Two ideas of freedom

George Lakoff has written an article published in the Boston Globe called "Understanding the meaning of freedom" in which he contrasts what freedom means to progressives and conservatives.

Here's a list:

Progressives: There should be a freedom to marry. The government should not be able to decide who can marry whom.

Conservatives: "Freely elected" government officials should determine who can marry whom. That's what a "free country" means.

Progressives: Social security, the minimum wage, universal healthcare, college for all are ways to guarantee freedom from want.

Conservatives: Giving people things they haven't earned creates dependency and robs people of their freedom.

Progressives: The 45 million working people who can't afford healthcare cannot all pull themselves up by their bootstraps. An economy that drives down wages to increase investor profits creates a cheap labor trap. The trap works against freedom from want.

Conservatives: Economic liberty comes through the free market; government gets in the way. Government works against economic liberty in four ways: regulation, workers' rights, taxes, and class-action lawsuits.

Progressives: Freedom of religion includes freedom from having a religion imposed on you.

Conservatives: Freedom to practice religion for fundamentalist evangelicals means spreading the good news of the truth of the gospel, which implies school prayer, "under God" in the Pledge, the Ten Commandments in courthouses, and the teaching of intelligent design.

Progressives: The president's spying on citizens without a warrant is a violation of freedom.

Conservatives: The president is just doing his duty to preserve our freedom.

What is scary is how consistent the differences are, how closely they stick to the progressive-conservative differences in moral worldview. The differences in the meaning of freedom reflect the major political differences of our time.

For conservatives it seems that freedom means freedom to exploit others. Freedom to be utterly selfish. Freedom to destroy the earth. Somehow, I don't think that's what the Founding Fathers had in mind.