At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, amid encouragement to stay at home, a Las Vegas school board candidate’s tweet went viral: “I just went to a crowded Red Robin.” Her reason? “Because this is America. And I’ll do what I want.”
Not so fast, says David Kinley in THE LIBERTY PARADOX: Living With the Responsibilities of Freedom (Johns Hopkins University Press, 363 pp., $29.95), a thorough meditation on the complexities of negotiating our desires with those of other people. Kinley, a professor of human rights law, argues against the “farcical myopia” of people who believe that freedom means an unfettered license to “do what I want.” Such claims, he writes, “are not only doomed to fail in any societal setting, but they also gravely misrepresent what liberty is about.”
Liberty, according to Kinley, is inherently limited. He details the constraints on our freedoms in eight primary realms of life: health, happiness, wealth, work, security, voice, love and death. Among more banal observations — having to work restricts our freedoms — Kinley picks at more interesting problems, like the right to suicide. “Are we indeed free to procure our own demise,” he asks, and are the rights of others — especially family members who might be psychologically impacted — infringed by a person’s choice to die? This is a “near impossible calculus,” Kinley admits, but he also suggests that entertaining the moral math is good for everyone involved.
And, he reasons, it is also good for us that liberty comes with responsibilities. You can tell, because people who always get their way are often miserable. Take despots, for example. The Roman Emperor Caligula was “sick, insane, perpetually fearful”; Mao “was plagued by insomnia and a theatrically erratic libido”; and the ever-smiling Kim Jong-un “conceals a darkness beneath his sunny, choreographed public image.” On the flip side, Kinley explains, having a give and take between your impulses and the demands of civilization is more likely to produce a higher functioning society with more happiness overall. “We fare much better the wider and more equally freedom is spread,” he writes. The difficulty, of course, is figuring out how to spread it.
In AMERICA LAST: The Right’s Century-Long Romance With Foreign Dictators (Liveright, 249 pp., $28.99), Jacob Heilbrunn deals with freedom from a different angle, starting with tyrants and moving forward from there.
Heilbrunn, a veteran journalist who covers right-wing politics, has observed a trend over the last decade: Prominent American conservatives have become more vocal in their admiration of foreign despots, from Donald Trump’s praise of Vladimir Putin to Tucker Carlson’s plaudits for the Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orban, whose government, Carlson once said, has “a lot of lessons for the rest of us.”
To those of us wondering, How did we get here? Heilbrunn responds: We’ve been “here” all along. “America Last” provides an alarming list of characters whose enchantment with foreign dictators through the decades exerted real influence on American intellectual life.
Take the activist Elizabeth Dilling, for instance, whom The Daily Beast has called “the 1930s’ Steve Bannon.” She believed Jewish refugees in the United States had come to America to start a Marxist coup. In 1938, she screened fascist propaganda featuring Hitler and Mussolini for an audience of thousands at the Hotel Commodore in New York.
In the 1960s, L. Brent Bozell Jr., a speechwriter for Joseph McCarthy and Barry Goldwater, “poured scorn on the notion that freedom was a worthy aspiration” and took the stage at Madison Square Garden to push for the U.S. government to establish a Christian theocracy. In 1970, he led a group of 200 anti-abortion protesters in a violent assault on a clinic in Washington, D.C., and attacked a police officer who tried to stop him with a five-foot wooden cross.
“America Last” is an impressive and engaging catalog of the right’s long-held fascination with autocracy, but readers will have to look elsewhere for an in-depth analysis of the bigger puzzle that this history suggests: What is the best way to preserve freedom and the government that protects it from those who are attracted by the opposite?
In OUR ANCIENT FAITH: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment (Knopf, 247 pp., $30), the historian Allen C. Guelzo looks to the 19th century to identify the challenges of sustaining a free society. He argues compellingly that Abraham Lincoln, who fought to defend the American republic against autocratic forces in the South while restricting civil liberties in the North, can help us figure out how to strike a balance.
Lincoln made explicit mentions of democracy rarely and only ever defined the word once, in a short note he jotted down on an unsigned scrap of paper. “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master,” he wrote. “This expresses my idea of democracy.”
That was the theory. The practice, after he became president and the Southerners rebelled, was not as simple. In 1861, Guelzo writes, when rioters in Baltimore attempted to stop Union militia members from traveling to Washington, Lincoln authorized “his generals to arrest and imprison suspected saboteurs without trials or charges.” He also purged government offices of employees who refused to take loyalty oaths, and his secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton, bullied the press and spied on civilian telegraph communications.
As critics accused Lincoln of leading an unconstitutional dictatorship, he wondered whether free republics had a “fatal weakness”: “Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?” Lincoln erred on the side of governmental strength, but he knew that motives and endgames were important. He warned his generals against revenge (“blood cannot restore blood”) and insisted that, “as soon as the Rebel armies laid down their arms,” they should immediately be “guaranteed all their rights as citizens of a common country.”
Guelzo points out the “uncanny” similarities between Lincoln’s time and ours. He governed through a hyper-polarized environment and was accused of subverting liberty by rowdy insurrectionists. “Our Ancient Faith” reveals the fragility of democracy in such moments. But its precarity can also be a strength, a source of flexibility. Democracy is a “government for humanity, not angels,” Guelzo concludes. The trick is not to let people take democracy, and therefore freedom, away from themselves.
