![]() ![]() “Liberty Conservatives look, first of all, to America’s founding document,” Smith wrote, while “Freedom Conservatives are as likely to look to Lincoln as to the founders, and they may admit to having ancestors who voted for Franklin Roosevelt and marched for civil rights.” The shift back to liberty has also been championed by the Tea Party and popular libertarians like Ron Paul, who launched his Campaign for Liberty and affiliated student group Young Americans for Liberty during the 2008 presidential campaign.īuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith picked up on this shift 2014 when he made the case for a reclassification of conservatives into two groups-liberty conservatives and freedom conservatives. But unlike the Gipper, who spoke only of freedom, Cruz used the word liberty thirteen times. ![]() As Geoffrey Nunberg astutely observed, Ted Cruz gave a shout-out to Ronald Reagan when he declared his presidential candidacy at Liberty University in 2015. By the middle of the 20th century, the United States was solidly the land of freedom, its politics marked by turf battles over the proper use of the word-from the Freedom Riders to Operation Iraqi Freedom (although, as many pointed out after several uses of “Operation Iraqi Liberation” by Ari Fleischer, that would have made for an unfortunate acronym).īut now, after a century-long hiatus, liberty is back.Īnd the Republican platform isn’t the only place the word is popping up. “It’s a word that wears a three-corner hat,” said Nunberg.įollowing its starring role in the Declaration of Independence, liberty has slowly slipped out of common usage. Even today, liberty still has 18th century connotations. Nunberg, a linguist who teaches at the UC Berkeley School of Information. For the founders, liberty was the “fundamental American value,” and liberty remained the dominant word in the country’s political lexicon until the 20 th century, according to Geoffrey D. In the era of the American Revolution, liberty reigned supreme. Political theorist Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, in her 1988 essay “Are Freedom and Liberty Twins?”, wrote that freedom “is more likely to be holistic, to mean a total condition or state of being,” whereas liberty “is more likely to be plural and piecemeal.” Another way of putting it: freedom is the capacity to do things in the world, while liberty is the absence of external institutional constraints. The two merged after the Norman Invasion, and it took 1000 years for them to approach each other in meaning. ![]() Liberty and freedom have never meant exactly the same thing, in large part because, as noted above, they have different ancestries liberty comes from Latin, while freedom comes from German/Old English. The GOP’s shift, whether intentional or not, represents the gradual re-embrace of liberty by religious conservatives, and it’s worth taking note of. The words liberty and freedom have different origins, and they have slightly different connotations in the context of American political and cultural history. In most circles, “religious freedom” and “religious liberty” are interchangeable, but to call them identical wouldn’t quite be right. Depending on your political orientation, they’re either a defense of religious freedom or a dog-whistle for anti-LGBT views. In the wake of last summer’s Obergefell decision, states and municipalities across the country have proposed and passed laws to protect certain religiously-based views on marriage, gender and abortion. In 2016, religious freedom was again used six times, only this time it was joined by four mentions of “religious liberty,” and the First Amendment section was renamed “The First Amendment: Religious Liberty.” Its section on the First Amendment was titled “The First Amendment: The Foresight of Our Founders to Protect Religious Freedom.” In 2012, the GOP party platform mentioned “religious freedom” six times. ![]()
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