Where Does Freedom Reside?

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, August 23, 2024

 

For reasons held by many a Goldberg, I’m not a big fan of large crowds chanting German slogans. But I kinda wish Tim Walz could have led the delegates at the United Center with a rousing chant of “Stadtluft macht frei!” Maybe even a call-and-response, in which he shouted “Stadluft!” and the crowd cried back “Macht Frei! Macht Frei! Macht Frei!”

 

“City air makes you free,” is a medieval German slogan. Originally, it referred to a patchwork of customs and laws in medieval German towns that said if a serf lived in a city for a year and a day his master couldn’t reclaim dominion over him. (Stadtluft macht frei nach Jahr und Tag or “city air makes you free after a year and a day.”) The laws were abolished for a time under the Holy Roman Empire, but the idea endured as a kind of cultural observation. Life in cities is “more free” in the sense that you have more opportunities to live life on your own terms than in more stultifying and conservative rural communities. Indeed, social scientists study something called the “city air hypothesis,” which “posits that the social constraints prevalent in rural life are weaker in metropolitan areas, freeing metropolitan residents from pressure to suppress their pursuit of individual goals.”

 

There’s obviously some truth to this. I mean it was obviously true for a lot of serfs. Better to be a free man in Düsseldorf than some baron’s piss-boy back home. But I think a lot of people at least know someone for whom this rings true in their own lives. I have several friends who grew up in poor rural communities. They have zero romantic nostalgia for that life. When they say they’re “not going back” they don’t necessarily mean the same thing Democrats meant when they chanted “We’re not going back!” at their convention this week. But they don’t mean something entirely different, either. 

 

The idea that the Big City is synonymous with liberty or at least a kind of libertinism, is one of the major themes of modern culture. Not many songs from a century ago have the cultural shelf life of “How Ya Gonna Keep ’em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree?).” Everyone understands the idea, even if they don’t remember the lyrics:

 

How ya gonna keep ‘em down on the farm

After they’ve seen Paree

How ya gonna keep ‘em away from Broadway

Jazzin’ around and paintin’ the town

How ya gonna keep ‘em away from harm, that’s a mystery

They’ll never want to see a rake or plow

And who the deuce can parley-vous a cow?

How ya gonna keep ‘em down on the farm

After they’ve seen Paree

 

Distrust of cities and what they represent is baked into American life. I remember the first time I navigated Penn Station with my wife. Penn Station, particularly at rush hour during the summer, manages to overturn our anatomical understanding of malus domestica by being the sphincter of the Big Apple. Amid the din and urine-rich stench, the Fair Jessica turned to me and said, “Jefferson was right about cities.” 

 

She was referring to the fact that TJ hated them. “I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man,” he wrote in 1800. So did some of America’s greatest and most influential writers. Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne had bottomless distrust or contempt for urban life. In a letter to Emerson, Thoreau wrote, “I don’t like the city better, the more I see it, but worse. I am ashamed of my eyes that behold it. … The pigs in the street are the most respectable part of the population. When will the world learn that a million men are of no importance compared with one man?” 

 

This last bit was a nod to the Jeffersonian romantic ideal of the patrician yeoman farmer who toils more in the fields of the solitary mind than among the grubby, bustling masses. 

 

Urban conservatism’s anti-urbanism.

 

Cultures are weird precisely because they defy rational or ideological attempts to impose order on them. 

 

American conservatism is a great illustration of this. Conservatives, broadly speaking, are champions of free-market economics. Free market economics both creates and depends on cities. And yet, culturally, conservatives have also been champions of the Jeffersonian view of cities. You can see this tension on display every morning if you tune into “Fox and Friends.” The ground floor studio is in the heart of midtown Manhattan, and yet the show’s New York-based hosts manage every morning to pee from a great height on city life, denouncing big-city politics and politicians, and running almost endless loops of video evidence of cities as a hellscape of dystopian dysfunction. The heroes, meanwhile, are exemplars and avatars of rural and small-town America. Country music megastars sit on the comfy couch promoting their albums between dispatches from Mayberry diners where real Americans in flannel worry about urban chaos heading their way like a zombie herd slowly encroaching on them. Weirder still, the Joan of Arc of small-town values is Donald Trump—easily one of the most recognized icons of urban America and long synonymous with New York City. 

 

Politically, this cultural schizophrenia is absurd for Republicans. Most Americans live in metropolitan areas, and Republican scorn for cities is bad for the GOP and for cities that desperately need competitive elections. Kevin Williamson has written a great deal about this. 

 

This phenomenon has some intellectual roots. In the early years of the conservative awakening after World War II, a slew of intellectuals embraced the aesthetics and other cultural commitments of the Jeffersonian tradition. Champions of southern agrarianism like Richard Weaver and curmudgeonly dissenters from industrial civilization like Russell Kirk, not to mention various “individualists”—an early label for right-leaning libertarians, including to some extent Ayn Rand—believed that cities were hotbeds of collectivism, conformity, statism, and mob rule. The fact that many of these people lived and thrived in cities didn’t seem to be much of a contradiction. (William F. Buckley didn’t subscribe to all of this stuff, by the way, but he did encourage it, which is a little weird for a New York mayoral candidate and the most cosmopolitan person I’ve ever met.) It’s funny, library shelves groan with tomes exploring the “cultural contradictions of capitalism.” But much less has been written about the capitalistic contradictions of our culture.

 

About 20 years ago, Reason’s Nick Gillespie poked at these contradictions. He wrote an essay poo-pooing the “economic freedom” of rural America, noting that the cultural freedom of city life was in fact often more liberating. He did not endear himself to those who think economic freedom is the sole bellwether of personal freedom. 

 

It takes a village to socialize the economy.

 

Which brings me to progressive weirdness. The qualities of small-town life that cultural conservatives celebrate—with much good reason—are precisely the qualities that progressives want to impose from above on the nation as a whole. When Tim Walz says, “One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness” he’s getting at what I mean. Likewise, Hillary Clinton’s pabulum about “It takes a village to raise a child,” supposedly an African proverb (from “the ancient African kingdom of Hallmarkcardia,” in the words of the late P.J. O’Rourke) is another version of this idea. Barack Obama’s second inaugural, in which he described an America where the state plays the role of the helpful neighbor is another. 

 

The small-town ideal and idyll of people looking out for one another, watching out for each other’s kids—in much the way Kamala Harris described her childhood—is a quintessentially conservative conception of American life. Oprah Winfrey in her speech to the DNC declared:

 

And despite what some would have you think, we are not so different from our neighbors. When a house is on fire, we don’t ask about the homeowner’s race or religion. We don’t wonder who their partner is or how they voted. No, we just try to do the best we can to save them. And if the place happens to belong to a childless cat lady, well, we try to get that cat out too.

 

Progressives downplay the other aspects of rhetorically small-town life they seek to impose on the nation. But they are there. In small-town life, contrary to Tim Walz’s flatly ridiculous claim that the motto of Minnesota is “mind your own damn business,” neighbors are constantly all up in your business. Speech may not be legally censored, but it is socially censored and curtailed. Gossip is a powerful form of social control because, unlike in cities, everybody knows who you are. Cooperation—once a term redolent with anti-capitalist undertones for progressive intellectuals—is the rule. Commerce is fine, but not if it oversteps the unwritten rules of “neighborliness.” There is no greater exemplar of police “de-escalation” than the small-town, Andy Griffith-style Mayberry sheriff who talks everyone out of their bad decisions without ever thinking of unholstering his weapon. 

 

Now, I should say that I love a lot about this conception of small-town life. Truly. The problem is that you cannot scale up small-town life. You cannot make a diverse, continental nation, a sprawling commercial republic of 331 million people operate like Mayberry. Even Rousseau believed that his General Will-governed vision of totalitarian cooperation could not work in any polity larger than Geneva. And let’s be clear, it didn’t work in Geneva, either. You can’t run a large nation like a small town, a family, a business, or an army. You certainly can’t run a large free nation that way. 

 

Freedom to and freedom from.

 

If you haven’t figured out where I am going with this, let me pull back the curtain on my intent. I’ve written dozens of times about the difference between “positive” and “negative” liberty. A host of commenters are revisiting this point in response to Democrats’ effort to “reclaim freedom” as a progressive value. I agree with my conservative friends on this, I just don’t want to write the same thing again. Still, I should explain the debate.

 

Here’s the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s explanation:

 

Negative liberty is the absence of obstacles, barriers or constraints. One has negative liberty to the extent that actions are available to one in this negative sense. Positive liberty is the possibility of acting — or the fact of acting — in such a way as to take control of one’s life and realize one’s fundamental purposes. While negative liberty is usually attributed to individual agents, positive liberty is sometimes attributed to collectivities, or to individuals considered primarily as members of given collectivities.

 

In his “Second Bill of Rights” speech—which I loathe—FDR gives the iconic statement of positive liberty. Economic freedom means freedom from want, freedom from need. Because “necessitous men are not free men,” Roosevelt argued, everyone has a right to a good job, a decent home, health care, etc. 

 

To be clear, I want every American to have these things, but I do not believe they should—or even can—have these things as rights. The actual Bill of Rights is written in the “negative,” in that our rights are assumed to be prior to government, endowed by our creator. And, therefore, the state cannot deprive us of them. “Congress shall pass no law” that deprives us of our rights to speech, worship, assembly, etc. The Bill of Rights is less a guarantor of rights than a restriction on our government to deny them. In a sense, the Bill of Rights is a really urban document. Constitutional air macht frei! It says you can let your freak flag fly and no amount of governmental neighborliness can stop you. 

 

It shouldn’t surprise anyone who has paid attention to American politics for the last century, that progressives traditionally like the idea of positive liberty while conservatives and libertarians opt for negative liberty. But, again, because culture is weirder than ideology, it’s worth noting that the right has never had a monopoly on negative liberty, because before American left-wingers are ideologues, they’re also Americans. Defunding the police, abolishing prisons, drug legalization—all of which I oppose—are extreme forms of negative liberty. 

 

College town America.

 

Anyway, I’ve long held the theory that the American left wants America to operate like a vast college campus. Nowhere in modern life—not China, North Korea, or Santa Monica—are more people successfully lifted up by positive liberty than on elite college campuses in America. Obviously, some people work their way through Harvard or Yale, but huge numbers of them are carried around like dauphins on a royal pillow across the quad and through the halls. Their food, housing, health care, security, and entertainment are all provided by the well-meaning bureaucrats of campus life. Ideological conformity is drilled down from above and from classmates, but it’s often sold as radicalism and transgression. The kids are convinced that agreeing with the prevailing orthodoxy of professors and administrators is a form of cultural rebellion. The only real offense is to offend the pieties of the prevailing orthodoxy.

 

And here’s the thing: These kids are told they are independent and they believe it. And for good reason. Who can dispute that for millions of people, college air makes you free? But this is the independence of positive liberty. And that’s fine. But campus life is supposed to prepare you for real life, not inculcate a desire to maintain the movable feast in perpetuity. 

 

But too many leave these institutions with their characters shaped by the experience, and they take with them a diploma and the deep-seated conviction that life should work the same way for the country as a whole. If you listen for it, you can find this attitude on MSNBC or in the pages of the New York Times. The emphasis on a very specific kind of freedom—of expression, of sexuality, of self-definition—only really makes complete sense in the context of the fishbowl life of elite college students. 

 

It hadn’t occurred to me until today that this experience dovetails with how many progressives talk about the role of government. Again, they talk about the nation as if it should be run like a small town or village, but, for many of them, their only experience of something close to actual small-town life is campus life. When Nancy Pelosi declared that the Affordable Care Act was emancipatory because it would allow people to quit their jobs and “write poetry,” it was like she was appealing to students who were freed from the necessity of waiting tables to pay for their degree. “This was one of the goals,” she explained. “To give people life, a healthy life, liberty to pursue their happiness. And that liberty is to not be job-locked, but to follow their passion.”

 

The same problem applies. Just as you cannot run a country like a small town, you can’t run it like a college campus. Positive liberty is good—in the right proportion and in the places where it is good, from family and school to childhood and the military. But negative liberty is vital, if for no other reason than that a system of negative liberty not only provides the prosperity and citizenry that make such things possible, it keeps the government from trying to turn us all into students, children, or soldiers. 

 

One last point. In her acceptance speech, Kamala Harris said this election offers “a precious, fleeting opportunity to move past the bitterness, cynicism, and divisive battles of the past, a chance to chart a new way forward. Not as members of any one party or faction, but as Americans.”

 

This is probably smart rhetoric for a politician running as a “change candidate” (an ironic posture for the incumbent vice president, but whatever). But this is also ludicrous. For all practical purposes, there is no such thing as a new way forward and, if there is, we shouldn’t want one. If we are to believe the Democrats’ rediscovered love of America as the greatest country in the world, we shouldn’t want to be unburdened by what has been. We should want to build on it. And it’s always been the case that our politics is driven by the competing desires for positive and negative liberty. I am decidedly on the side of the latter, but we should make peace with the fact that both are good, in their place.