What is Freedom?

An old debate with new implications

Beyoncé may never have appeared in person to sing its anthem, but there’s little doubt which word stood out in the rhetoric of the 2024 Democratic National Convention.

According to New York Times analysis of transcripts, DNC speakers used freedom 227 times. That’s less than Harris (724), Walz (620), Trump (401), and America (436), but more than job (161), love (160), Democrat (122), and Biden (116).

For that matter, Democrats invoked freedom more than thrice as often as Republican speakers (67) had done earlier in the summer. “Who would have thought that freedom would be the watchword of the Democratic Party,” asked Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer in his prime time speech, “and no longer the Republican Party?”

While Joe Biden had more typically cast the election in terms of the future of democracy, Washington Post reporters Colby Itkowitz and Clara Ence Morse suggested that Harris’ decision to shift focus to freedom gave

Democrats a new rallying cry that political practitioners say is far more likely to resonate with voters — including, perhaps, disaffected Republicans and right-leaning independents….

Where Biden ominously warned that Trump posed a fundamental danger to the future of America’s constitutional republic, Harris has leaned into a term that better fits the more upbeat and optimistic tone she has sought to strike. It can also be applied to a range of issues with a more tangible impact on people’s day-to-day lives, including abortion, education, gun control and the economy….

“The vice president’s fundamental point is the same as those who invoke ‘democracy,’ but she believes discussing it in terms of fundamental freedoms makes it tangible in terms of what Americans stand to lose under a Trump presidency,” said Brian Fallon, a Harris campaign spokesman.

But I can also imagine Trump voters scoffing at the idea that freedom is central to the Harris-Walz vision for the country. For freedom is one of those words that sparks disagreement as soon as Americans try to define it. Indeed, it’s one of the most contested words in U.S. history.