“Democrats have now rebranded as the party of freedom,” Reason magazine Editor Matt Welch noted in a recent video.
Is this freedom agenda more substantial than the joy agenda?
Linguist John McWhorter wrote in the New York Times Aug. 29:
‘Joy’ Is a Euphemism for a Word No One Wants to Say Out Loud
The problem is that no one is talking about what the joy is really based on and how it could let us down in the end.
…a good deal of the joy people keep talking about is a result of one fact: that Harris is Black….
Nothing about Harris just now justifies her being treated as some kind of once-in-a-generation phenom or savior. This is about not substance but optics. Harris is being received on the basis of a category she fits into rather than who she is as an individual. The thing sweeping so many people up is the idea that her being Black — and a Black woman at that — would in some resonant way shape her presidency.
…Obama was a Black president; it’s hard to see how it ended up making anything better.
There is no reason to suppose that Harris’s color will be any more significant than Obama’s was if she becomes president.
Freedom can never mean anything more than freedom to act according to one’s hero system. Any other quality ascribed to freedom is just rhetoric. The “free world” during the cold war was that part of the world largely aligned with America’s dominant hero system (that it largely inherited from England).
Categories such as true and false, right and wrong, good taste and bad taste, sense and nonsense, weird and normal, depend upon one’s hero system. The position of the observer shapes the data. For example, I’m conservative. I react to the world in predictable ways.
Reason’s Katherine Mangu-Ward said last week: “I saw the silent presence of Chat GPT in so many of those [Democratic convention] speeches like every single one of them could have been and I think many of them likely were written either by or with the assistance of AI and I look forward to the expose on that in the distant future. They were so generic, they were so bland, it really was message discipline on display.”
Matt: “Freedom to the right to have housing.”
Katherine: “Freedom to not feel sad about Donald Trump. Freedom to have abortions paid for by nuns.”
Peter Suderman: “Democrats ran on pablum. Hour after hour of shallow platitudes.”
Merrill Matthews writes for The Hill Aug. 27:
…the overriding theme at the convention and until the election is freedom. But don’t be fooled. Democratic strategists made it very clear months ago that they shifted to the freedom theme as a marketing strategy because it sells well.
As the Wall Street Journal’s Molly Ball reported last December, abortion rights advocates have “changed their message.” And the article’s subtitle explains why: “Supporters of abortion access have emphasized ‘freedom’ and ‘values’ in successful campaigns in red-leaning states, with more to come in 2024.”
…Ball points out, “Abortion-rights activists rarely use the term ‘pro-choice’ anymore, preferring to talk about people’s ‘freedom to decide.’” We heard that message from several convention speakers.
As one Democrat told Ball, “‘The messaging we were using wasn’t working, and we knew we had to get at deeper emotions, versus what people say they think.’” Democrats discovered the term freedom resonated with lots of people, especially with independents and seniors.
Democratic pollster Angela Kuefler added that Democrats “can seize on the success of the ‘freedom’ message and tie it to other issues, such as Republicans’ attempts to limit books in school libraries or gender-reassignment treatments.”
How do you know that Democrats are deceptively using the term freedom to sell their agenda? Because there are lots of fundamental freedoms they have no intention of allowing Americans to enjoy. Here’s some of them:
Am I free not to have health insurance?
Am I free not to be vaccinated?
Am I free not to drive an electric vehicle?
Am I free not to send my children to the public school of the government’s choosing?
Am I free to go to church or synagogue during a pandemic?
Do I have the freedom, if I’m a young lady, to compete in sports only against biological females? Not in Walz’s world. When Minnesota Republicans introduced a bill that would ban transgender athletes from playing on sports teams matching their gender identity, as opposed to their biological sex, Walz threatened to veto it.
Molly Ball wrote for the WSJ Dec. 30, 2023:
Shortly after November’s state-level elections affirmed voters’ support for abortion rights in Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio, a Democratic pollster named Angela Kuefler got on a webinar to deliver an analysis—and a warning—to her fellow progressives. Yes, it was clear abortion was a winning issue, she said, but it mattered a lot how advocates talked about it.
“Talking about this in the context of values really widens our support,” said Kuefler, an adviser to the Nov. 7 ballot initiative in Ohio that added a right to abortion to the state’s constitution, winning by nearly 14 points in a state President Biden lost by eight. By values, she explained, she was principally talking about the idea of freedom. In polling by Kuefler’s firm, Global Strategy Group, majorities answered “yes” to both “Should we restore the rights we had under Roe v. Wade?” and “Should personal decisions like abortion be up to women rather than the government?” But the latter statement outperformed the former by a whopping 19-point margin, she noted, adding, “It’s the values language that allows us to win by such big margins.”
…many Democrats see the issue’s success—at a time when their party’s stances on many other issues are unpopular—as a crucial political asset: not only as a way to drive turnout in the 2024 presidential election but also a road map for appealing to voters’ fundamental values on issues from the economy to education.
…Republicans have noticed the resonance with their liberty-loving voters. “They stole freedom!” one antiabortion Republican consultant recently remarked.
…A similar linguistic and conceptual shift powered the public’s increasing support of same-sex marriage as advocates switched from talking about “gay rights” to talking about the universal values of love and commitment and the “freedom to marry” whomever one chooses.
Democrats, Kuefler said, must not assume that simply putting abortion on the ballot will automatically be a winner as activists work to do so in multiple states in 2024. But they can seize on the success of the “freedom” message and tie it to other issues, such as Republicans’ attempts to limit books in school libraries or gender-reassignment treatments, or even conservative policies on healthcare, taxes and crime that liberals argue circumscribe people’s autonomy.
“The ‘freedom’ argument both speaks to a value we have and undercuts a Republican brand advantage,” Kuefler said.
Andrew Heywood wrote in his 2015 book Key Concepts in Politics and International Relations:
Freedom or liberty (the two terms are best used interchangeably) is, in its broadest sense, the ability to think or act as one wishes. An important distinction is nevertheless made between negative and positive freedom (Berlin, 1958). Negative freedom means non – interference: the absence of external constraints on the individual. The individual is thus ‘at liberty’ to act as he or she wishes. The clearest manifestations of negative freedom are in the form of freedom of choice, civil liberty and privacy. Positive freedom is linked to the achievement of some identifiable goal or benefit, usually personal development or self – realization, though Berlin defined it as self – mastery and linked it to democracy . For Berlin, the negative/positive distinction was reflected in the difference between being free from something and being free to do something. However, the ‘freedom from’ and ‘freedom to’ distinction is misleading, because every example of freedom can be described in both ways. For example, being free from ignorance means being free to gain an education. G. C. MacCallum (1991) proposed a single, value – free concept of freedom in the form: ‘X is free from Y to do or be Z’. This suggests that the apparently deep question ‘Are we free?’ is meaningless, and should be replaced by a more complete and specific statement about what we are free from, and what we are free to do.
What about the freedom to make jokes? Our ruling elite have concerns. Matt Bernius (“a design researcher working to create more equitable government systems and experiences”) writes for OutsidetheBeltway.com Aug. 30:
“Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party” VP Candidate Publicly Eats Supporter’s Face
J. D. Vance seems to have a cruel sense of humor and issues with women. Weird!
In an attempt to “dunk” on Kamala Harris and her upcoming CNN interview, Vance published the following tweet/xeet/whatever:
BREAKING: I have gotten ahold of the full Kamala Harris CNN interview. pic.twitter.com/c6nfcJrFJy
— JD Vance (@JDVance) August 29, 2024
I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, um, some people out there in our nation don’t have maps and, uh, I believe that our, uh, education like such as, uh, South Africa and, uh, the Iraq and everywhere like such as, and I believe that they should, uh, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., uh, should help South Africa and should help Iraq and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future. [source]
This clip quickly went viral at the time. And if that was all there was to it, this probably wouldn’t be a story worth paying attention to. However, there was a darker side to the meme. Upton would later reflect on how the negative reaction affected her mental and emotional health:
I definitely went through a period where I was very, very depressed. But I never let anybody see that stuff, except for people I could trust. I had some very dark moments where I thought about committing suicide. The fact that I have such an amazing family and friends, it really, really helped. [Begins to tear up] Sorry, it’s just really emotional. This is the first time I’ve actually been able to talk about it. It was awful, and it was every single day for a good two years. I’ve only spoken to my fiancé about how I felt in those moments truthfully, and my best friend. And, recently, my mom. But, like, my dad doesn’t even know yet. [source]
At this point, we can begin to see how continuing to use the meme is in bad taste. In fact, that’s something Upton commented on after Vance’s tweet:
I think most of us agree with Upton that online bullying is a bad look full stop. In fact, this was Melania Trump’s signature issue while First Lady. So, engaging in that activity is bad enough. What makes it worse is that a quick glance at her social media presence shows that Upton is a Republican and public Trump supporter. She also has a personal history with the former President, as she signed with the Trump Model Agency in 2007.
When presented with these facts in a CNN interview, J. D. Vance did the only logical thing for someone on the Trump campaign: he doubled down, saying he “won’t apologize for a joke.”
I’m sure some commenter will call me out for lacking a sense of humor. Again, unlike the former President and his Vice-Presidential candidate, I don’t find punching down funny. And, as previously discussed, I’m not a huge fan of anger-based humor. I also think it’s an especially bad choice to engage in such humor when the subject of the joke is a public supporter of your campaign.
What is punching down and why is it bad?
April 11, 2015, Steve Sailer wrote:
When I was young in the Sixties and Seventies, the Spirit of the Age was all about satire and disrespecting sacred cows. A lot of youngish people emerged triumphant from that era and many of them are still around. Perhaps not so surprisingly, from their august positions today they lecture us on the dangers of satire and comedy unrestrained by respect for proper thoughts.
For example, consider Garry Trudeau. He was a scion of old money liberal Protestant good blood good bone folks (his mother went to Miss Porter’s School, for example) who rapidly triumphed as a representative of the rising generation of the educated and sophisticated. Trudeau started the predecessor to his Doonesbury cartoon strip at Yale in the late 1960s and quickly became the Jon Stewart of his generation.
Today, however, Trudeau writes in The Atlantic:
Garry Trudeau on Charlie Hebdo, free-speech fanaticism, and the problem with “punching downward”
GARRY TRUDEAU APR 11 2015, 1:12 PM ET
My career—I guess I can officially call it that now—was not my idea. When my editor, Jim Andrews, recruited me out during my junior year in college and gave me the job I still hold, it wasn’t clear to me what he was up to. Inexplicably, he didn’t seem concerned that I was short on the technical skills normally associated with creating a comic strip—it was my perspective he was interested in, my generational identity. He saw the sloppy draftsmanship as a kind of cartoon vérité, dispatches from the front, raw and subversive.
Why were they so subversive? Well, mostly because I didn’t know any better. My years in college had given me the completely false impression that there were no constraints, that it was safe for an artist to comment on volatile cultural and political issues in public. In college, there’s no down side. In the real world, there is, but in the euphoria of being recognized for anything, you don’t notice it at first. Indeed, one of the nicer things about youthful cluelessness is that it’s so frequently confused with courage.
In fact, it’s just flawed risk assessment. …
The strip was forever being banned. And more often than not, word would come back that it was not the editor but the stuffy, out of touch owner/publisher who was hostile to the feature.
For a while, I thought we had an insurmountable generational problem, but one night after losing three papers, my boss, John McMeel, took me out for a steak and explained his strategy. The 34-year-old syndicate head looked at his 22-year-old discovery over the rim of his martini glass, smiled, and said, “Don’t worry. Sooner or later, these guys die.”
Well, damned if he wasn’t right. A year later, the beloved patriarch of those three papers passed on, leaving them to his intemperate son, whose first official act, naturally, was to restore Doonesbury. And in the years that followed, a happy pattern emerged: All across the country, publishers who had vowed that Doonesbury would appear in their papers over their dead bodies were getting their wish. …
I, and most of my colleagues, have spent a lot of time discussing red lines since the tragedy in Paris. …
Traditionally, satire has comforted the afflicted while afflicting the comfortable. Satire punches up, against authority of all kinds, the little guy against the powerful. Great French satirists like Molière and Daumier always punched up, holding up the self-satisfied and hypocritical to ridicule. Ridiculing the non-privileged is almost never funny—it’s just mean.
Ridiculing the non-privileged is almost never funny—it’s just mean.
How can you tell who are the non-privileged? The answer is actually very simple: By definition, the non-privileged are those who have the privilege of not being ridiculed.
By punching downward, by attacking a powerless, disenfranchised minority with crude, vulgar drawings closer to graffiti than cartoons, Charlie wandered into the realm of hate speech, which in France is only illegal if it directly incites violence. Well, voila—the 7 million copies that were published following the killings did exactly that, triggering violent protests across the Muslim world, including one in Niger, in which ten people died. Meanwhile, the French government kept busy rounding up and arresting over 100 Muslims who had foolishly used their freedom of speech to express their support of the attacks.
The White House took a lot of hits for not sending a high-level representative to the pro-Charlie solidarity march, but that oversight is now starting to look smart. The French tradition of free expression is too full of contradictions to fully embrace. Even Charlie Hebdo once fired a writer for not retracting an anti-Semitic column. Apparently he crossed some red line that was in place for one minority but not another.
That would be kind of an interesting topic for Doonesbury to explore, no? But would that be punching up or punching down? Muslims or Jews: which group is punching up and which group is punching down?
Or is the bigger question: Just how hard would Trudeau get punched if he did it? Better not to think about it.
… Writing satire is a privilege I’ve never taken lightly. And I’m still trying to get it right. Doonesbury remains a work in progress, an imperfect chronicle of human imperfection. It is work, though, that only exists because of the remarkable license that commentators enjoy in this country. That license has been stretched beyond recognition in the digital age. It’s not easy figuring out where the red line is for satire anymore. But it’s always worth asking this question: Is anyone, anyone at all, laughing? If not, maybe you crossed it.
We hear an awful lot these days about punching up and punching down, but we sure don’t hear many respectable in-depth explorations of just who is up and who is down and why. It would seem like a topic ripe for satire, but apparently it crosses one of those red lines of unfunniness. You’re not supposed to think, much less laugh, about who is privileged and who is punchable, you’re just supposed to know. Who you can punch and who you can’t is one of those things that go without saying.
If you are still uncertain, well, that’s your problem. If you’d had the good sense to to Yale, you would probably have a more refined sense of discretion and social boundaries. But it’s too late for you now, so if you don’t want to get punched, you’d better just shut up and let your social superiors make all the jokes.
When Palestinians slaughter Jews, or when Jews slaughter Palestinians, is that punching down? Apparently, when non-Europeans slaughter Europeans, that is punching up and that is cool. When Europeans try to protect themselves, however, that is punching down, and is severely constrained.
Amanda Alexander, Senior Lecturer in Law at Australian Catholic University, contributes a chapter to the 2023 book, Making Endless War: The Vietnam and Arab-Israeli Conflicts in the History of International Law:
Revolutionary War and the Development of International Humanitarian Law
The distinction between civilians and combatants and the protection of civilians are perhaps the central precepts of international humanitarian law today.
…Vietnam served as the archetype of the contemporary conflicts that had prompted the ICRC to draft new laws. When the ICRC began calling for new laws of armed conflict it
was concerned by military developments, such as aviation, that had “almost wiped out” the fundamental distinctions between combatants and civilians. It was also troubled by the rise of a “truly enormous tidal wave of guerrilla activity” that had not been anticipated by earlier conventions.The Vietnam War was the consummate example of these concerns. Moreover, the Vietnam War informed the drafting process by challenging the traditional Western understanding of the laws of armed conflict. The revolutionary writings on people’s war, put into practice in Vietnam, shaped a new language and paradigm of a just war, while advocating for the legitimacy of guerrilla warfare.
This language was adopted by Palestinian movements, which presented their struggle as analogous to the Vietnamese people’s war. Support for the Palestinians and the Palestine Liberation Organization led to a series of United Nations resolutions, proclaiming the rights of national liberation movements and their fighters in a quasi-legal language that would later be repeated at the Diplomatic Conferences.
There was also growing support for the Palestinian and the Vietnamese resistance in the West. Wars against imperial powers were increasingly accepted as just and the means used to oppose them seemed shocking. Popular and academic commentary in the West questioned the lawfulness of counterinsurgency techniques, in particular attacks on civilians.
Fighting against imperialism (always defined as a uniquely white evil) is punching up in this view, while counter-insurgency is punching down.
Hamas attacks on Israel October 7, 2023, were widely celebrated on elite American campuses while Israel defending itself was increasingly portrayed as illegitimate according to international law.
Jan. 5, 2024, the Jerusalem Post published this op/ed:
Did years of pro-Hamas support on US campuses lead to October 7?
Western academic bone fides helped Hamas gain international legitimacy, even for its terror actions, to which global condemnations of Israel’s war against Hamas attest.
…Since 10/7, broad demonstrations of support have been on display on campuses across the US, from New York University to Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania. Pro-Hamas demonstrations across scores of American universities were shocking in both their public affirmation of Hamas’s genocidal mass murder and in their rhetoric, echoing that of Hamas.
…At a rally at Cornell University organized by SJP, Prof. Russel Rickford said that Hamas’s acts “exhilarated” and “excited” him. SJP chapters posted pictures and graphics on social media of invading Hamas paragliders, celebrating its deadly assault on young Israeli party goers on the Simchat Torah holiday weekend. Hours after the 10/7 massacre, George Washington University SJP issued a statement justifying the massacre, reflecting the student group’s ever-increasing radicalization.
The Columbia University Social Workers 4 Palestine referred to the Hamas massacre as a “counteroffensive and the centrality of revolutionary violence to anti- imperialism.”
SJP’s jihadi narrative has whitewashed terrorism and mass murder, transforming the student organization into a conduit for pro-jihadi activism, while academically intellectualizing and equivocating Hamas massacres. In short, SJP’s nationwide aggressive actions, initiatives, and programming have signaled to Hamas and other colluding terror organizations that they could carry out the mass murder of Israelis with limited repercussions in the West.
Rony Guldmann writes in his forthcoming book Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression:
* Michelle Malkin describes a Democratic Fundraiser in Chelsea where one comic attacked President Bush as “this piece of living, breathing shit” and others “took to savaging Vice President Dick Cheney’s family,” calling his lesbian daughter “a big lezzie.” Yet the media gave this outrage a free pass. Why? “It’s like an Upper West Side Manhattan left-wing Ku Klux Klan mentality,” explains Republican Congressman Peter King of New York: “[I]f some Southern redneck talked like this about a liberal, everyone would denounce it. But because it’s Upper West Side humor, somehow it’s supposed to be chic.” Enjoying this Upper West Side privilege, liberal comedians can issue mock death threats against prominent conservatives and expect everyone to take this in stride. Malkin observes that liberals fantasized about the assassination of George W. Bush and then pleaded that this was an “ironic” joke. But conservatives who would turn the tables and wish the same upon prominent liberals cannot expect the same understanding, as they are not members of the culture of irony.
* Judaism and Catholicism are deficient from a Protestant perspective because they have in the process of freeing themselves from the investments of pagans, articulated this freedom through hierarchies, laws, rituals, ethnic identifications etc., in which they subsequently became reinvested, thereby slipping back into the blindness from which true monotheism is intended to liberate us.
* Secular liberals claim to promote “freedom.” But this freedom describes a specific ethos that is just as “fixed” as are Satmar sensibilities. “Freedom” is always the freedom to operate within a hero-system. While liberalism holds itself out as the transcendence of all hero-systems, no social unifying system can deliver the absolute self-possession promised by the buffered identity, a promise inconsistent with these systems’ embedded socio-biological nature. This undermines any sharp dichotomies between the self-awareness of the properly civilized and the self-oblivion of those who refuse the disciplines and repressions of the buffered identity and instead cling to the teleological illusions of a religious past. If secularists think inconsistently with their own understanding of the secular in refusing to look upon religion as a secular phenomenon, this is because that understanding is not, in fact, fully secularized. Rather, it is inflected by a religiously-inspired hostility to the enfleshed pre-modern religiosity for which the Satmars stand as symbols. Our contemporary understanding of the secular grew out of Religious Reform. And this legacy’s ongoing influence is betrayed in liberal attitudes toward religious conservatives, who are seen to embody all the vices that Religious Reform once associated with paganism. This is why liberals can feel comfortable projecting what is a human constant—being “cemented”—onto religious conservatives alone, because this cementing is but a secularized translation of what was once condemned as fallenness into idolatry.
* [Mark Lilla:] “Britain and the United States can pride themselves on having cultivated the ideas of toleration, freedom of conscience, and a formal separation of church and state, their success has depended on a wholly unique experience with Protestant sectarianism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”
* [Kwame] Appiah writes that “[c]lashes between, say, traditionalist and libertarian perspectives express clashes about what people care about more—social stability or expressive freedom; the management of society or individual liberty. They’re not over what the world is like but what the world ought to be like.” However, my argument has been that the clash between liberal elites and ordinary Americans isn’t strictly about either facts or values in any narrow sense. Rather, it concerns rival authenticity narratives each originating in different, historically constructed ways of being human.
* Though liberals insist that conservatism requires a special explanation like “motivated cognition” or the “authoritarian personality,” it is actually liberalism that stands out as peculiar, historically speaking. “Looking at the entire range of human societies, the statistically normal human society is built upon all six foundations, not just the three endorsed by modern liberalism,” observes Haidt. Conservatism is completely “normal” in the context of the anthropological record. Conservatives may be less committed to equality and certain social freedoms. But this is in line with most traditional cultures, which “do not have highly developed notions of individual rights” and do not “appear to value or seek to create equality among all adult members, or even among all adult male members.” Conservatives may be less keen to celebrate diversity, but this too is in line with most historical cultures, which strongly cultivate the loyalty/ingroup foundation.
* Liberalism’s twin idols of freedom and equality cannot substitute for the complex matrixes of socially constructed meaning that enable social cooperation and cohesion.
* “[W]hen liberals try to make concrete the ideal of freedom which they propose, they find themselves always constrained (whether wittingly or no) by the habits and predilections of a particular way of life –the way of life of the emancipated urban intellectual.”
* [Conservatives say] liberalism promises freedom at the expense of the self when it eschews the unifying cultural understandings that could give the self content. Liberalism promises freedom but delivers only nihilism and alienation.
* [C]onservatives insist that our constitutional freedoms are the specific legacy of Anglo-Saxon history rather than partial instantiations of some universal ideal of expressive individualism.
I grew up as a Protestant and I felt sorry for Jews and Catholics who were enslaved to tradition. Then in my 20s, I came to see things differently, and at age 27, I converted to Judaism. I screwed around in my late 20s and early 30s, enjoying a licentious freedom completely contradicting my religious choice. By my 40s, I had calmed down and accepted that all good people are slaves to their high moral standards. While liberals might endorse follow your bliss as a life philosophy, conservatives are more likely to endorse an ethos of do your duty. In 2011, I entered my first 12-step program, accepting the principle (to the extent that I found it useful) that I was powerless over my desire to screw around. Until I overcame my compulsive desire to do things against my best interests, I was not free. By enslaving myself to recovery principles and practices, I rediscovered some freedom.
