On Freedom: The Left vs The Right
This is the sixth in a series of posts attempting to expand the left/right political paradigm. You can find the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth posts here.
Fellow blogger Armand Diaz recently wrote an insightful post about what the word “freedom” means for Americans on the Right versus Americans on the Left. He noted that the Right is largely concerned with freedom from certain things while the Left is largely concerned with freedom to do certain things. For example the Right is obsessed with freedom from State intervention: freedom from taxes, freedom from regulations on guns, etc. The Left on the other hand, is concerned with freedom to pursue opportunities facilitated by State intervention. For example universal healthcare enables people to change jobs or pursue entrepreneurial activities without being limited only to those jobs offering healthcare benefits.
However this is only half the story. The Left has its own version of freedom from…, and the Right has its own version of freedom to… The Left seeks freedom from oppressive cultural norms such as traditional gender roles, outdated moral codes, or religious values that aren’t shared by the whole community. The Right’s version of freedom to pursue a good life is facilitated by the same cultural norms the Left seeks freedom from. For example, shouldering responsibilities associated with the traditional family encourages hard work and community connection, which is said to bring more opportunities, affluence, and success on all fronts. Living according to traditional moral codes brings freedom from the degeneracy of drugs, divorce, STDs, etc.
I’ve laid out these perspectives in the cart above. The visualization allows us to see how these two perspectives are pathologically opposed to each other. What the Left seeks freedom from, is what enables the Right the freedom to pursue its own goals. And what the Right seeks freedom from, is what enables the Left the freedom to pursue its own goals. Given these mutually exclusive perspectives, it seems the Right and the Left are destined to be locked in a zero-sum battle over the nature of freedom.
However, we can break out of this vicious circle by recognizing that the freedom to pursue our respective goals is only tendentiously predicated on the things our political opponents are seeking freedom from. I’ve tried to illustrate this concept by drawing dotted lines between the squares in the chart above. The lines are dotted in order to illustrate that the correlations between the squares are much less direct than we would like to believe. For example, the cultural norms the Right attempts to protect do not always enable success in life. Why is it that conservative communities across the country often suffer from higher levels of divorce than more liberal communities? And while state intervention can help people to pursue greater opportunities for themselves, this doesn’t always work out in practice, leading in some cases to a lifetime of welfare dependence. This is not to say that cultural norms and state intervention don’t have their place in society. Of course they do, and we need both approaches. What is missing is the recognition that our respective solutions for society are not perfect solutions. They require reform, recalibration, and rebalancing as our society adapts to continuously evolving circumstances.
We should also recognize that the solutions offered by our political opponents have at least some merit. For example, it shouldn’t be hard for conservatives to recognize times in their own lives, or in the lives of others they know, where state benefits such as medicare or free education helped them in the pursuit of a better life. And it shouldn’t be hard for liberals to recognize that their own educational or familial success has been at least partially predicated on under-appreciated traditional values like hard work, marital fidelity, or resistance to addictive behaviors.