Thought for the Day: Kamala’s Understanding of “Freedom”

James Burnham

The positively Orwellian invocations of “freedom” at the Democratic National Convention by authoritarian “equitycrats” like Kamala Harris and Tim Walz sent me to my library to dust off James Burnham’s classic Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism. Looks like I’m going to end up re-reading the whole thing, because it has lost none of its potency in the 60 years since it was first published, and it illuminates a lot of what we’re seeing from the Progressive left just now.

And this passage from Burnham nails the problem with Kamala’s faux-embrace of “freedom”:

Nearly all liberals invoke the name of Freedom the way a drill sergeant invokes his favorite obscenity. It takes close study to find out just what they mean by the term and how they rate it under pressure. Very often we find that what is really being talked about has little to do with individual freedom, but is basically a question of advancing the interests of an economic, racial or religious group that the Freedom-invoker feels has a status below what it ought to be. Sometimes it is easy to prove that individual freedom is not really involved. For example, a liberal may call on Freedom in demanding that trade unions should have the right to recruit members without interference, to strike, to enjoy immunity from anti-monopoly legislation, etc.; and also to establish a closed shop, with automatic deduction of union dues from paychecks of all workers. Without attempting to judge the merits of these two sets of proposals, it is obvious enough that by any normal understanding the second—that is, the compulsory closed shop and dues checkoff—is not an enhancement but a deprivation of individual freedom. This is accepted because of the belief that the enhanced social power of the unions taken as a group of collectivities will help raise the living standards and political power of the members.

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