These two sentiments divide America.
“Freedom” and “liberty” are two terms that are used interchangeably since the founding of the Republic, as in “Give me liberty or give me death!”, which might have been said as “Give me freedom or give me death!”, but these two terms should be distinguished so as to be clearer about the architecture of government. Freedom refers to ways in which people are not externally constrained by governments and so point to the process of unleashing people of their shackles. Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” refer to becoming unconstrained by fear and want though it treats the other two as attributes of positive government, which is the freedom of speech and to engage in religion, but those two had been under attack by contemporary repressive governments and so to be thought of as something to be achieved rather than as the founding fathers thought inherent in human nature. Liberty, on the other hand, refers to what the unconstrained person can do and so are the expressions of individuality rather than a coercive act to be lifted. So people can mean liberty to mean, as many frontiersmen did, to be far away from their neighbors, or wear holstered pistols so as to create a great equalization, or try unpopular or uncouth thoughts, or to engage in dangerous sports, or to otherwise explore the possibilities of the individuality coming into favor in the late Eighteenth Century.
One way to recognize the difference between the two concepts is to see that freedom is political while liberty is social and cultural. Freedom recognizes an oppressor severe enough to require collective action so as to defend a government or to oppose it because so much is at stake, so much that people can think their own basic rights as citizens and human beings are threatened. So the United States went to war in two world wars and the Cold War so as to protect its freedoms, as did the Confederacy in the Civil War to assure the expansion of slavery into new territories, so vital an interest this was to the Southern way of life. Wars can be waged so as to accede territories, such as the case in the Mexican War, though it is a stretch to think the American southwest was largely uninhabited and remote from Mexico City but thinking conquering territories is a matter of right however much the what would become the ASmg that the need for a large continental nation was “manifest destiny”, required so as typo avoid the division of Europe into ever warring close abutting nations, though people like Lincoln didn't think that a sufficient reason, a freedom to acquire a continental nation, for a war. But we can think of a war against poverty or cancer as worth fighting because it has to do with freeing many people from extreme distress and so something of a right to exist, however slow are these prospects because of the social structural and biological difficulties. Freedom imagines overcoming nature and heretofore everlasting situations. In our own lifetime, there are freedoms achieved from black people and from same sex marriages and so the impossible is made possible.
Liberty, on the other hand, is to do what you will only under the constraints freedom moses so as to guarantee everyone their rights. People are adventurous in what they consider the expressions of their consciousnesses, whether it means skiing or debating or becoming a food critic or an ascetic. The term is used to describe a sailor as being at liberty in that he has no other duties and can roam on shore while subject to most ordinary standards of law and given some leeway as to keep secret what happens in Las Vegas. Liberty is expansive and so people are required in a regime which is free to be tolerant of one another. The fight for gay marriage is a matter of freedom while the acknowledgement of such unions as honorable pursuits is an inclination of individual persons. And so the distinction made in the last century concerning blacks whereby people had subjective prejudices and also, perhaps institutional or rule bound forms of actual discrimination can be generalized to mean that liberty is a personal taste or vocation while freedom is the lifting of fundamental constraints that intrude on human rights. Both are needed for a progressive nation.
Sometimes, particular political issues can be treated as either a freedom or a liberty. Such is the case with the second amendment. Some people think owning arms is a matter of freedom in that it is a guarantee against the federal government, through its national army, quashing other freedoms. Others treat it as a liberty in that it is a form of self defense rather than the reliance on a police force to surveil and intrude assaults on people, and as such is an extension of the liberty of being a gunslinger.
American history has given the ideas of freedom and liberty its own distinctive twists. For a long time, America was defined as tied together not by an ethnic identity, like France or Germany., but by a document, the Constitution,. Which provided the parameters of freedom and which could be reset only with great difficulty. That was challenged recently in that the Dobbs decision revoked what had been considered settled law and because the Supreme Court ruled recently that a President in most instances was immune from prosecution. And some recent MAGA figures claim that the United States is a normal rather than an extraordinary nation in that it is made up of the Americans as an ethnicity with its own customs and traditions rather than whatever flotsam and jetsam arrive on our shores. The still prevailing freedom of the Constitution as its bulwark tied nicely into the American sense of liberty where the object of government is to provide the means whereby, through entitlements and anti-discriminatory laws, for people to have the wherewithal to try to pursue whatever might be their happiness, to try out their wings, the actuality achieved in that successive waves of immigration get assimilated and fully achieved Americans rather than, as in other countries, remaining in caste like inferior positions. Europe, at the moment, is struggling with that.
What do these two terms, freedom and liberty, mean in the present political and intellectual context? Some conservative commentators claim that the combatants for the 2024 election should discuss the contending issues even while neglecting the fact that Trump does not do so, engaging in personal attacks. But there aren’t many issues to contest. Crime is down even though Republicans claim they are up; the economy is doing quite well, inflation well under control; the southern border is better organized than in the previous administration, fewer people crossing than in tube past and dealt with more humanely through more efficient border security despite the fact that immigration is a worldwide phenomenon. The only thing that makes people at odds with one another, to get all riled up about, is that Republicans are concerned with threats to freedom while Democrats are concerned with the extension of liberties.
Contemporary conservatives invoke freedom from constraint but these are often trivialized to mean freedom from a kind of stove or vaccinations or zoning laws when freedom has to do within the political arena or the underpinning of them, such as being hungry and afraid or thinking that school principals are intruding on parental rights, even if, in fact school teachers have always been the institution to allow children to think otherwise than their parents think. But that is an issue about freedom: who is wrenching people out of the political and natural order. A secular education, which became predominant since Horace Mann and John Dewey, is seen as an affront to religion and decency, and American law has tried to untangle what schools are allowed to do.
Liberals, for their part think of liberty as finding a new final frontier.whether in space or in elongation of the life span, these to enhance consciousness rather than lift a political restriction. Positive efforts are made to subsidize the poor or give child allowances rather than think, as J. D. Vance does, to award more votes for the size of the family membership, a very radical revision of voting tights, from one person, one vote, regardless of other qualities. But contemporary conservatives are more apocalyptic in thinking the nation is on the brink of catastrophe and stern and radical measures are required, or so they choose to contemplate, even if not expecting that a conservative in charge will change very much except at the edges, such as abolishing the Department of Education, while Liberals tend to look at the long gain of gradual entitlements raising well being, unjust as Social Security lifted the elderly poor out of poverty. Conservatives are more direct and therefore more dramatic while liberals work on circumstances whose immediate consequences are unseen.
It is very important to appreciate the division in America over sentiments than was the dynamic in elections previous to 2016 when Trump was elected. Previously, elections were fought over economic interests, traditional party loyalties, and cultural issues like abortion or racial inclusion. Now, voters seem untethered to their external economic and cultural issues. Rather, voting is free floating in that a person takes to one of those two sentiments because of the meanings of the two rather than because they betray their social attachments. That is dangerous because it is so unstable, not anchored in reality, but sub next to a demagogue who mobilizes the sentiment, although the sentiment of freedom is more dangerous because it can allow anything while the sentiment of liberty is slowly additive even if boring.
It should also be said, by way of complication, that the freedom and liberty camps are each internally divided, and these do have to do with attributions rather than cultures. Traditional conservatives think freedom means lower taxes, a calling as old as the Republic, and obviously of economic interest especially of those who pay the highest tax rates. Traditional conservatives also like the idea of states rights as providing power to those closer to home and so representing the interests of locals, and so apply that to abortion and other issues liberals believe to be run from the federal government, quite aside from the fact that people are more aware of their federal officials than most of their local officials, and that states are not uniform interest groups, rural New yorkers more different from New York City people than they are from other similarly urban regions, so that Salt Lake City is more like New York City than it is like southern Utah. The urban-rural divide is stronger than state boundaries. MAGA Republicans want to dismantle the federal bureaucracy that they label “the deep state” and return to Christian values, the ones that replaced the Founding Fathers, who were Deists, and did not take hold in America until the Great Awakening in the second quarter of the Nineteenth Century. MAGA conservatives are rural rather than urban..
Liberals are also divided because some who can be considered progressives, are more attune to ethnic identity as the basis of their interests, and so are in favor of affirmative action, and this grows from their experience as blacks, while women, understandably, are particularly concerned with reproductive rights in that women should not be constrained from achieving their other ambitions because of the unfortunate fact that only women bear children. What might be called constitutional liberals are more concerned with the orderly accretion of more and more benefits so that people are liberated to be farmers because of farm subsidies or to get a career because of subsidized education. Elections will decide, so constitutional liberals think, which is the way forward and trust the electorate will be wise because it is the best recourse,