Republicans often crow about how they’re the party of “freedom” and about how their efforts to destroy the American government and worker and environmental protections around the country are actually making each of us more “free”.
For instance, on November 20, 2022 West Virginia’s Attorney General Patrick Morrissey tweeted about how he fought for corporations’ right to pollute in the case of West Virginia v EPA writing: “If you want more freedom, drain more power from the swamp! Who’s with me?”
His tweet and the millions of others like it always make me think of German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck arguing for Germany to adopt the world’s first worker’s compensation program in the 1880s: “There scarcely exists nowadays a word with which more abuse is committed than the word free.”
Morrissey’s tweet is part of a long history of Republicans lying about what it means to be free. In America, the modern history goes back over a century ranging from recent objections to Medicare for All to racist objections about the Great Society and objections to FDR’s wildly popular New Deal. Even before the New Deal, this interpretation of “freedom” underpinned a decades-long slate of anti-worker and undemocratic conservative Supreme Court rulings exemplified by the 1905 case Lochner v. New York.
The Lochner ruling re-interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment to include a business’ right to a “liberty of contract.” It was used to strike down child labor laws, minimum wage laws, and every other sort of worker protection law that any state tried to pass until the Court upheld a Washington state minimum wage law in West Coast Hotel Co. v Parrish in 1937.
For almost forty years, the conservative Supreme Court interpreted a “freedom of contract” in the Fourteenth Amendment in such a way that they overturned worker protection after worker protection. The Court argued that any such laws violated an employer’s right to draft whatever contract they wanted to draft, no matter how it disadvantaged workers of any age.
Basically, the conservative Supreme Court interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment to mean that any worker was free to accept any job, and any employer was free to dictate the exact terms of who they would hire and for what compensation, even if that meant discriminating against some workers and cherry-picking the most vulnerable and desperate workers in a race to the bottom.
This epitomized the Republican conception of freedom since the end of the 19th century. The result of these conservative rulings from the Supreme Court when combined with the Republican laissez-faire economic and tax policies championed by Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover? The Great Depression!
Times of great economic unrest tend to produce times of great political unrest, and the Great Depression worldwide fueled the movements for fascism from the right, and for communism or socialism from the left.
America during the 1930s saw a rise in the popularity of both fascism and socialism, with Franklin Delano Roosevelt working tirelessly with his cabinet and talking directly to the American people to preserve American democracy without sacrificing American capitalism. To do so, FDR knew that the American government needed to be able to provide some basic human rights.
In his 1941 State of the Union Address, FDR laid out the “Four Freedoms”:
In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression … The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way … The third is freedom from want .. The fourth is freedom from fear. … That is no vision of a distant millenium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation.
Notably, Roosevelt’s use of the word “freedom” stands in direct contrast with the concept that Republicans evoke when they talk about freedom, especially when it comes to concepts like “freedom from fear” and “freedom from want”.
Fifty years before, Bismarck highlighted the absurdity that pro-worker policies might be a “socialist fad,” declaring that “Perhaps the whole institution of the state is a socialist fad. If everyone could live on his own, perhaps everyone would be much more free, but also much less protected and guarded.”
Bismarck was right. When run out to its logical ends, conservative demands for “freedom” amount to eviscerating our American government, repealing any law that inhibits a business’ freedom to discriminate, to pollute, to pay poverty wages, and to generally do whatever they want in order to make some more money for shareholders. That’s not “freedom” for the American people.
As FDR addressed the nation in his 1944 State of the Union address, he bluntly observed that “Necessitous men are not free men”. To that end he introduced a “Second Bill of Rights” or an “Economic Bill of Rights” that included a right to a useful and remunerative job, the right of every family to a decent home, the right to medical care and good health; the right to a good education; and the right to protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment.
In the eighty years since the New Deal our American politics have rolled back the other way, with conservatives arguing daily that Americans have no right to any of these, and arguing in fact that any action taken to secure these rights would amount to “socialism” or “tyranny”. But as Bismarck pointed out (hardly a bleeding heart liberal): “Each law for poor relief is socialism. There are states that distance themselves so far from socialism that poor laws do not exist at all.”
And while Republicans seem hell-bent on turning America into a state where we have no “poor laws” or social safety net or any guarantee as to what standard of living may be afforded to families, Democrats have begun to reclaim our history and take up the mantle of the New Deal and FDR’s vision for an Economic Bill of Rights.
That’s why on September 30, 2023 the West Virginia Democratic Executive Committee affirmed clearly that the WV Democratic Party is fighting for every West Virginian and every American to have a right to:
A job that pays a living wage;
A voice in the workplace through a union and collective bargaining;
Comprehensive quality health care;
A complete cost-free public education and access to broadband internet;
Decent, safe, affordable housing;
A clean environment and a healthy planet;
Meaningful resources at birth and a secure retirement;
Sound banking and financial services;
An equitable and economically fair justice system;
To vote and otherwise participate in public life.
As FDR laid out in his 1944 State of the Union, we now “have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.”
Without these rights guaranteed and secured for all West Virginians and all Americans we are living in a country that is represents only a shell of the American promise. West Virginia’s Democratic Party is the third state party in the country to adopt this 21st c. Economic Bill of Rights. West Virginia Democrats will be fighting for these rights at every level, from the municipal to the national level, but we can’t do it alone.
It is time for all state parties to affirm these rights so that the party can move “to secure these rights to win the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known.”
In the words of FDR “We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.”
Republicans may fight for a “freedom” to starve in a polluted holler while working three jobs, but Democrats are fighting to secure the American Dream for All.
P.S. I’m trying to get back into the habit of regularly writing about both the news of the day and under-covered stories. If you have an essay idea you’d like to see me write or if you’d like to know my thoughts on a particular topic, post it in the comments or send me a message!