Republicans are Giving Freedom a Bad Name
You may have the freedom to ingest horse dewormer but that doesn't mean if you do that you're using your freedom well
In Alabama a couple weeks ago, Donald Trump told a crowd of MAGA faithful to “take the vaccines. I did. It’s good.” That earned the ex-president something he probably hasn’t heard recently at one of his rallies: Boos. Trump acknowledged the jeers. “That’s OK, that’s all right,” he said. “You got your freedoms, but I happened to take the vaccine.”
Trump’s right about that: We Americans do got our freedoms. In fact, we love freedom in this country. We love freedom for what freedom allows us to do. We love freedom for freedom’s sake. As Eric Foner begins his 1998 book The Story of American Freedom, “No idea is more fundamental to Americans’ sense of themselves as individuals and as a nation than freedom.”
For all the talk about freedom in the United States, I suspect most Americans have rarely taken the time to think all that deeply about the idea of freedom; instead, I would wager Americans are more likely to connect their own understanding of freedom to their own and past generations’ experience of simply living in the United States. Beyond the Harm Principle, if there is a philosophical concept that animates Americans’ understanding of freedom, it is that government poses the biggest threat to individual liberty. Freedom is said to flourish in the absence of government; that is, in our homes, in nature, in our voluntary associations with others, and in the marketplace. Only since the early twentieth century have Americans really entertained and acted upon the idea that government may at times be necessary to secure and expand our freedoms or that non-governmental forces may do more to curtail our freedoms than the government.
Still, in the United States, the public’s understanding of freedom remains strongly associated with a disdain for government, and the party most associated with that disposition is the Republican Party. That helps explain the knee-jerk reaction of so many GOP voters and politicians to government efforts to mitigate the pandemic, which many Republicans continue to denounce as an infringement of their personal freedom. Republicans as a group are less likely to support policies and actions that would slow the spread of COVID and hasten the end of the pandemic. For example, according to a late August NBC News poll, while 91% of those who voted for Democrat Joe Biden in 2020 have been vaccinated against COVID-19, only 50% of those who voted for Republican Donald Trump have gotten the shot.
As Shane Goldmacher wrote in the New York Times this past Monday
As a new coronavirus wave accelerated by the Delta variant spreads across the United States, many Republican governors have taken sweeping action to combat what they see as an even more urgent danger posed by the pandemic: the threat to personal freedom….
The actions of Republican governors, some of the leading stewards of the country’s response to the virus, reveal how the politics of the party’s base have hardened when it comes to curbing Covid. As some Republican-led states, including Florida, confront their most serious outbreaks yet, even rising death totals are being treated as less politically damaging than imposing coronavirus mandates of almost any stripe.
“Freedom is good policy and good politics,” Senator Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican…who has introduced federal legislation to end mask decrees and to forbid federal vaccine passports, said in an interview.
Cruz makes a fair point. As I wrote earlier, Americans love their freedom. It’s just that Teddy Cancun and his Republican buddies are peddling a pretty nihilistic version of it, one in which the mantra of personal freedom celebrates willful ignorance and social dysfunction and ultimately places unnecessary burdens on people’s personal freedoms. This should be a clarifying moment for the United States, as it reveals the moral bankruptcy at the heart of the Republican Party.
Let’s go on a quick tour of three states governed by Republicans. We’ll begin in Florida, where Republican Governor Ron DeSantis has made himself the poster child for pandemic mitigation resistance. (His political website is currently selling t-shirts and beer koozies emblazoned with the phrase “Don’t Fauci My Florida.”) As his state is coping with its worst outbreak of the virus yet, he’s preventing local school districts from issuing requirements that students—many of whom remain unvaccinated—wear masks. He’s also trying to keep cruise lines from imposing vaccine mandates. This is happening all while beleaguered hospitals are finding themselves short on rooms, staff, oxygen, and morgue space, and as Florida became the first state to record a weekly death toll higher than that of last winter, when vaccines were not yet widely available.
The situation is just as ridiculous in South Dakota, where Governor Kristi Noem rode into the Sturgis motorcycle rally on a horse wearing a cowboy hat and waving an American flag. (Not two flags, Kristi? That’s some weak patriotic sauce right there.) Sturgis became a notorious super-spreader event when it was held in 2020, but Noem didn’t care then, and she doesn’t care now. The state has seen a spike in cases, and Meade County, the home of the rally, went from having an average of 1-2 cases per day at the beginning of August to about 38 cases at the beginning of September. (Last Monday, the county, which has a 49% vaccination rate and 30,000 residents, reported 97 new cases.) The outbreak in Meade County is worse than it was last summer and last winter. Take a look at a map of COVID cases and it’s easy to see the disease spreading north and west from Sturgis as who-knows-how-many of the 500,000 rallygoers head back home with the virus. And what does Noem have to say? She went on FOX News to deflect the criticism back onto liberals, who she said are just “accusing us of embracing death when we’re just allowing people to make personal choices.”
No, Governor Noem, it’s not just liberals saying that. So are your fellow governors, like Republican Tate Reeves of Mississippi, which is also experiencing its worst outbreak of the pandemic. Reeves told a crowd at a fundraiser a few days ago in reference to COVID, “When you believe in eternal life—when you believe that living on this earth is but a blip on the screen, then you don’t have to be so scared of things.” Look, I’m a Christian and I get the whole “Jesus died so we could have eternal life” thing, but Christianity is not a death cult. Jesus did not want people to suffer. I’m pretty sure that’s why he did what he could to heal the sick. Also, it’s quite an argumentative shift to say one day that pandemic restrictions infringe on people’s freedom to, say, go on cruises or attend motorcycle rallies, and then turn around the next day to say COVID isn’t that big of a deal since our lives are no more significant than a “blip on the screen.” If that’s the case, who gives a damn about a motorcycle rally? That’s just a blip on a blip.
The obvious counter to Republicans’ insistence on a maximal amount of personal freedom in the midst of a deadly pandemic is that it disregards our shared responsibilities and obligations to others. If people don’t socially distance, wear masks, get vaccines, etc., they run the risk of harming others and prolonging the pandemic. Additionally, asking people to do these things for the greater good and the good of others is not unprecedented, since we ask people to do such things all the time. For example, the law forbids people from driving drunk even though that infringes on a person’s freedom to drink alcohol and a short time later operate a motor vehicle. That law is there to protect the well-being of others by trying to make sure that one person’s freedom does not infringe on the freedom and well-being of someone else. There is of course a balancing act involved in weighing individual freedom vs. the social good, and we’ll come back to an element of that in a little bit, but you get the idea.
But the problem with Republicans embracing this largely unlimited view of personal freedom when it comes to the pandemic involves more than this fairly familiar utilitarian calculation. In the first place, it involves an extreme case of tunnel vision when it comes to understanding freedom. Pandemics by nature don’t create conditions in which freedom can flourish as it normally would. Pandemics are basically long-term natural disasters. To get them under control, people have to change their behavior to stop the spread of a contagious disease.
In this light, government regulations are designed to claw our freedoms back from the pandemic. Pandemic restrictions are intended to get society back to normal as soon and as safely as possible by fostering collective action; if people follow them, the freedoms taken by the pandemic will be restored more quickly. It is hard to fathom how someone would believe that a reasonable pandemic regulation that eventually allows for a return to normalcy is a greater infringement on someone’s freedom than an out-of-control pandemic itself, which would keep millions sheltered in their homes and shut down society as the reckless engage in behavior that would inevitably cripple the health care system and its ability to treat even those suffering from non-pandemic related illnesses. That’s the sort of strain many states with lax restrictions are experiencing right now.
The symbolism here is almost too on-the-nose, but consider the example of Liberty University, a conservative Christian school of about 15,000 students and 5,000 staff in Lynchburg, Virginia. When school started this fall, it did not require either students or staff to wear masks in class or be vaccinated. There were no restrictions on gatherings; instead, huge gatherings were held. One week after classes began, a COVID outbreak forced the university to move all its classes online and put 500 people into quarantine. A week later, that number had climbed to 1,500. That’s Liberty for you.
Contrast that with the country of Denmark, which enacted a strict lockdown when the pandemic began. When vaccines became available, 72% of the population got one. An reporter for the Miami Herald in Copenhagen recently reported seeing virtually no one on the street wearing a mask. Life is returning to normal there. And lives were saved in the process: While the United States has 1,904 deaths per million people, Denmark only had 442 deaths per million. That’s not to say the virus won’t reappear in Denmark, but just that they’ve done a good job so far keeping it at bay so they can return to life as usual.
One can easily argue that Denmark is a freer place than Liberty University or the state of Florida right now. In fact, I imagine Denmark is what Ron DeSantis wishes Florida could look like right now. Florida doesn’t look that way, though, because pandemic conditions are not conducive to freedom. The same can be said about sickness; just ask someone suffering from a chronic illness how such a condition affects their experience of liberty. Getting hospitalized and put on a ventilator isn’t freedom, either, and neither is death. Maybe you haven’t noticed, but there’s a reason why Americans only apply their ideas about freedom to the living rather than extending it to the dead. Conservative radio talk show hosts Marc Bernier, Phil Valentine, Jimmy DeYoung, and Dick Farrel all characterized vaccine advocacy during their broadcasts as infringements upon freedom. DeYoung, for instance, said vaccines were “another form of government control of the people.” Farrel called Anthony Fauci a “power-tripping, lying freak.” Bernier compared government efforts to get people vaccinated to Nazism. They’re all dead now, though, each having passed away this past August after contracting COVID despite the widespread availability of vaccines. They lost their freedom when they lost their lives. In an article for CNN, Chris Cillizza called their deaths “tragic.” That’s generous. I’d call it folly, which leads me to my final point.
If COVID was just no worse than a bad cold, sure, we could afford the risk of catching it. We are very fortunate COVID doesn’t sicken and kill more people than it already does. And we should be careful about raising the specter of death when discussing limits on personal freedom since such arguments are often used as scare tactics. Yet COVID is so deadly it has actually lowered life expectancy rates in the United States. More Americans have died of COVID since March 2020 than died in the forty-five months we fought World War II, and deaths from the disease have exceeded the low-end estimates of deaths resulting from the United States’ four-year Civil War. Those losses were so great that we’ve built monuments to memorialize those who lost their lives in those conflicts. It’s hard to think of COVID as just a “new normal” we have to learn to live with when the suffering it has caused is so great.
Furthermore, the way to get past the infringements on our freedoms imposed by the pandemic entails a minimal intrusion on one’s personal freedom: Getting the vaccine. If all of us did that, this pandemic would practically come to an end. Everything would open back up. The masks would go away. The breakthrough cases would be manageable. That’s the only thing keeping us from getting back to normal with the full range of freedoms we’re accustomed to.
But it’s the refusal of so many Republicans to get a vaccine that exposes the rot at the core of their theory of personal freedom. Some will say they don’t trust the vaccine, that they don’t know enough about it yet, that it’s some sort of government scam or part of a conspiracy to magnetize our blood or implant computer chips in our skin. When they are told that medical experts agree with near certainty that the vaccines are safe, they insist that nobody can know that for sure, which, yes, I don’t know anything with certainty. Maybe I’m chained to the floor of a cave and what I assume is reality is simply a bunch of shadows being projected onto the wall in front of me by my captors, or maybe an evil demon of utmost power and cunning has employed all his energies in order to deceive me with a complete illusion of the external world, or maybe a horde of intelligent machines have trapped me in a pod to harvest my bioelectric power while keeping my mind pacified within a computerized simulation resembling the world as it existed in 1999. I don’t know for sure, but I still carry on with my life as best I can by using the freedom I have to educate myself and then making the most-informed decisions I can.
It turns out there’s a lot of good, readily-available information out there about vaccines. Yet many of the unvaccinated, rather than using their freedom to get the information they need to make the best decision possible, instead base their personal decisions on crackpot theories that pop-up in their Facebook feeds. It’s amazing that these people can watch doctor after doctor recommend the vaccine and notice that hundreds of millions of people around the globe have received the shot with virtually no negative repercussions and that case numbers decline significantly in places with large numbers of vaccinated people yet still reject the vaccine but think a horse deworming drug holds a lot of therapeutic promise for those who catch COVID. (If you want to read a good article on Republicans’ susceptibility to snake oil salesmen, read this op-ed by Paul Krugman in the New York Times.) I don’t know if these ideas trickle-up or trickle-down the Republican hierarchy (and for the record, yes, it’s not always just Republicans, as anti-vaxxer Robert Kennedy, Jr., demonstrates) but for people who place such an emphasis on personal freedom, Republicans sure don’t use it well. Imagine what would happen if we let people like that run this country. Oh wait…
A little over one-hundred years ago, the Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., wrote that the First Amendment, by allowing anyone to speak and believe anything they want, creates something like a marketplace of ideas in the United States, where ideas compete against one another for acceptance. The best ideas win (at least in theory). That’s one of the reasons people are so uncomfortable with censorship even when it comes to advocating for the use of horse dewormer to treat COVID: What may at first sound like a bad idea may in some cases actually turn out to be a good idea, and we wouldn’t want to prematurely stifle that. But that doesn’t mean we have to buy everything the marketplace is selling. Sometimes the marketplace of ideas sells a bad product, and that can be demonstrated in a competition between ideological products. If anyone should appreciate a metaphor built around the principles of free market economics, it should be Republicans, but it turns out a lot of Republicans are horrible shoppers when it comes to many of their most important purchases in the marketplace of ideas. It’s so easy to get this one right yet so many use their freedom to get it so wrong.
The pandemic has revealed the limits of the Republicans’ rudimentary notion of personal freedom: It is dismissive of people’s responsibilities and obligations to others, can’t comprehend that government intervention could do more to expand personal freedom than a laissez-faire policy might, and makes greater accommodations for the willfully ignorant than it does for those who use their freedom to make informed choices. This theory of personal freedom lies at the heart of Republicans’ governing philosophy, but it is woefully inadequate for the challenges we face today. When Republicans have put this theory into action during this most recent surge in the pandemic, the results have not only been disastrous but also avoidable.
Republicans can’t get the pandemic right because their view of freedom—the basis of their worldview—is flawed. And if Republicans can’t get the pandemic right at this point, how can we expect them to get tax, health care, education, or environmental policy right? Enough is enough. It’s time we all make Republicans own the mess they’ve made.
Thanks for reading.
Photo credit: Godatees.com
Exit music: “I Will Dare” by the Replacements (1984, Let It Be)