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“Freedom” Is Good for Democrats, Bad for Democracy

photograph of miniature flags at political rally

The central debate in this presidential campaign was set out at the beginning by the novice pundit Beyonce: “freedom, freedom where are you?” The Democrats have claimed that freedom has always belonged with them and they are finally reclaiming it from the right. Conservatives, of course, countered that freedom is being hijacked from its true home and used to dress up the left’s usual coercive politics. So, who’s right – did the Democrats reclaim or hijack freedom? And, more importantly, should they have done either?

Commentators on both sides agreed on the answer to the first question: it depends on your definition of “freedom.” The philosopher Isaiah Berlin famously distinguished between two kinds of freedom, negative and positive. Negative freedom asks the government only to “mind [its] own damn business,” while positive freedom allows the government to intervene in people’s lives to help them achieve their goals. So, when Democrats used “freedom” to describe their interventionist policies, they were reclaiming a positive definition of freedom to reframe values like safety, equality, and justice as (somewhat tortured) freedoms: the “freedom from fear, violence, and harm,”freedom to live without fear of bigotry and hate,” and the “freedom to learn and acknowledge our true and full history.”

Even as commentators argued over whether Democrats were entitled to use the language of freedom, however, no one questioned whether they should. Messaging gurus declared it a winning strategy based on focus group testing and the broad appeal of freedom. Liberal writers celebrated it as potentially transforming American politics. And even political philosophers were pleased; parsing this one word back into its many meanings is going to keep us relevant for at least a month. In an election that has struggled to elevate the debate above who is “weird” and who is “real,” it might be hard to get worked up about too much philosophy in politics. But, in this case at least, what’s good for philosophers and Democrats is ultimately bad for democracy.

Campaigns are not just contests between messaging gurus. Party platforms are created to win elections, but they also serve the important democratic purpose of providing a clear contrast to the other party so voters can choose the party that speaks to their priorities. To draw a clear contrast, it helps to use different words. Consider the debate over national security after 9/11 or the recent debates on pandemic policy. It is difficult enough to choose between safety and privacy or freedom and health without commercials telling you that privacy is the new safety or true freedom starts with health. And once both sides try to redescribe their priorities in the language of freedom, you end up with a confusing contest between freedom from fear and freedom from surveillance, or the freedom to be healthy versus the freedom of association. These debates are framed for lawyers, not the voting public. And if voters can’t understand what they’re choosing between, then their chosen representatives don’t and can’t represent their will.

Replacing other values with “freedom” also runs counter to the pluralist strand of Democratic politics, which Barack Obama represented in his speech at the DNC. As he often has, Obama talked about the importance of how we treat those who disagree with us – how we listen to and learn from them. On his podcast the next day, Ezra Klein described this strand as valuing how we “make space for them even in disagreement.” Part of making this space is to acknowledge that others’ values are indeed valuable, even if they aren’t what’s most important right now. But when we suggest that ours is the “real” freedom, we don’t leave any space for theirs. For instance, when we frame pandemic policies as sacrificing some amount of freedom to promote public health, we are at least acknowledging the trade-off between legitimate values. If, instead, we call public health the “freedom from viruses,” it suggests that there is not an inevitable trade-off but a way in which we can have both freedom and health. Anyone who thinks otherwise just has the wrong idea about freedom. This insight that there are inevitable trade-offs in politics is another aspect of Isaiah Berlin’s thought – one that did not resurface last week. In Berlin’s world, we often have to choose between good things – safety and privacy, speech and inclusion, freedom and health. If we don’t acknowledge these trade-offs, it becomes difficult to even see the need for a compromise with others, let alone pursue one.

Maybe you’re not a pluralist Democrat, though, and you don’t care whether voters can make a clear choice. Maybe all that matters is that voters choose the right president in November, and we can work out the policy details later. Even then, reframing all Democratic values as freedoms does little to move the public in a progressive direction. The reason that reframing progressive values as freedoms broadens their appeal is that freedom seems to demand less than progressives usually want. For some people, freedom only demands non-interference – no one telling them what to do. For others, freedom demands that they have the option for something, but not necessarily a realistic opportunity, a responsibility, or an entitlement to that thing. As a result, the freedom to vote is not necessarily a demand to make voting easier. The freedom to “get ahead” is not necessarily an equal opportunity to get ahead. And the “freedom to learn and acknowledge our true history” takes a strong stand against banning books, but doesn’t suggest a responsibility to teach our children how race has shaped that history. When these slogans get translated into policy, Democrats may find that freedom is flexible enough to accommodate Republican aspirations, but not quite broad enough for their own.

Should Republicans and Democrats Be Friends?

photograph of stuffed Republican elephant and Democrat Donkey face-to-face atop American flag

America’s polarization crisis extends to its friendships: a 2017 Pew Research Center survey found that only thirty-one percent of Democrats have at least some friends who are Republicans, while only four-in-ten Republicans said they have some friends who are Democrats. Should we be alarmed by this? Should we be friends with people who hold views we believe to be immoral?

It seems that we have dueling intuitions about the moral permissibility of friendship with those who do not share our values. Consider a peaceful neo-Nazi — someone who has genocidal beliefs but will never act on them. I think most people believe it is wrong to be friends with such a character, and I can think of three arguments in support of this belief. First, there is the “signaling” argument. Being friends with the neo-Nazi will likely be interpreted by others as expressing approval for, or lending credibility to, their beliefs. One ought not signal one’s approval for beliefs one takes to be immoral, so one ought not be friends with the neo-Nazi. The second argument is the “incentive” argument. The idea is that withholding friendship from the neo-Nazi might incent him to abandon his beliefs, which is something we ought to encourage him to do insofar as we believe his beliefs are immoral. If one ought to withhold friendship from the neo-Nazi for this reason, then one ought not be friends with him. Finally, there is the “disesteem” argument, which is that disesteem — that is, feelings of disdain or disapprobation — are an appropriate response to the neo-Nazi’s immoral beliefs, and these feelings are incompatible with genuine friendship. If we ought to A (in this case, feel certain emotions towards the neo-Nazi), and A is incompatible with B (in this case, be friends with the neo-Nazi), then we ought not to B.

So, we certainly have intuitions, backed by reasons, that support not being friends with individuals solely because of their moral beliefs. On the other hand, consider a Kantian and a consequentialist. These two may have fundamental moral disagreements over a host of issues, such as our obligations to the foreign poor, the morally optimal distribution of all-purpose goods, the morality of lying, the morality of infanticide, and whether it is morally permissible to intentionally kill one person in order to save five. Only one of them can be right, so one of them has immoral beliefs. Yet we do not think it would be wrong for them to be friends.

I will assume that Democrats and Republicans have moral disagreements, for example over abortion. The question is whether friendship with someone of the opposing party is like the Kantian’s friendship with the consequentialist or like being friends with a neo-Nazi.

It might be argued that the neo-Nazi’s immoral beliefs include immoral beliefs about how others can be permissibly harmed, which distinguishes them from the beliefs of Kantians and consequentialists, or Republicans and Democrats. But from a Republican’s perspective, Democrats impermissibly believe that it is permissible to harm the unborn; and from a Kantian perspective, consequentialists impermissibly believe that it is permissible to intentionally kill one in order to save five. Furthermore, since the neo-Nazi is peaceful, her genocidal beliefs cannot be distinguished from the others in terms of disposing her to act violently.

The Kantian’s friendship with the consequentialist also nicely illustrates why the distinction between cross-party friendships and friendships with neo-Nazis cannot lie in the sheer number of disagreements, or their moral importance. The Kantian has a large number of fairly fundamental moral disagreements with the consequentialist, including over what makes actions morally right or wrong. Nor can the distinction lie in the idea that Democrats (or Republicans) shouldn’t believe that Republicans (or Democrats) as such hold moral beliefs, while they should believe neo-Nazis hold immoral beliefs. Either the Kantian or the consequentialist should believe that the other’s beliefs are immoral, yet they are seemingly still permitted to be friends.

Nor can the distinction lie in the confidence with which we hold the moral beliefs that differ from our opposite party friend. Plenty of people are just as confident that consequentialism (or Kantianism) is the correct moral philosophy as that racism, or racially motivated genocide, is morally right or wrong. Yet confident consequentialists should not disdain friendships with Kantians and vice versa. On the other hand, we should not be friends with a neo-Nazi just because he is not confident about his genocidal beliefs.

We might try to appeal to the admittedly vague idea of reasonability to distinguish between cross-party friendships and friendships between Kantians and consequentialists on the one hand, and friendships with neo-Nazis on the other. The thought is that the disagreements that occur in the former cases are reasonable, but not in the latter case. It’s not clear that all would agree that this feature does distinguish them, since many people think the beliefs of people of the opposing party are unreasonable. For these people, if reasonability is what distinguishes friendships between Kantians and consequentialists and friendships with neo-Nazis, then cross-party friendships will fall on the side of friendships with neo-Nazis. These people will have to conclude that people of the opposing party do not deserve friendship, that being friends with them lends credibility to their views in a morally problematic way, and that disesteem that is incompatible with friendship is an appropriate response.

More fundamentally, if it’s true that having what we take to be immoral beliefs unfits a person for our friendship, it’s hard to see why they should be unreasonable immoral beliefs. What’s doing the work in our intuition that we ought not to be friends with people because of their beliefs is the moral character of their beliefs, not their rationality or reasonability. Just because a prima facie compelling argument can be given for consequentialism and not Nazism does not make the consequentialist’s beliefs less morally heinous from the point of view of the Kantian.

Another suggestion is that neo-Nazi beliefs are somehow simply worse than, for example, the beliefs of Democrats as viewed from the perspective of Republicans, or the beliefs of consequentialists as viewed from the perspective of Kantians. However, the “signaling,” “incentive,” and “disesteem” arguments are not based on Nazis’ ideas being particularly heinous in the eyes of others, but just on their being believed to be immoral.

We’re left, then, with a troubling conclusion. If one ought not be friends with neo-Nazis solely because of their beliefs, then there is in principle no way to distinguish such friendships from cross-party friendships, insofar as each member of a cross-party friendship believes that the other side holds immoral views.

Still, perhaps we ought to deny the claim that we should not be friends with neo-Nazis, at least in its unqualified form. Some former Nazis strike up friendships with neo-Nazis in order to de-program them; ought we condemn that action? Similarly, if a Democrat believes his Republican friend is racist, might he not justify his friendship on the ground that he is likely to be more successful at persuading his friend to abandon his racist beliefs by remaining friends? A friend of this conception of cross-party friendship might point out that withholding friendship is but one way, and perhaps not the most effective way, to incent others to abandon their beliefs; that simply because feelings of disesteem are appropriate does not mean they are morally required, all-things-considered; and that there are ways to signal one’s disapproval of a friend’s beliefs.

Note that even if these counterarguments are successful, they will not justify a “de-politicized” or “de-moralized” friendship — a friendship wherein at least one person believes the other has immoral beliefs, but decides to do nothing about it. But this raises a further problem, which I can only gesture at: if genuine friendship requires accepting the friend as they are in some sense, then the kind of cross-party friendship that seems morally permissible may not be genuine. In the end, then, it may turn out that genuine cross-party friendships are morally impermissible.

We’ve Got Politics Wrong

photograph of democratic and republican party figurines atop the American flag

In the heat of partisan divisions, it is tempting to think different sides of the dispute are deeply committed to distinct and irreconcilable political and moral principles and values that explain their disagreement: partisan rifts are about ideology, not party affiliation. However, despite the intuitive appeal of this view, we have good evidence that it’s backwards: party affiliation trumps ideology. Understanding why will clarify our thinking about politics.

First, let’s begin with an unnerving fact: your single vote doesn’t matter to the outcome of an election (except in astronomically rare cases). It isn’t hard to see why: in a large democracy, for your vote to count, it must break a tie. But there are scant opportunities for your individual vote to break any ties. As a Louisiana resident, voting in the upcoming presidential election is highly unlikely to make a difference; the state will be carried by the Republican. And the same holds, to varying degrees, up and down the ballot.

You may object that “even if an individual vote doesn’t matter in deeply blue and red states, the same isn’t true of swing states.” A swing state is likely the best chance one has to decide an election outcome with a single vote. Even this is highly unlikely: an optimistic estimate is that an individual vote has a 1-in-10 million chance, and on average about a 1-in-60 million chance, of deciding the outcome of an election. Just to get a feel for the odds: this is roughly equivalent to the odds of winning a state lottery twice. (Since no one rationally thinks that will happen, we should think the same of deciding an election with a single vote).

When I bring this point up, people often cite the U.S. Presidential election in 2000 as a case where a few votes mattered a lot. However, this is a poor response for a couple reasons. First, the fate of that election was ultimately decided by the courts; so there’s a sense in which even in that rare case, individual votes didn’t matter. Second, the fact that something unlikely happens — like someone winning the lottery — doesn’t show it will likely happen again. The fact that we focus on that particular example, at least in American politics, is itself revealing.

Partisan affiliation trumps ideology partly because a single vote doesn’t effectively influence policy; but it can signal allegiance to those in one’s tribe. The incentives at play are revealing: voters are rationally ignorant because it is rational for them to be politically ignorant. Indeed, the average voter lacks the most basic of political knowledge: which party controls the White House; which party is in favor of banning abortion; which party supports free trade. There are many examples like this. There are poor incentives to be politically informed: if an individual vote is incredibly unlikely to decide the outcome of an election, voters lack the incentive to be politically informed. It would make sense to be informed if an individual vote would likely make a difference; one would want to study to ensure their vote had the desired impact.

Sometimes political commentators argue voting only takes a few hours: one must register, pick their preferred candidates, and then vote. This is nonsense. It would only make sense if voting didn’t require knowledge. However, we should vote well if we’re going to vote; even if a single vote won’t influence the outcome of an election, voting badly in aggregate does. And voting well requires substantial expertise in economics, foreign affairs, and educational policy, to name but a few. Voting well is costly too: it is hard to undertake, requiring thousands of hours, and with high opportunity costs.

Worse still, even if someone is informed enough to vote well, there is no guarantee that they will; there’s a good chance they’ll vote badly for reasons unrelated to how informed they are. We are susceptible to what psychologists call ‘motivated reasoning’: the unconscious tendency to find arguments for conclusions we want to believe stronger than arguments for conclusions we dislike. A creationist may require a low level of evidence for her view, but require that evidence for evolution meet a much higher evidential bar. Likewise, a smoker may dismiss studies showing a link between cigarette smoke and cancer, but accept similar studies showing a relationship between trans-fat and heart disease. Consider a real-time example: the partisan divide over police and teachers’ unions. Democrats favor the latter, but not the former; Republicans are the reverse. This is odd: if one thinks police unions are corrupt because it is very hard to fire a bad cop, then by similar reasoning they should think teachers’ unions corrupt too (and vice versa). If, however, support for one’s preferred union were an exercise in signaling partisan affiliation, this strange mix of policy positions would make sense.

Everyone engages in motivated reasoning; but the more politically informed someone is, the more likely they are to engage in such reasoning. Perhaps greater political knowledge enables one to better defend their prior convictions. This speaks to an epistemic paradox at the heart of democracy: we can’t vote well without sufficient expertise; but the more politically informed we are, the more likely we are to engage in politically motivated reasoning. This is why some philosophers argue it would often be morally better to ignore politics. We lack the incentives and psychological objectivity to vote well. And given the opportunities costs of voting well, and that an individual vote isn’t worth much, civic-minded citizens among us, who sincerely want to make the world a better place, would be better off doing something other than voting, like say, working at a homeless shelter.