“Message Imperative #1”

It’s an imperative, I guess.

I have a new piece up at Discourse expanding on my earlier comments about how Democrats have been trying to gain the high ground on the issue of “freedom.”

I found out in my research that this was actually designated in one party meeting as “Message Imperative #1.” Here’s the report in Mother Jones.

On Tuesday afternoon, in one of the convention’s massive conference rooms, a couple dozen delegates attended a training session on how to most effectively speak to voters about abortion and reproductive health. “We are reclaiming the word freedom and we are running on freedom,” Gabby Richards, Planned Parenthood’s director of federal advocacy communications, explained to the crowd. A slide displayed on two large screens read: “Message Imperative #1: Focus on Freedom.” 

I also combed through the transcript of the September 11 presidential debate and found an interesting pattern. Kamala Harris used the word “freedom” four times, in two very prominent passages. By contrast:

How many times did Trump use “freedom”? Zero—and this is typical of his speeches. It’s a shocking reversal from the past 50 years, when Republicans from Ronald Reagan through the Tea Party movement practically trademarked the word.

So hooray for the Democrats—except that their talk about freedom is rather limited.

This message about freedom is not really new. Democrats are attempting a return to old-fashioned 20th-century left-liberalism. It’s the liberalism that will defend your freedom “to live the life you want to lead”—in those areas that pertain to your personal life, your lifestyle and especially your sex life. You will be free to read the books you like, to have a relationship with someone of the same sex, to get an abortion.

The problem is that their passion for freedom is limited to those issues. In your economic life, you’re going to be told what to do an awful lot, particularly in those areas where you are a producer of goods and services—which most of us are, in our working lives—rather than a consumer.

Freedom may be “Message Imperative #1,” but we have reason to doubt how much of an imperative it is beyond “messaging.”

I argue in response that “the two freedoms, personal freedom and economic freedom, are really just different aspects of one freedom: our freedom to make decisions about our own lives and futures.”

Read the whole thing.

Two Freedoms

The time is coming for me to give my formal election recommendation for this year—a bit earlier than normal, since early voting has now become so common. I don’t think there’s going to be a lot of suspense in my readers’ minds, but in the next few weeks, I’ll be laying out a long, multi-part case against Trump—and a very short and limited case for Kamala Harris. The ratio is very deliberate and reflects the facts of the case. We can scrounge around and find a few positive things to recommend Harris—but I’m going into this with my eyes open.

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In that spirit, I couldn’t pass up a delicious and totally predictable story about Robin D’Angelo.

You may recall that in 2020, during the George Floyd protests (and riots), corporations and big institutions were scrambling to show that they were on the right side of the race issue. So naturally, they decided to elevate the two biggest charlatans on this issue.