Freedom and 9/11

One of the major consequences of 9/11 has been its dreadful impact on the nation’s conception and experience of freedom, its core secular value. Nearly all Americans consider themselves to be very free regardless of class and ethnicity, although what exactly this means, and how it is experienced, has always been strongly contested.

The terrorist attacks on 9/11 severely exacerbated these differences and contradictions, and have provided the opportunity for the greatest threats to civil liberties since the McCarthy era, threats perversely carried out, as in that era, in the name of freedom itself. To understand these effects one must first recall the pre-9/11 complexities of freedom in America.

Since the nation’s founding, two broad traditions of freedom have competed for hegemony: a more public and increasingly liberal progressive tradition, and a conservative one that has become more and more privatized. Liberals value negative freedoms such as habeas corpus and protections of free speech, but give equal weight to the positive freedoms that enhance people’s capacity to achieve basic securities without which formal liberties are largely meaningless. The liberal tradition also sees democracy not in competition with but as an integral component of freedom, and as a bulwark of both negative and positive freedoms—the legislative triumphs of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and the historic civil rights legislative triumphs of 1964 and 1965 being its greatest moments. I call these “public liberties” because they involve not simply the regulation of egoistic interpersonal relations, but the guarantee of equal access to the nation’s public powers, laws, patrimony, and all other rights and obligations of citizenship, as well as the legal requirement of government at all levels to protect the interests of minorities in responding to the will of the majority.

From early after the founding of the nation, however, conservatives came to view democracy with suspicion, a potential threat to “true freedom.” Limited government became the mantra of American conservatism and this has intensified with each wave of liberal control of the legislative arm of government. Conservatives have largely won the ideological battle over both the ownership and meaning of freedom. Over the decades, freedom was not only appropriated as a largely conservative preoccupation, but also semantically uncoupled from democracy—indeed, seen to exist in opposition to it. Freedom has been privatized and has come to be viewed as a highly individualized personal value regarding oneself and one’s unmediated relationships with others—being left alone to do what one wants; having choices; securing one’s property; being independent; being autonomous; and, in the most extreme form of personalization, being inwardly liberated from sin and other inner constraints. So thorough has been the conservative victory that even among people who do not view democracy as a threat, who indeed may even regard it as necessary and desirable, voting and other forms of political participation are not viewed as expressions of freedom. This was perhaps the most startling finding from research into Americans’ views of freedom that I have conducted over the past decade.

Two critical features of the conservatives’ tradition of freedom require emphasis. One is the fact that their most important freedom is, in spite of the negative slant of their rhetoric, essentially a positive one: the protection of property and all the powers that come with it. The second is that, contrary to common belief, what most conservatives truly fear is not strong government but strong democratic government, and what they truly desire is not limited government, rhetoric notwithstanding, but limited democracy. This is clear in foreign affairs, where conservatives have favored vast military forces not only to protect but to project power and enhance economic interests.

Domestically, conservative governments have often sought an imperial presidency and have recklessly used the state to intervene in the personal lives of citizens who deviate from conservative cultural norms or, in the case of the Jim Crow South, to preserve a racist social hierarchy. The commonly made claim that there is a fateful split between capitalistic libertarians whose main preoccupation is the protection of property rights (and the broader capitalistic system) and cultural conservatives who are preoccupied with the use of the state to impose moral codes on the population is a misleading political cliché. With the exception of the small and mostly marginal group of genuine libertarians, this contradiction is overdrawn. As long as property rights are protected and the democratic propensity to tax the wealthy reined in, most conservatives are quite prepared to use the power of the state to enhance conservative cultural norms. American conservative leaders have long known what the Chinese leadership under Deng Xiaoping discovered 33 years ago: For capitalism, the only freedom that matters is the protection of property rights, beyond which the system is utterly neutral in its cultural and political bedfellowship.

With all this in mind, we can now better understand the fallout from 9/11. The assault directly strengthened the hands of those who had long sought a more imperial and powerful presidency. And it was, of course, the justification for the calamitous waging of war on Iraq. It is striking that when the cause of war turned out to be fictitious, the concocted rationale became the need to protect and spread freedom abroad. To most foreigners and all liberal-minded Americans, this seemed like sheer cynicism; the astonishing thing, however, is that the Bush Administration was able to persuade a substantial portion of Americans to buy into the view that freedom could be spread at the point of a gun, even if it meant the devastation of a country.

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