How the right corrupted the idea of 'freedom' to promote its racist agenda
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As the COVID-19 pandemic has unfolded we’ve heard an awful lot from the right—a near-constant refrain, in fact—about their “freedom.” The word itself has become a shibboleth, wielded like a bludgeon against any attempts to rein in the virus: VaccinHow the right corrupted the idea of 'freedom' to promote its racist agenda
As the COVID-19 pandemic has unfolded we’ve heard an awful lot from the right—a near-constant refrain, in fact—about their “freedom.” The word itself has become a shibboleth, wielded like a bludgeon against any attempts to rein in the virus: Vaccine mandates? An infringement on our freedom! Closure of businesses? They’re killing our freedom! Masks? Social distancing? How dare you impose on our freedom? The Republican Party, we are told, is the party of freedom: freedom of enterprise, freedom from government, freedom from regulation. So many freedoms are being claimed by these people, it’s getting hard to keep up. Interestingly, the word “freedom” never appeared in the original Constitution of 1787 (the watchword for that document was “liberty”) but was added in the Bill of Rights, specifically the First Amendment, to apply to various universal principles such as the “free” exercise of religion and freedom of speech. The Second Amendment, according to the founders, was necessary to ensure the security of a “free” state, but beyond those two amendments there was really nothing explicating exactly what “freedom” was supposed to mean. As explained by Gene Slater writing for The Atlantic, that omission left a considerable degree of latitude in defining what “freedom” actually portends in this country. Slater notes that in the mid-1960s during the heyday of the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. and others embraced “freedom” as the purpose of the movement’s struggle against discrimination and racism. In that context, given the nation’s lengthy history of slavery, white-inspired terrorism, and Jim Crow laws, the demand for justice and freedom was nearly impossible to refute, and for those who had a vested interest in opposing equality and civil rights, that presented a very serious problem: No one could risk being tarred as standing against such a bedrock principle as freedom, even if there was a whole lot of money and power put at risk. So the question for conservatives became: How do we maintain and exert control over groups whose own desire for equal rights served to challenge the traditional status quo, the established pecking order? Read more
