Freedomπs Just Another Word

By Crispin Sartwell

(The voters greet Comrade Stalin's appearance at the rostrum with a loud ovation lasting for several minutes. Continuous cries from the hall: "Long live great Stalin, Hurrah!" "Hurrah for Comrade Stalin, the creator of the Soviet Constitution, the most democratic in the world!" "Long live Comrade Stalin, leader of the oppressed throughout the world, Hurrah!" )

≥Comrades, I would like to congratulate you on the occasion of the forthcoming national holiday, the day of the elections to the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union. (Loud applause.) Never in the history of the world have there been such really free and really democratic elections -- never! History knows no other example like it. (Applause.) ≥

Stalinπs speech Dec 11, 1937, Bolshoi Theatre

Outgoing Attorney General John D. Ashcroft forcefully defended some of his most controversial policies and statements yesterday, arguing that aggressive law enforcement and intelligence gathering were "expansions of freedom."

Washington Post, February 2, 2005

One interpretation of ideology ≠ which might be defined as language that seeks to erase and replace reality ≠ is that it is a rational attempt by people with power to make their power more pervasive and less subject to critique.

Another is that ideology is a psychosis: literally a mental illness induced by power that has reached the point at which there is no check on self-delusion. Stalin and Ashcroft, in the quotations above, might as well be asserting that black is white, up down, love hate.

One might have defended Soviet communism and its attendant repressions by saying they were necessary to modernization or to achieve a classless society. But without just lapsing into idiocy or madness you cannot say that Soviet communism was justified by its defense of freedom and democracy.

And you could defend wide new government powers of surveillance, detention, search and seizure and so on by saying that they are necessary to defend us from terrorism. But without lapsing into idiocy or madness you cannot say that an expansion of the police powers of the state is an expansion of freedom.

Suddenly the meaning of the term ≥freedom≤ is a central issue in American public life. Itπs the centerpiece of a newly single minded state political discourse. And so the question of whether it will float free of reality entirely in the lips of the authorities who wield it ≠ whether the term will mutate into sheer ideology - is a question about our identity and our future.

The term and its concept have been central to our self-understanding since before the founders. The ideal of freedom has inspired our greatest political thinkers and actors: Jefferson, Thoreau, Lincoln, King.

And if it means anything in a political context, freedom means absence of constraint by the state and the maximum possible scope of autonomy for each person. If the Bush administration and its ideologues are content to mean that by the term and use it as the basis of their governance, then I am content to let them run the country and to prosecute their agenda in foreign conflicts.

But the Ashcroft quote must give us pause, as must much else. The Bush administration has produced a huge expansion of the federal government and its power. Even relatively benign centralizations of power, as in No Child Left Behind, indicate a willingness to regulate whole realms of action over which at one recent time the Federal government claimed no power.

The Patriot Act and the related new limitations on the rights of citizens claimed by the Bush administration with Ashcroft as its point man, are obviously incompatible with the claim that their first and most profound commitment is to freedom.

And the fact that Ashcroft would justify all of this precisely as expansion of freedom indicates that at every turn, in every utterance, the use of the term ≥freedom≤ must now arouse suspicion and critical examination.

You canπt stake everything on freedom and then oppose gay marriage, or medical marijuana, or the right to end your own life. You can oppose these on other grounds, of course, but then you have to say why and upon what occasions these grounds override your commitment to freedom.

Stalin could believe the lies he himself told because there was no one who could tell him the truth and live. We have not yet reached that position, and to whatever extent we can for as long as we can we must hold our leaders accountable to the meaning of their own words.

Crispin Sartwell teaches political science at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA.

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