Words Like Freedom

A small NGO recently found itself having to look for a new name. The director approached me because they were workshopping some of the proposals. One involved the word "Freedom," and I lunged at it. I thought it was plainly the best one. When I said so, however, she told me that unfortunately some of their board members had nixed the idea. They thought "freedom" sounded a bit passé. It was American exceptionalist. It was triumphalist. It had been appropriated by neo-cons. Etc.

I gathered this opinion came from some older white folks on the board who had been leftists for a  long time. When I heard their grounds for rejecting the "freedom" proposal, long-dormant irritations arose within me, related to things I hadn't been forced to think about for several years. I sensed in some vague way that these board members were giving voice to a Bush-era view of the matter. They hadn't got the memo that times had changed.

The Bush years, you will recall, coincided with the high water mark on the left of 'cultural relativism' in its worst sense. The notion of "universal human values" or a global framework for human rights are inherently imperialistic. That sort of thing. These days the only people you hear making this argument are Donald Trump and the heads of major authoritarian states. But fifteen years ago, you would find it mostly on Z-Net.

It's understandable and predictable that the left would be attracted to such unsavory avenues of thought, at the very moment the United States was plunging ahead with its project of Neoconservative global revolution. If Bush was bombing civilians and torturing people in the name of "freedom," and "democracy," then freedom and democracy must be bad things. The left was willing to let the neoconservatives have them.

Was this an enormous shame? A lost opportunity? A concession to the adversary that need never have been made? Of course. Is the history of the left made up of anything else?

Perhaps as I describe this Bush-era left mood, it sounds vaguely familiar to your memory. No doubt too, however, it feels very distant from where we are now. The left these days has started talking an awful lot again -- and rightly so -- about democracy, human rights, and freedom.

Partly what is happening here is that the left will always talk about whatever the right is not talking about, and vice versa. But there is also something deeper at play. Something about the way our media landscape has shifted in the last two decades, such that non-white people and religious minorities have claimed a voice for themselves in our public discourse, rather than having a lot of white leftists speak "on their behalf."

In the Bush era, the far left punditry was primarily made up of white boomers. And there's nothing wrong with white boomers -- they've done plenty of good for us all -- but theirs is not the only possible perspective on the world, and it can be helpful to vary the voices.

Faced with the phenomenon of neoconservative military interventions, waged in the name of "liberal democracy," white boomer leftists felt -- out of liberal guilt --that they must speak for the "other side." They had to promote non-liberal anti-democracy (doing so all the time, oddly enough, because of their liberal conscience).

In the Trump era, it is a far more multi-racial, multicultural left that is leading the resistance -- at least in the arenas that are most visible to our media punditry (at the level of actual social change, of course, civil rights struggles have always been multiracial). And this new left has taken up all the values of liberal democracy that the boomers had tried to cast aside. Muslim Americans are fighting for civil rights and religious liberty. Black Americans are fighting for the vote and due process.

This version of the left is of course far more truly "American" than Donald Trump's siren call of "America First." It is grounded in the Constitution, liberal democracy, and the rhetorical ideals of the Declaration of Independence. And it had to come precisely from the people whose "American-ness" is being denied by a sitting president who demands that religious minorities and refugees be banned from the country, or that political leaders from these groups be sent "back where they came from."

It has always been thus with struggles for justice. For all that some leftist academics have sneered at the touchstones of human rights as mere aspects of a framework of "ideological hegemony" and "Western dominance," the people whose rights are being violated have seen the importance of these rights, the usefulness of the framework for pressing just claims to equality and opportunity. They feel the crucial importance of liberal democracy as a tool for preserving human security against arbitrary power, more keenly than anyone can who has never faced the possibility of being abused by a government unchecked by civil protections.

They are not likely, in short, to be the ones to resent the use of the word "freedom." As Langston Hughes wrote, in his "Refugee in America," There are words like Freedom [...] That almost make me cry/ If you had known what I know/ You would know why.