Conceptual partisanship
What’s the definition of freedom?
One reason for D.C.’s nasty partisanship is that the parties use the same words to talk about different things, especially when it comes to the concept of freedom. How can two people have a productive debate that involves the concept of freedom if they each hold a different definition of the term? They can’t.
Gerald MacCallum argues that one’s definition of freedom depends on how he fills in the concept’s triadic structure. Specifically, he argues that whatever freedom means, it means that some agent (X) is free from certain constraints or “preventing conditions” (Y) to do or become certain things (Z). I won’t focus on this latter category here. To generalize, the Republican Party believes freedom means freedom from state intervention. The X (relevant agents) is Americans and the Y (constraints) is Government Intervention. The ideal is of a person entering the unfettered marketplace and civil society, seizing control of his own life, and taking responsibility for any ensuing benefits or burdens. It is an ideal of an empowered, dignified individual.
The Democrat’s conception of freedom is less clear. At the very least we know that the relevant Y (constraints) is not limited to Government Intervention. When Republicans talk about expanding regulation and welfare, their worries that such activities threaten freedom, in the sense described above, always linger, and sometimes loudly. Democrats are much less likely to raise these concerns. But that’s not because they do not believe in freedom. Rather, their Y category is more amorphous, containing constraints like Dire Need and Unequal Access to Social Opportunity. I am indeed putting words in their mouths, but on their view, one cannot be deemed fully free if he lives in a state of severe deprivation or if the benefits of the marketplace and of civil society are denied to him for some reason, say because of disability or discrimination. If one is hungry, it’s difficult to say he is free to make whatever he wants of his life; he can make no choice but to secure food, and in that sense dignity and empowerment escape him. Whether it’s the marketplace or the government that creates some opportunity does not especially matter from the perspective of freedom and one’s ability to live an autonomous life; whatever gets the job done, Democrats might say.
There are two take home points here. First is that the Republican conception of freedom is much clearer than the Democrats. You don’t really hear Democrats arguing that some progressive policy program expands freedom and autonomy by delivering people from dire need and freeing them to pursue their life’s purpose, or something like that. You do hear Republicans arguing that some progressive policy program limits people’s freedom to live a life free from government intervention. A broader Democratic conception of freedom lurks in the background, but it is never filtered and delivered cleanly.
The second is that when the two parties sit down to debate a given regulation, they are talking past each other when it comes to the basic premise of government intervention, because the notion directly threatens individual freedom from the perspective of Republicans, but not as much, if at all, for Democrats. Republicans believe the government ought to address issues like dire need and unequal access to opportunity, but that these problems are separate from the concept of freedom and to the extent that their solution requires government intervention, they represent a limitation of American liberty. Maybe a right and justified limitation, but a limitation nonetheless. Market solutions, which don’t entail intervention by definition, are preferred.
Since the Democrats don’t especially share this view it makes it very difficult if not impossible to debate regulation. Here is a place where philosophy and the meaning of values has, I believe, as big a role to play as economics and pragmatics. The parties disagreement over healthcare is, at its core, a disagreement over the definition of freedom.
-Jake
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