Last night’s Super Tuesday results — along with the news this morning that Nikki Haley is suspending her presidential campaign — make clear what was already pretty apparent: America is set for a rematch between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
Tomorrow night, President Biden will have one of his biggest chances of the year to address the public and deliver a vision for the country. When he takes the podium at the U.S. Capitol to deliver the last State of The Union address of this term, we expect to hear the familiar list of accomplishments and forward-looking plans.
But a question on our minds is: Will we also hear about freedom?
Biden has a strong record of policy achievements to run on — from passing multiple ambitious pieces of legislation to pulling the country out of its pandemic tailspin. But as we’ve been exploring here, wonkery doesn’t win elections.
With a besieged, severally indicted, and yet emboldened Donald Trump threatening dictatorship on day one, with a Supreme Court that seems determined to roll out the red carpet for the former president-cum-insurrectionist, with the disaster of Gaza roiling the world and Democratic politics, with a Congress that no longer does stuff, with the age question that just won’t die, the president knows he must make a real, emotional, energizing case for four more years.
Enter the idea of freedom. In announcing his re-election campaign some time ago, Biden centered his argument on that concept. He has watched over decades as Republicans have stolen away the concept of freedom, sought to monopolize it, bent it into an authoritarian caricature, and then largely abandoned it under Trump.
And there Biden sees an opportunity. As Mike Donilon, one of his closest advisers, told The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos this week:
He sees an opportunity for Democrats to be “in a place where they usually aren’t.” They can lay claim to the freedom to “choose your own health-care decisions, the freedom to vote, the freedom for your kids to be free of gun violence in school, the freedom for seniors to live in dignity.”
So this week, just below, we are looking back on our reflections on the launch of Biden’s re-election campaign last fall, and the way the Democratic Party lost hold of the idea of freedom in the first place. Each week, we excerpt a piece from our archives for our free subscribers to enjoy. If you enjoy these posts and appreciate the labor that goes into them, we’d be honored if you’d join us as a paid subscriber.
The right’s desertion of freedom creates a historic opportunity for the left to reclaim what should never have been conceded. In reporting my book “The Persuaders,” I saw research showing that freedom is the most highly ranked value by people on the far right, far left, center right, and center left. There aren’t a lot of values like that left.
And it’s not just rhetoric: the actual program of the diverse camps of the political left is consonant with a freedom-centered pitch. What is the fight for reproductive rights but a fight for the freedom to control one’s body — and to have sex without fear that you are making a lifelong commitment some Friday night? What is the fight against book bans but a fight for the freedom to read and think? What is the effort to pursue justice for the January 6, 2021, insurrection but a fight to enshrine and defend the freedom to vote? What is the fight against climate change but a fight for the freedom of our children and grandchildren (and us) to drink clean water and breathe clean air and live in the mental peace of not constantly dreading floods and fires? What is the fight for truly universal healthcare but a fight for the freedom from illness — and for the freedom to pursue your business ideas and not have to cling to your awful job? What is the quest for free daycare and college but a fight for the freedom to learn and pursue your dreams regardless of whether you happened to be born into wealth?
Today, as President Biden announced his re-election campaign, his choice of approach struck me as a sign that this great political realignment may be upon us. As Politico summed up the campaign’s opening pitch: “Biden’s 2024 choice: ‘More freedom or less freedom.’” In the campaign’s three-minute opening ad, Biden uses the word “freedom” six times. That is approximately five times the frequency of Reagan’s 11 uses of the word in his 27-minute speech in 1964. The ad frames all kinds of present-day issues as battles for freedom: protecting Social Security, beating back insurrection, defending democracy, safeguarding the vote, preserving abortion rights, preserving marriage equality, resisting book bans, shoring up civil rights, and more.
As Anat Shenker-Osorio, our in-house progressive messaging guru, says, the thing about freedom is that you can feel it. It’s corporeal. It’s not abstract. People know what it feels like to be free. And not to be free. This is a theme, a concept, a frame, a word that the left can no longer afford to hand to the right, and the good news is it seems like it no longer is.
Photo by: HUM Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
This post was originally published on The.Ink.