Friday blahg: The rhetoric of "freedom"
The resumption of university means that my posting has become sporadic. So, as it happens, have my teaching and studenting abilities. The thing is, all I want to do these days is crawl into bed, hug my knees to my chest, pull the comforter (isn’t that a nice word sometimes?) over me, and wake up when I know what I want out of life. There is some hideous irony to the fact that people like me who are lucky enough to have choices are so paralyzingly indecisive.
But that is not what I have to say today. Today you get a redux, a synthesis if you will, from what I’m learning in my rhetorics of political economy. First, some terms:
rhetoric: I define this as the careful use of language. It has a well-earned pejorative definition as “the way politicians speak when they don’t say anything,” but as all maligned and marginalized societies, we rhetoricians think we deserve to determine how we’re seen. So we’re repossessing “rhetoric” and turning it into a good thing.
free market: the idea that people and businesses, not governments or other controlling entities, determine and negotiate costs and trade.
capitalism: the pursuit of profit.
socialism: originally, the philosophical idea that there ought to be a basic standard of living for all classes that would benefit society as a whole; has become erroneously synonymous with communism in many people’s minds.
false binary: that there is only one dimension of an issue; for example, many people (particularly fiscal conservatives) believe in the very short binary of |socialism —– capitalism|. Any small step away from capitalism is a big step toward socialism, so the thinking goes. (This doesn’t have a lot to do with the ensuing post; it just bothers me so I’m throwing it in there, anyway.)
So here’s the thing.
Americans cling to one thing more than guns, religion, or money: the idea of “freedom.” Manifest destiny, right? The American dream? Pulling ourselves up by our collective bootstraps? All things made possible by the ideology written into our constitution and its first amendment: give us freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom to petition. That’s what it says, right?
Not exactly. We have, in fact, written the word “freedom” into our history books far more than it originally occurred. Guess how many times the word is mentioned in the Constitution.
No, guess. Really. How many times?
Once.
I’m not saying we don’t have those freedoms I mentioned above, nor am I saying that I don’t think we should have those freedoms; on the contrary, they make what I am doing right now possible.
What I am saying is this: we so embrace the word “freedom” and its ideology that we also embrace the root of it when it occurs elsewhere: “free reign,” “free country,” and others, including “free market.”
Because if the market is “free,” then it must be a good thing. That’s about as intelligent as me when I was six informing my mother and father that I could do whatever I wanted because it was a “free country.”
That didn’t work particularly well for me then, and it’s taken years to gain a basic understanding of what living in a “free country” means. Unfortunately, many people believe in a “free market” the way I believed in a “free country.” And many of them have not bothered to look beyond the word “free.”
The nearly last part
Here’s the thing: I’ve looked at the Swedish and Japanese economic crises of the eighties and nineties. The fact is, unchecked capitalism and the belief in the free market breed monopolism, corruption, and greed. Look at the robber barons of the late nineteenth century; look at the stock market crash of the late twenties; look at the golden parachutes of yesterday.
Sweden, in particular, had a nice little setup called “social democracy” that ensured basic human rights to its citizens: education, health care, unemployment and retraining, and pension. It had the lowest poverty rate of developed nations; homelessness was nonexistant; the jobless rate was regularly below the standard 5.5 percent that capitalists see as the ideal rate. Essentially, its workers, businesses, and government worked together to make sure that social needs were met and to create an environment where capitalism would and could and did thrive. But capitalists nearly destroyed that twenty-five years ago when they (surprise, surprise) wanted more power. A fiscal crisis followed. The short version is that the government stepped in and ordered banks to write down their losses if they wanted to be bailed out (this is temporary nationalization). Then the banks who were willing were nationalized; the crisis was averted and was simply a recession rather than a depression. In the end, the government sold the companies back to shareholders for a neat little profit. (You can read about that here, though my source is Sackrey & Schneider.)
When a similar situation arose in Japan (funny, by the way, how all these economic crises take place after a housing boom), the Japanese were rightfully angry and indignant, as many Americans are today. And they didn’t bail out the fat cats. And as Nicholas Kristof pointed out (which is weird, because this is normally Krugman’s territory), they’re still suffering the aftereffects of that decision: their recession has been much more massive than Sweden’s because they let anger and belief in a free market cloud their judgment.
The last part
So we have our love of “freedom” and all things free, when in fact it is a dangerous, short-sighted infatuation when it does not delve into the ideas behind the word “free.” Who else might share this infatuation?
“It was Ronald Reagan who said that freedom is always just one generation away from extinction. We don’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream; we have to fight for it and protect it, and then hand it to them so that they shall do the same, or we’re going to find ourselves spending our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children about a time in America, back in the day, when men and women were free.” Sarah Palin’s closing statement at last night’s debate.*
Appealing in the name of freedom is one of the strongest rhetorical moves made on Americans. But my god, I hope it is losing its potency.
*Just as I was finishing up this post, I saw that Paul Krugman and I were thinking along the same lines.