Why ‘Freedom’ Matters: The Harris Campaign’s Double-Down on Democracy
The Harris campaign’s ‘Freedom Rally’, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, August 20/Kamala Harris X
August 21, 2024
On August 1st, as Vladimir Kara-Murza’s plane was lifting off from Moscow following a sequence of events he’d been sure would culminate in his execution, the FSB/KGB minder escorting the journalist and longtime state harassment target told him to look out the window.
“This is the last time you will see the Motherland.”
Kara-Murza laughed and replied that he would be back, and sooner than his chaperone might think.
Vladimir Kara-Murza doesn’t need a tutorial in the connection between freedom and democracy. In that exchange between one dictator’s projection proxy and a newly freed political prisoner, the words “freedom” and “democracy” didn’t need to be articulated. Kara-Murza was telling a representative of the corrupt covert culture that made a joke of Russia’s pit stop at democracy between the Soviet surveillance state and the Putin surveillance state that he would be back because democracy would be back.
For people who’ve spent their lives in democracies that, until recently, could be relied upon to place the rights of citizens over the whims of tyranny, the connection between democracy and freedom may not be so obvious.
At its most fundamental level, the link between democracy and freedom lies in the relationship between power and people. If power can be obtained without the ratification of the people, the elimination of freedom becomes an indispensable element of the control necessary to maintain that power. And because democracies — especially in the 21st-century context of anti-democracy power consolidation games that depend on misrepresentation, propaganda and other covert methods — don’t succumb to dictatorship overnight, the transfer of power from voters to unelected interests happens gradually. And that shift is achieved through the incremental, systematic violation, degradation and obliteration of freedom.
For someone like Kara-Murza there were many freedom-robbing moments, including the moments when he slowly but surely realized that the regime’s freedom and privacy-annihilating need for control included control of his physical safety and biological integrity through poison because, sooner or later, every dictatorship veers into paranoid, pathocratic excess.
Freedom is to democracy what faith is to religion or character is to identity — it’s where the rubber of abstraction meets the road of daily life. Those choices you make every day whose context is unspoken and invisible, but that define how you navigate the experience and adventure of being human. In autocracies and some democracies currently being termited by autocratic creep, those choices are filtered through a prism of violation and dissection that evaluates them based on their threat to the regime, their utility to the regime or their insignificance to the regime — a process whose facility and efficiency have been vastly improved by post-internet surveillance and hacking.
‘The biggest difference between a dictatorship and a democracy,’ Kara-Murza told an interviewer after his freedom was reinstated, ‘is that the highest value in a democracy is human life and the protection of human life and the saving of human life.’
Indeed, the world has changed since Franklin Delano Roosevelt made his famous 1941 “Four Freedoms” speech, immortalized in oils by Normal Rockwell. Roosevelt’s four freedoms were freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear. While those freedoms remain critical — it will take you fewer than five seconds to think of examples of where and how they remain imperilled — the confluence of technology, corruption and abuse of power that has so vividly dominated human events and degraded human rights since the dawn of the fourth industrial revolution has expanded that list. We can now add to it freedom from violation, freedom from exploitation and freedom from deception. The existing Rockwells have been updated so beautifully for representation, the freedoms themselves could surely be, too.
President Joe Biden made democracy not just the buzzword of his 2020 campaign but an existential cause because Donald Trump’s presidency had made it undeniably clear American democracy was under threat to a degree unprecedented since the Civil War. It is not, as some coverage has framed it, Biden’s subjective take on the situation — i.e., “democracy, which, according to Biden, is under threat.” It was a documented fact made manifest by the events of January 6th, 2021, by the corruption of the US Supreme Court and overturning of Roe v. Wade and Affirmative Action, by the daily deluge of propaganda where information used to be and by the telltale decoupling of political behaviour from electability.
The Harris-Walz campaign has refined that messaging to remind voters of democracy’s most invaluable attribute, freedom. From the campaign’s use out of the gate of the anthemic “Freedom” by Beyoncé featuring Kendrick Lamar, through the launch this week of the one-word tagline, the focus on freedom reminds people of what they lose when democracy isn’t fought for. This is not a departure from, or negation of, Biden’s focus on the existential threat to what is — despite all its flaws and loopholes — America’s defining characteristic. It’s an elaboration.
In Milwaukee Tuesday night, in a “Freedom Rally” held in the same arena where the Republicans anointed an autocrat last month, Harris made that clear.
“We are witnessing across our nation a full-on attack on hard-fought, hard-won, fundamental freedoms and rights across our nation, like the freedom to vote, the freedom to be safe from gun violence, the freedom to love who you love openly and with pride,” Harris said, adding, “the freedom of a woman to make decisions about her own body and not have her government telling her what to do.”
In a country born from the fight for democracy, dragged into adulthood over the question of whether all of its citizens would be free, and compelled again a century later, as Dr. King said, to deliver on the promissory note of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness via Civil Rights, Harris has situated this fight firmly within that struggle. “As the generations of Americans before us who led the fight for freedom,” she said Tuesday night, “the baton is now in our hands.”
The coalition represented at this week’s Democratic convention — including and especially the Tuesday night reminder from Barack and Michelle Obama of who last held the baton and why — will prevail for the same reasons that freedom will return to Russia.
“The biggest difference between a dictatorship and a democracy,” Kara-Murza told an interviewer after his freedom was reinstated on August 1st, “is that the highest value in a democracy is human life and the protection of human life and the saving of human life.”
There is only one party in this American election vowing to insult the lives of the very people who support it by eliminating their freedom to choose their own government; the same freedom that protects all the other freedoms.
Policy Magazine Associate Editor Lisa Van Dusen has served as a senior writer at Maclean’s, Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News and an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.