I grew up in a very conservative clan in a very conservative community in a Midwestern state that has become, over the decades, as red as a state can be. It would surprise no one that I was taught from an early age that we were Republican to the core – and I don’t think I even met a Democrat until I went to high school.
The rhetoric of Republican conservatism, then, was deeply entrenched in my memory long before that. I remember being told by my parents that they’d voted for Goldwater. I remember a mock election when I was in the second grade, where most of the entire class voted for Nixon, because our parents were going to.
And I remember having it carefully explained to me that we were conservative Republicans because Republicans are freedom-loving – and Democrats were closet socialists who wanted to strip us of those freedoms and make us pawns of the state.
I was cured of all of this after about 15 minutes on a university campus when I was 18, and made it my mission to become fully informed about the political and social history of my country, and in particular the underlying philosophies of my birth tribe. I especially wanted to understand this ‘freedom’ thing.
It took very little time to learn that almost everything I’d been told by my conservative community, all my young life, had been false. Nothing – nothing! - I had been told about women or black people or gay people or Democrats or liberals was true. That made everything else I’d been told, about social order, economics, religion – and, of course, ‘freedom’ - very suspect.
During my freshman year, I became a journalist (and remain one today, though I have several other professional vocations as well) and I developed a life-long habit of digging into important subjects and discovering all that I could about them as I formed my ideas and opinions. Though I remained part of my conservative community socially for many years thereafter, I turned as a young adult to the straight-and-narrow of science and investigation. I would never take the workings of the world around me for granted again, and would never settle for adopting the opinions of others as my own, regardless of how close I might be to them.
But I digress. Back to ‘freedom’.
It’s one of those words, like ‘values’ and ‘family’, that Republicans co-opted for themselves in the quest for identity. If Republicans are the ‘freedom’ party, then Democrats must be against freedom. That’s not even a little bit true, of course, but it taps into how our brains process language. The GOP is very good at leveraging it.
I was a young father raising a family as the realities of my country’s politics and social landscape came into increasingly clear focus. I stayed in school, on and off, for many years, and studied both cognitive and social psychology in depth, struggling to get to the real heart of why we believe the things we do.
But as I sit here today, well into middle age, I realize that for all my digging, the truth emerged on its own.
Conservatism isn’t now, and never has been, about freedom.
Conservatism is about conformity to one specific worldview – voluntary, for those who find comfort in that worldview, and involuntary, for everyone else. As far back as modern conservatism goes (and I went way back past Goldwater in my studies), it has been a movement to impose that worldview across the board – by whatever means necessary.
I could sit here all day and type out the arguments supporting my conclusions, but the current GOP leadership has spared me the trouble. From Donald Trump to Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis to the Roberts Court, there is no longer even a token pretense of respect for freedom on the right.
The latter, now a 6-3 conservative body, has undertaken an unprecedented rollback of civil rights, unraveling two generations’ work in bringing all Americans to the table of freedom. With one stroke, it has re-alienated the nation’s women, taking away reproductive freedom.
DeSantis, in his ongoing effort to seem as Trump-like as possible, has launched an openly authoritarian agenda that is unapologetically oppressive to anyone who isn’t white, male, and Christian. He has attempted to impose government censure on what’s taught in public universities; he’s banning books, and restricting the speech of public schoolteachers; he’s suppressing self-expression of identity among everyone whose identity is inconsistent with his own; and he is heaping political retribution on anyone who objects to these draconian measures.
Up in Ohio, the assault on LGBTQ citizens now includes a push in the state legislature for one of the most egregious – and ironic! - government intrusions imaginable: genital inspections of students in public high schools to rout out suspected transgender children.
In Texas and several other red states, Republicans are moving to block their citizens from traveling to other states where they can obtain abortions, and to punish companies who sponsor such travel for their employees.
All this from the party that has railed, all my life, about ending government intrusion in our lives. All this from the party that champions ‘freedom’.
“It has frustrated me that Republicans love to cloak themselves in this blanket of freedom and feel as though they own it somehow, when in fact what they are selling to the people of Pennsylvania, or the American people, really isn’t freedom at all,” said that state’s attorney general Josh Shapiro. “It’s far bigger government and more control over people’s everyday lives.”
The GOP rails about freedom when it’s dispensed to non-conservatives. They’re fine with restricting it when it benefits those outside their tribe.
And that’s me, of course.
The Party of Freedom wants a government that will take away my daughters’ reproductive rights. The Party of Freedom wants the government to decide what ideas can and cannot be expressed in a university classroom. The Party of Freedom wants the government to decide which books my grandson can and cannot read.
Worst of all, in my home state – one of the 10 most gerrymandered in the nation – the Party of Freedom wants to strip me of my vote.
I’m pretty clear on the whole ‘freedom’ thing at this point, I think.
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