsev: And of course, Tocqueville’s book had the title Democracy in America.

Applebaum: Autocracy in America is hosted by Peter Pomerantsev and me, Anne Applebaum. It’s produced by Natalie Brennan and Jocelyn Frank, edited by Dave Shaw, mixed by Rob Smierciak, fact-checked by Yvonne Kim. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

Pomerantsev: Autocracy in America is a podcast from The Atlantic. It’s made possible with support from the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, an academic and public forum dedicated to strengthening global democracy through powerful civic engagement and informed, inclusive dialogue.