Whose Freedom?: The Battle over America's Most Important Idea (13 page)

These fundamental frames are repeated over and over until they seem like common sense.

We are now in a position to see how the strict father model fills in the blanks in simple freedom to yield conservative freedom.

Harm:
Freedom from harm is gained through force—the military at the national level, the police at the local level, and your own guns at the individual or family level.

Coercion:
Freedom from coercion by the state or by the liberal elite.

Property:
Property is your reward for being sufficiently disciplined to be able to be moral. Wealth and other forms of property can bring one freedom of many kinds. You earn your property through the market by being disciplined, or you inherit it from others who earned it. Property rights are absolute. You own your property and should have the freedom to use or dispose of it any way you want. The government should not be able to take your property under any circumstances without fair compensation. Taxation and regulation rob you of your freedom.

Security:
Physical security provides freedom from harm by other people, and that is the only legitimate role for the government. Those who provide security to you have legitimate authority over you (the military, Homeland Security, the police). Individuals are responsible for other forms of security—health security, retirement security.

In a strict father family, it is the father who protects you. He has not only the right but also the duty to be aware of where you are and what you are doing. If you are where you’re supposed to be and are doing what you’re supposed to be doing, there is nothing to fear.

Similarly the security apparatus of the government—the military, intelligence agencies, and the police—have both the right and the duty to keep citizens and their activities under surveillance.
Law-abiding citizens have nothing to fear. Security trumps the right to privacy.

Rights:
Everyone has the right to carry out moral obligations and to engage in natural human activities. Since we have both the right and the duty to protect ourselves and our families, we have the right to bear arms to do so. Since we have the duty to teach our children right from wrong, we have the right to dictate what their education should be. Since we have a duty to support our families, we have the right to start a business and engage freely in trade.

The Constitution guarantees us freedom of speech and religion. Religion is a natural activity and we have the right to practice our religion freely, openly, and in public. For evangelicals, that means spreading the “good news” to as many people as possible.

Because nature is there to be used by human beings, we have the right to exploit natural resources and engage in development.

To take away such rights would be an imposition on freedom.

Human rights:
The rights given above are rights that everyone in every country should have.

Justice:
There can be no morality without punishment for harm. Harm is an imposition on freedom. Justice is retribution. The imposition on the freedom of the victim must be matched by an imposition on the freedom of the criminal. Victims and their families can rest only after wrongdoers have been punished severely for severe crimes. Criminals have forfeited their right to freedom. Murderers have forfeited their right to life.

Responsibility for freedom:
Responsibility is individual responsibility. Except for military and police protection of our bodies, our property, and our rights, we are responsible for our own freedoms. Every individual is responsible for taking care of himself and his family—for earning enough for food, clothing, shelter, and health care, and for defending his own family. Fundamentalist
Christians have a responsibility for playing their part in carrying out God’s plan. Citizens also have a duty to be loyal to their country and serve their nation, especially the military, which protects the nation from external evils.

Order:
People cannot function freely in physical, social, or political chaos. In a strict father family, it is the duty of the father to maintain order and the duty of others in the family to show respect and do their part. Rowdy demonstrations or disrespect or disloyalty to the nation, the military, or the police undermines legitimate authority, which must be maintained for the sake of both order and protection.

The rule of law:
What is legal should accord with what is moral according to strict father morality. Laws that violate morality should be changed and it is our duty to work to change them; for example, laws that make abortion legal. It is the duty of citizens to obey the law and to respect those who administer it, unless they are imposing their own immoral views, as in the case of activist judges.

Nature:
Natural forces don’t count as interfering with freedom. For example, Hurricane Katrina was a natural disaster and no one bears any blame for it.

Competition:
Normally, freedom comes with the moral obligation not to impose on the freedom of others. But in competition, this moral obligation is lifted, so long as you obey the rules. Winners can beat losers in competition without it being seen as an imposition on the losers’ freedom. Even if the loser is harmed by the loss, as long as the rules are obeyed, the loss is not considered an imposition on freedom.

Engaging in business is a form of competition; once you are in business, you are not imposing on the freedom of your competitors, which frees you to do whatever is necessary to win—within the law. What does restrict freedom in business are limitations on the free market: government regulation, taxes, and lawsuits.

The free market is thus, ideally, about freedom—the freedom
to make money without qualms about interfering with the freedom of others. From this perspective, government, which imposes regulations and taxes and in whose courts lawsuits take place, is interfering with freedom.

Now that we have shown how the strict father model fills in the blanks in simple freedom to produce conservative freedom, we can make sense of the types of conservatives. Each is a different version of strict father morality, applied to different issue areas.

Freedom for financial conservatives flows from private property—the freedom to acquire it, keep it, and use it. They see the free market as natural (people naturally pursue profit) and moral (it maximizes the profit of all). They are against social programs, which they see as seizing their legitimately earned wealth and giving it to people who have not been disciplined enough to earn it, don’t deserve it, and are being made dependent on the state.

For them, communism, socialism, the New Deal, and the labor movement are all evils, threats to the laissez-faire freemarket system and the ideas that go with it: reward and punishment, competition, discipline, and the moral order. Thus, they support a strong defense against communism, socialism, and radical Islam. And they oppose environmentalism, which they see as restricting the free use of the environment as a resource for profit. In short, they see financial harm as harm that restricts freedom. They accept the corporations as persons metaphor and
see anything that threatens profit to corporations as a potential form of harm, restricting the freedom of corporations.

Financial conservatives are often those who own, own stock in, manage, represent, or identify with the owners of large corporations. When those corporations benefit,
they
benefit. They tend to see corporations as citizens—citizens with special status. The country is best run when it is run for the profit—and the freedom of operation—of large corporations. “What’s good for General Motors is good for America,” as Charles E. Wilson, president of General Motors and Dwight Eisenhower’s secretary of defense, said back in 1952.

An important aspect of discipline is fiscal discipline—not spending money one doesn’t have, or can’t readily get or borrow at reasonable rates. For financial conservatives, very large deficits could ultimately harm business—unless matched by either economic growth, the ability to borrow money cheaply, continuously deferred payments, or the prospect of eliminating the costs of social programs.

Libertarians focus on being their own moral authorities, free of any strict father’s authority. In politics, this means being free of the government’s authority.

Libertarians are radical financial conservatives. They see free markets as defining freedom and want to extend the ideas of free markets to replace as many government functions as possible. They prefer privatization of just about everything, except for the “minimal state”—the military and the police, and the basic infrastructure needed to defend the country, protect lives and property, and keep order.

Competition is the basis of the free market, which is the essential engine of freedom. Competition favors the most disciplined
and defines who is best. Competition thus creates a natural hierarchy of merit, where those who deserve to win do win—by definition. Losers are just that—losers! Competition, they believe, should be extended to as many realms of life as possible. Standards of competition are “standards” for society.

Strict father morality should govern family life and social life, especially with respect to men’s and women’s roles. Masculinity is strict father masculinity. The parents can’t be gay in that model, so gay marriage is a threat. The father controls reproductive decisions in that model, so reproductive rights are a threat. The father is a protector, so gun control is a threat. Freedom comes from being disciplined and knowing right from wrong—or, even better, being your own moral authority. Law should also follow strict father morality. Patriotism lies in maintaining the moral authority of this nation over other nations. Social programs are immoral, giving lazy people things they haven’t earned, taking away their discipline, and making them dependent.

Fundamentalist Christianity starts with the idea that God is a strict father: You obey his commandments, and you go to heaven as your reward; otherwise, you are punished with eternal torture in hell. With Christ, you get a second chance, but again, it’s heaven if you obey and hell if you don’t.

Strict father family life and social morality are seen as natural, following from the nature of God as a strict father. Just as the strict father’s word is law in the household, so God’s word—the Bible—should be law on earth.

Fundamentalists are evangelicals; their mission is to convert:

Defending and extending the strict father system in religion and daily life is a moral duty.

Fundamentalists are, of course, social conservatives as well.

Going to your reward—to heaven—is the ultimate freedom. Religion is the path to freedom; politics should be in the service of that freedom. Religious freedom is not in the separation of church and state. It is the freedom to evangelize, to spread the good news, to spread the word of God through school prayer in public as well as religious schools, to put the Ten Commandments in every courthouse because they are God’s law, the natural basis of man’s law. Freedom
of
religion (to do God’s bidding, which is inherently moral and should be legal) is not freedom
from
religion. The separation of church and state is seen as state support for secularism and against true religion, and it therefore is an imposition against religious freedom.

Neoconservatives are centrally concerned with applying strict father morality to foreign policy. The United States is seen as the moral authority in the world, and it is its moral duty to maintain its sovereignty and to use its military and economic power to maximize American interests, which are, in this view, also the interests of other countries.

Neoconservatives believe in “free-market freedom”—spreading free markets throughout the world, which American corporations can enter and dominate. They take for granted the truth of what I will call “the free market freedom theory,” that once free markets take hold, other democratic institutions naturally follow:

• Free elections, so that business leaders can secure their rights (against their property being seized by the government) through a government that optimizes their
  interests, as opposed to a tyrant who optimizes his own interests
  

• Checks and balances, to limit the power of any government to control their property and the functioning of any business
  

• Civil liberties, to limit the power of any government over the lives of those running businesses
  

• Civilian control of the military, to prevent military coups, which could threaten private property and civil liberties
  

• A free press, because business depends on many kinds of accurate information
  

In these ways, neoconservatives assume that strict father morality serves democratic ideals.

Those are the basics of the radical conservative idea of freedom. They arise from using strict father morality to fill in the blanks in simple freedom.

I’ve been wondering for some time about a phenomenon I keep running into—moral or political disputes between progressives and conservatives, where the progressives argue on the basis of systemic causation (within a social, ecological, or economic system) and the conservatives argue on the basis of direct causation (by a single individual).

Examples are everywhere:

• The ecology of complex systems like river systems and wetlands versus private property rights of individuals
  

• The complex social causes of poverty versus a focus on individual initiative
  

• The complex health care system versus private accounts
  

• Our complex economy versus lower taxes for individuals