Conservatives’ professed devotion to freedom is mostly fake news, believes writer Paul Rosenberg. “Liberals and Democrats actually care about freedom substantially more than conservatives and Republicans do,” argued Rosenberg this past Sunday in Salon. “When it comes down to the most basic forms of freedom Americans have long recognized, conservatives may talk a good game, but that talk is largely B.S.”
The peg for Rosenberg’s piece was a set of results from a recent NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll. In his telling, on “three key issues, conservatives display much greater antipathy to freedom than Democrats/liberals do. [Conservatives] want to place more power in the hands of the state…to control the press, to stifle citizens’ criticism [of government] and to limit voting.”
Rosenberg thinks there's “nothing surprising” about those findings:
Conservatives everywhere around the globe tend to share these same tendencies. But with such basic freedoms enshrined in our First Amendment, American conservatives have long been forced to express themselves in more circuitous, devious, or deceptive ways. Until the passage of the 14th Amendment, for example, state governments were not limited by such guarantees of freedom…And of course, states had complete control of who would be allowed to vote -- a right contested repeatedly throughout our history.
On a fourth, related matter, freedom of religion, Rosenberg opined that big wins for the religious right, such as the Hobby Lobby decision, have “everything to do with political power having reshaped the courts, and nothing to do with the actual meaning of religious liberty.” He alleged that conservatives’ views on that issue “actually illustrate the broader pattern of how American conservatives work around the basic liberal thrust of the Constitution…The only area in which their anti-freedom bias is muffled is precisely the area in which that ‘freedom’ has been vigorously redefined around the ‘right’ to infringe on the rights of others...Conservatives love to talk about liberty, but they’ve always had peculiar ways of defining it. ‘Religious liberty’ is just one example of a broader strategy.”
Rosenberg suggested that when conservatives use pro-freedom rhetoric, they’re typically motivated not by ideology, but by the imperatives of fundraising (bolding added):
What has kept the conservative claim to care about freedom alive is less on the level of political philosophy, and more on the level of political trench warfare and the propaganda that supports it. In 2012, I wrote about the ways that Planned Parenthood and the NRA represented two contrasting models of freedom, which play key roles in America’s decades-long culture wars. The NRA constantly uses the language of freedom, far more prolifically than Planned Parenthood does.
Yet a careful examination of the underlying history and facts shows a much stronger case for Planned Parenthood’s model, reflected for example in the quantities of lies used both to promote the NRA and to attack Planned Parenthood. Virtually no one wants to take guns away from ordinary law-abiding Americans, for example, even though the NRA frequently makes such claims, while opposing common-sense measures that its own membership strongly supports. At the same time, Planned Parenthood’s enemies want to shut it down completely. It’s not just abortions they oppose, but everything Planned Parenthood does to empower women to have control over their own bodies. What could be more fundamental to the idea of liberty than that?
As I wrote at the time, “It’s not just that conservatives are opposed to women’s freedom, they genuinely can’t even conceive of it...Women are non-persons. They have nothing to do with discussions of freedom -- unless, of course, they want to buy a gun.”
