Freedom’s Just Another Word Republicans Shouldn’t Use

For decades, Republicans won the slogan war, and the contest was not close.  Phrases such as “death tax,” “pro-life,” and more recently “woke politics” and the inspired “Make America Great Again,” not only dominated debate but also energized the Republican base and persuaded swing voters that Democrats were stealing their souls.

But no turn of phrase was more effective than conservatives’ co-opting “Freedom.”  At every juncture, they bemoaned Democrats’ robbing Americans of their freedom to do just about anything, from forcing them to submit to socialized medicine to taking away their guns to protecting their children from atheists and drag queens.  That there was a hypocritical undertone to all of these accusations did not make them any less potent.

Nowhere was this hypocrisy more in evidence than in the farcically named Freedom Caucus, a group of Republican congressmen whose core tenet is that they have the freedom to deny freedom to anyone they deem unworthy.  That covers a broad spectrum of the ungodly, including anyone not white and straight, any woman unwilling to have any child she is forced to carry regardless of circumstances, or anyone who doesn’t think turning the local shopping mall into the OK Corral is guaranteed in the Constitution.  This group of patriots also feels they have the freedom to deny the vote to anyone who disagrees with them and overturn any election with whose results they disagree.

That Democrats spent decades being bulldozed by such nonsense is their own fault.  Their counterattacks were as limp as overcooked pasta.  They could not bring themselves to realize a message that was excessively dense and policy-laden could be too boring for even most party loyalists to care about.  Former Republican strategist Mike Murphy noted, “They’re forgetting a lot of voters don’t follow this detailed stuff because they’re busy with their life.  Pick a simple thing people understand that’s popular, that’s smaller.”  In the end, Democrats’ outreach failed because, unlike Republicans, they seemed to lack an appreciation for the power of the effective use of language.

That is changing.

It began with subtle shifts on two key issues and Democrats have since been making progress on both. In abortion, “pro-choice” was supplanted by “reproductive rights,” and in the Second Amendment debate, “gun control” has been replaced by “gun safety.” Each reflects increased cognizance of how the terms are absorbed by voters who are not ideologically frozen on one side of the debate or the other.

The term “pro-choice” began as “right to choose,” and was originally adopted as a reaction to “pro-life,” itself an abbreviation of “Right to Life,” a phrase that had gestated among anti-abortion groups in the 1960s.  Pro-choice focused on conscience, characterized as “an internal matter,” giving any woman the right to choose her course of action, “not with her right (or anyone else’s right) to make a judgment about whether that choice is morally licit.”

Can’t get much wonkier than that. 

The problem was that, while pro-choice seems a wholesome enough phrase, when matched against pro-life, it can easily be seen as something else. The natural alternatives would be either “anti-life” or “pro-death.” While many who advocate for abortion rights would dismiss either term as ludicrous and nothing that any reasonable person would believe, in a nation where conspiracy theories are as popular as the Game of Thrones dragons, anti-life struck a responsive chord.

“Reproductive rights,” on the other hand, is an easy-to-understand phrase with a bell attached to it.  “Rights” is the key word in any number of disputes—voting, gun possession, stand-your-ground legislation, even legalized cannabis. And so, it cuts across political ideology. Rights means the ability to make decisions for oneself, a cornerstone of conservative and libertarian ideology.  Unlike “choice,” it is an active term—one must be allowed to assert one’s rights. Those who believe in the right to bear arms will have more difficulty dismissing the right of a woman to make reproductive decisions for herself.

Which is why those advocating for stricter gun laws faced a different problem. Use of “rights” has been appropriated by the gun lobby, used in virtually every public statement, advertisement, and article.  Any attempt at meaningful legislation, therefore, has been assailed as an attempt to deprive law-abiding citizens of their Constitutional rights, casting those who wish to make it more difficult for disaffected individuals to shoot up a school or workplace as fascist storm troopers.

But gun safety, although not swaying the hardcore, avoids the red flag word “control,” and thus seems a good deal more palatable to gun owners, the majority of whom favor the safe use and storage of weapons.

And now, with the wind in its post-Biden sails, the Harris campaign has staked a claim to the most powerful word of all—Freedom.

Freedom is in every speech, every policy position, every attack.  Placards, t-shirts, and convention backdrops are plastered with it.  Even “reproductive rights,” which had already worked well, has been upgraded to “reproductive freedom.”  Republicans are now the ones attacking freedom. They’ve put the government in the bedroom and doctors’ offices, closed off access to the ballot box, and restricted the books children can read in schools and libraries.  To drive the message home, Beyoncé’s “Freedom,” has become the Harris fight song.  (Take that, Kid Rock.)

With this pivot, Democrats can now cast Donald Trump as the point person for those who would deny fundamental freedoms, a role for which a would-be autocrat with no verbal off-switch is perfectly cast.  The left has been gnashing their teeth for eight years at its inability to portray Trump as a villain.  Not Access Hollywood, not “some very fine people on both sides,” not “inject bleach,” nor any other of Trump’s contemptuous and moronic outbursts seems to have done the trick.

 Freedom, however, well might.  What is clear even now is that Trump and his party are back on their heels, playing defense for the first time in recent memory.  And their desperation is palpable.  (See my previous post, https://lawrencegoldstone.substack.com/p/two-barometers-of-panic.)  Suffice to say that Trump’s media company, DJT, is now trading under 22, the lowest it has been since the merger, and the Fox News website has, if anything, gotten more grotesque.

In addition, Democrats seem to be having fun being on offense.  Pressing the attack, on Monday night, UAW president Shawn Fain unveiled a t-shirt that read, “Trump’s a Scab,” and a meme was born.

And then, of course, there were the Obamas…

Maybe, just maybe, Democrats now realize that how one says something is every bit as important as what one says, and to convince independent voters that their vision is superior, they need to express that vision in terms that ordinary people respond to.