American Rhetoric About Freedom and Equality is Meaningless - Is Revolutionary Action Needed?

Since the Civil War Republicans have promoted themselves as the party of freedom and equality. Unfortunately, despite the short-lived Radical Republicans and passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments that granted citizenship and voting rights for African American males, or the recent anti-tax crusaders and a government without interference, upon closer examination the Republican Party reveals a party backed by big business, the military-industrial complex, and White Nationalists. With the recent January 6 Insurrection and attempted overthrow of an election, not to mention the US Constitution, the Republican Party now appears to be leaning towards a cult of personality and fascism.

A closer look at the founding of the United States would show, however, that the meanings of freedom and equality have always posed a problem. On June 7, 1776, when the delegates at the Second Continental Congress decided to draft a document based on independence, Thomas Jefferson, a thirty-three-year-old marginalized delegate who owned over 200 slaves, carried out the instructions of the other delegates-who also owned hundreds of slaves. Writing: “all men are created equally and endowed with unalienable rights,” the delegates were responding to British intellectuals that had projected Americans, their ways, their land, their animals, and their people as naturally inferior to everything British. (1)

In history context is everything, which is the reason the assertion can be made that the delegates excluded millions of enslaved African Americans, women, White indentured servants, children, and Native Americans. In other words, America’s original definition of freedom and equality depended more on whiteness and wealth and land and power than on modern interpretations of equality and freedom. For these rich men, freedom was not the power to make choices, freedom was the power to create choices. England created the choices, the policies American elites had to abide by. Power, wrapped in whiteness, wealth, land, and power, came before liberty. Power by these means created freedom-not the other way around.

This is the reason Jefferson and other delegates could argue for their freedom in one stroke of the pen but deny freedom to millions of others. It is why the delegates criticized the British for “exciting those very people (slaves and Native Americans in the Ohio Valley) to rise in arms among us.” The British may have treated Native Americans as political equals to prevent more rebellions like Chief Pontiac’s or declared liberty to the slaves (Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation), but not the delegates and America’s elites. They wanted a new nation and government based on their idea of freedom and equality, dictating to others the conditions of liberty. That liberty, being, controlled and limited through whiteness, wealth, land, and abuse of power.

Democrats hardly fare any better. Southern Democrats resisted abolition to the extent they fought a war to secede and then instituted Black Codes and Jim Crow Laws. The 20th century witnessed the rise of President Woodrow Wilson and the Ku Klux Klan and racist Dixiecrats who opposed the integration of the military, government, and schools. Today, despite Republican officials and governors and judges rolling back civil liberties, Democrats have failed to launch a revolutionary protest or respond with moral outrage to protect the rights of minorities. Both parties now threaten the existence of America’s fragile democracy. (Perhaps it has always been this way, ever since Jefferson founded Democratic-Republicans.)

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin is well known for his famous distinctions between two types of liberty. Republicans have usually emphasized “negative” liberty: the freedom to live without government interference. Democrats, on the other hand, have stressed “positive” liberty, concerned with creating opportunities for individuals to fulfill their potential. Here lies the problem: liberty, freedom, equality, and opportunity are all meaningless without power. That power primarily being whiteness, wealth, land, or money. Jefferson later wrote, “To secure these rights, it is the right of the people … to institute a new government … organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness.”

George Orwell wrote: “Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” It is evident that at this juncture in America’s fragile democratic experience, some type of revolutionary action motivated by raw political and economic power (not to mention courage) by the people-especially the marginalized-is desperately needed. Without that revolutionary action the power to realize freedom and equality will continue to be just “pure wind” and out of the grasp of most Americans.

Dallas Darling (darling.wn.)

(1) Kendi, Ibram X. Stamped from the Beginning. Bold Type Books: New York, New York, 2017., p. 105.