Freedom is not free.” Those four simple words are prominent on the wall of the Korean War memorial in Washington, DC. They play on each other to form a stirring reminder of the sacrifice that Lincoln called the “last full measure of devotion” in the defense of freedom.1 But that gentle paradox pales beside the dark conundrum that lies at the heart of freedom itself: The greatest enemy of freedom is freedom. If the first sentence is as inspiring as it is short, the second is sober and arresting. Bluntly nonheroic and quite unsuitable for carving on any memorial wall, this paradox is etched indelibly into history itself, and it stands menacing and mocking across the path of all who are naive enough to think the course of freedom is smooth. Far from easy, both freedom and the politics of freedom are not only demanding but in a sense doomed—unless the paradox is faced squarely and overcome. For all who love freedom, there is no way around this paradox except to confront it and pick up the gauntlet thrown at our feet with such a sardonic challenge. The fourth question on the checklist therefore asks: Have Americans faced up to the central paradox of freedom, that freedom is the greatest enemy of freedom—including American freedom?
History by itself should be sufficient to cure us of naivety about freedom. Freedom may be glorious, but free societies are few, far between, and fleeting. If the hundred-centuries clock of civilization were to be compressed into a single hour, today’s interest in freedom and democracy would appear only in the last few minutes before midnight. Freedom requires a certain view of human dignity and independence, and until quite recently only two societies with world influence have attained those ideals. The first was the Jews, with their view of the human person as made in the image of God, and the second was the Greeks, with their view of the logos, or reason within each person. The Romans owed much to the Greeks, just as the later Europeans and the West at large owed much to the Greeks and Romans, but even more to the many gifts of the Jews and the Bible when mediated through the Christian faith (which Benjamin Disraeli described as “Judaism for the multitudes”).
As a young poet, William Wordsworth hurried to Paris at the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789 and heralded it with a breathless naivety that later turned into bitter disappointment. (“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive / But to be young was very heaven!”)2 The great Whig statesman Charles James Fox gushed similarly in calling it “the greatest event it is that ever happened in the world.”3 In 2010, many Westerners responded to the Arab Spring in the same giddy way. They were intoxicated with the dream of freedom and democracy breaking out all over the world. Their instant celebrations of claims to freedom and their facile ideas of the easy export of democracy showed they had not digested Edmund Burke on the French Revolution, and their naivety was shown up yet again. People who prize freedom and know the grand paradox of freedom should never be naive, and they should never put their trust in freedom itself, for freedom alone can never bear the weight of freedom without the foundation and framework it requires. Freedom unsupported and unbounded has a chronic habit of undermining and destroying itself. Again and again history teaches an unforgiving truth: With freedom, more may mean less, and too much of a good thing becomes a bad thing as freedom falters and fails in one of three routine ways.
First, freedom commonly fails when it runs to excess and breeds permissiveness and license. This is behind the iron link between anarchy and tyranny.
Second, freedom fails when people who love freedom so long to be safe and secure that their love of security undermines their freedom. (“The dangers of life are infinite,” Goethe is known for saying, “and among them is safety.”) This danger surfaces in today’s tensions between security and privacy (“One nation under surveillance” again).
Third, freedom fails when free societies become so caught up in the glory of freedom that they justify anything and everything done in its name, even things that quite clearly contradict freedom. In particular, freedom always sours when it is used to mistreat or oppress others. Which is why so much of the world finds recent American discussions of torture so troubling and the American lack of any serious discussion of “collateral damage” in war equally troubling.
It hardly needs to be said that recent decades have offered numerous examples of each of these corruptions of freedom writ large in both American society and foreign policy. But the added seriousness of the choices comes from the fact that the differences between the different views of American freedom now on offer are as great as the differences that led to the Civil War. Under the leadership of Abraham Lincoln, victory in the Civil War confirmed the overall direction of America’s founding and reinforced its commitment to freedom by correcting the major contradiction the founders had left unsolved. Restore or replace? Following the 1960s, many versions of freedom have repudiated both the founders and the past, and the question is whether this shift will succeed in winning the day, and if it does, will it advance freedom or set freedom back?
There are three major reasons why freedom has proved to be the greatest enemy of freedom, and history is the principal witness to the way each of them works its way out in reality and how they combine to form a deadly trio. The first reason is political. Baron de Montesquieu noted in his eighteenth-century classic The Spirit of the Laws that free societies require a combination of the structures of freedom and the spirit of freedom. But these two things rarely travel in tandem for long. The structures of freedom supply the outer framework of freedom and include such things as a wise constitution, good laws, and such foundational notions as the rule of law and the right to personal property. But they are not the heart of freedom, as some who focus on them alone seem to think. They are only the external framework. When carefully designed and laid down well, these structures of freedom provide an indispensable setting for freedom, and they can be counted on to last for a considerable time. But by themselves they are not enough.
The heart of freedom is what Montesquieu calls “the spirit of freedom.” His great disciple Alexis de Tocqueville famously called it the “habits of the heart.” The spirit of freedom concerns the attitudes and convictions that grow from the foundations of human freedom itself. First, there must be the foundational faith that grounds and guarantees that we are indeed free. Second, there must be the respect that is prepared to grant similar freedom for others. And third, there must be the responsible self-restraint that issues from self-rule or mastery of the self, which issues in turn to the “obedience to the unenforceable” that true freedom requires. When such a spirit of freedom flourishes, it makes policing and extra levels of law and regulations redundant.
The trouble is that while this spirit of freedom is essential, it is neither easy nor durable. Such a spirit, or such habits of the heart must be cultivated afresh in every citizen and in every generation. An open fire needs a hearth and a grate, but a hearth and a grate provide no warmth unless the wood in it is lit, logs are added and kept burning, and the fire is constantly stoked. Like such a fire, the spirit of freedom is not self-fueling. It has to be inspired and passed on from leaders to followers, from parents to children, from teachers to students, and from generation to generation, and it has to be constantly kept alive though a myriad of symbols, celebrations, and reminders. Unless this spirit of freedom is transmitted successfully, including civic education, the structures of freedom simply cannot keep freedom healthy by themselves. Americans, take note: It is naive to think that freedom will survive through relying on the US Constitution alone. Unless the spirit of freedom is kept burning brightly in every generation, American freedom will die.
This means simply that a free society is always one generation away from losing freedom, and it must pay constant attention to what freedom requires if it is to thrive. We humans require food and water, fire requires fuel, and freedom requires the cultivation of the habits of the heart and the self-control that they empower. Any nation may keep its constitution in place for a long time, may keep its armies in a state of constant readiness, and may multiply laws endlessly in a well-meaning attempt to hedge freedom around in countless ways. But all that will amount to nothing if freedom’s triple foundation wears thin, the self-mastery of the citizens slackens and frays, and the habits of their hearts cool off and die. A huge part of America’s present troubles can be illuminated by that single principle alone. The ancient maxim runs “Who is mighty?” Not one who can conquer his enemies but the “one who can conquer himself.” Obedience to the unenforceable and the self-mastery of emotions, thought, and speech are not exactly America’s strongest suit today.
Needless to say, there are many factors in America today that have made such habits difficult and such a healthy transmission rare—broken families, the focus on negative freedom, the foolish rejection of civic education, the triumph of feelings in an expressive culture, and the disparaging of the past for a start. The result is that the habits of the heart that are essential for sustaining American freedom are seriously malnourished or dying. The current cynicism of the millennial generation is telling. The lunacy of generationalism and the deliberate aggravation of the divisions between the generations (“It’s a generational thing. You wouldn’t understand.”) means a disastrous dropping of the baton in the great relay race of the American story. The pulse beat of American continuity is suffering from a serious arrhythmia.
The second reason for the paradox is ethical, and it poses an even stiffer test. Freedom requires order and therefore restraint, yet the restraint that is most appropriate to freedom is self-restraint—the famous “obedience to the unenforceable”—but self-restraint is the very thing that freedom undermines when it flourishes. Thus the heart of the problem of freedom is the problem of the heart, because free societies are restless at their core and always anxious to throw off restraint.
Why so? Talk of restless hearts sounds psychological at best and pious at worst, but it was argued strenuously by thinkers who were highly political and anything but pious. Machiavelli, for example, understood that political restlessness is rooted in the fact that human appetites are by nature insatiable because our reach is greater than our grasp. We “desire everything” but we are unable “to secure everything.” The result is that human “desire is always greater than the power of acquisition.”4 Montesquieu argued the same point. Freedom-loving people have an “uneasy spirit,” he wrote, that leaves them “always inflamed.”5 Needless to say, he made these observations long before the rise of modern American consumerism that gains its life from stoking human desire and restlessness to higher and higher levels.
Another way of stating the same point is that the consent of the governed is at the heart of democracy and is crucial to both freedom and its legitimacy, but it is beguiling because it masks a challenge. In a democratic republic such as the United States, “We the people” are simultaneously both the rulers and the subjects, so freedom depends constantly not only on the character of the nation’s leaders but also on the character of is citizenry.
The flaw in that reliance is plain. Such are human passions and the political restlessness they create that the self-renunciation needed for the self-restraint to sustain freedom is quite unnatural. It goes against the grain of humanness—especially in peaceful and prosperous periods, when it seems that no one is required to rise above private interests and remember the common good, and especially in bitterly anxious times such as the present, when so many citizens contradict rather than consent to the government that is them. In recent years, the United States has reached the absurd point that is the bane of presidents and the Congress alike: No sooner do Americans send their representatives to Washington than they turn on Washington and claim that Washington no longer represents them.
The core problem can be expressed simply like this: Such is the human propensity for self-love—or thinking and acting with the self as center—that the virtue it takes for citizens to remain free is quite simply unnatural. America today is a republic in which the private trumps the public and consumerism whispers to Americans in a thousand ways, “It’s all about you.” Citizens then tell the government to “get off our backs” even though the government is their own just-chosen representatives, and it supposedly governs them with their free consent and backing.
The result, in Montesquieu’s words, is that the self-rule and the self- renunciation needed for freedom are “always a painful thing.” The natural bent of self-love is toward domination and not self-restraint, so the will to power at its heart will relentlessly seek to expand unless it meets resistance. Freedom therefore naturally thrives on freedom, and mistaking power for freedom expands naturally to create the abuse of power that throttles freedom—that is, unless freedom is checked and balanced strongly, wisely, and constantly. If freedom is not checked in this way, or worse still, freedom is defined only negatively (as freedom from constraint, as it is in much of America today), then once again freedom undermines itself.
Anyone in search of evidence need look no farther than the twentieth century. Reject authority, deny truth, dismiss virtue, ignore restraint, and glorify power and as sure as eggs are eggs, liberty will become license, equality will become leveling, and justice will become the power moves of the powerful. Authoritarianism will be on its way, whatever the sugarcoating of democratic wording. And logically, how could it be otherwise? The need for restraint under authority is at the heart of the paradox, and it explains how the rich and the powerful so easily lose their freedom. Being powerful and mistaking power for freedom, the upper classes and the elites rule everybody—except themselves—and so become slaves. Failing to rule themselves, they either become slaves to their own unchallenged ideas, which become an obsession, or slaves to their own unbounded behavior, which becomes an addiction. Long ago, Plato warned that this is how an “excess of liberty” becomes an “excess of slavery.”6
This aspect of the paradox carries a warning for the supporters of 1789. They criticize 1776 for the oppression of its “cultural hegemony” over American life and seek to assault it through their own sustained cultural subversion. But do they show signs of encouraging greater freedom in the spheres where they have “won hegemony” themselves? The university world with its political correctness and intolerance would suggest otherwise. As the paradox demonstrates, power can undermine oppression, but by itself it cannot establish freedom.
Who then is truly free? The free person is not the person who controls others, for that is merely a matter of power. Truly free persons are those who control themselves, which again circles us back to inner freedom and positive freedom. True freedom comes from victory over the passions, and therefore from the character that is built on habits of the heart that in turn are built on obedience to the unenforceable—a rare pattern among Americans of power and wealth today.
The third reason for the paradox is spiritual and psychological. For freedom to be exercised well—that is, in a manner that is appropriate to freedom—freedom assumes and requires responsibility. The self-restraint of freedom and the self-reliance of responsibility go hand in hand. But self-reliance and responsibility are anything but simple and straightforward, and the deepest source of the paradox can be tracked down in the dark corners of the twisted paths by which we humans often try to evade responsibility. There is at times what appears to be a tyranny in freedom, just as there appears to be a freedom in tyranny. The result is a fear of freedom that ends in the desire for freedom from freedom.
No faith in history has put a higher emphasis on the ethics of responsibility than the Jewish people, yet it did not come easily. At the heart of the Torah’s view of sin is the notion of the evasion of responsibility (for example, Cain’s infamous question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” [Gen 4:9]). Michael Walzer reflected on the paradox in commenting on the Israelites’ grumbling against Moses in the desert after they were liberated from the Egyptian Pharaoh. What the complainers did was transform Egypt in their minds from being the “house of slavery” into a “house of freedom.” Most remarkably, when Korah rebelled against the leadership of Moses, he went so far as to describe Egypt as “a land flowing with milk and honey,” the cherished term for the Promised Land (Num 16:13). “Indeed,” Walzer concludes, “there is a kind of freedom in bondage. . . . The childish or irresponsible slave or subject is free in ways the republican citizen or Protestant saint can never be. And there is a kind of bondage in freedom: the bondage of law, obligation, and responsibility.”7
Dig deep into this paradox and you can understand the disastrous endings to which freedom so often leads—it explains why freedom is less straightforward and free societies are always harder than people think, why so many people submit willingly to real tyranny, why human beings are so easily swayed by group-think and mass movements, why it becomes so easy to “go along to get along,” and why democracy can so easily end in dictatorship. In 1935, as Western democracies were obsessed with the rise of fascism and communism, Christopher Dawson warned of the coming danger of democratic societies making the same universal claims on the life of the individual as totalitarian societies did. He called it “democratic totalitarianism.”8 This problem grew from a double error: confusing freedom with democracy, and regarding democracy and dictatorship as opposites. “The truth is, unpalatable though it may be to modern ‘progressive’ thought, that democracy and dictatorship are not opposites or mortal enemies, but twin children of the Great Revolution [in France, in 1789].”9
Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom is a classic analysis of the paradox of freedom. Writing as the world recoiled in horror at what totalitarianism had wrought in the Second World War, he argued that modern people had been freed from the bonds of traditional society, but had not gained a new freedom in the positive sense, so they were left in a modern no-man’s-land—isolated, anxious, and powerless. “This isolation is unbearable” to a modern person, and the solution is “to escape from the burden of his freedom into new dependencies and submissions.” Fromm described the result as the “totalitarian flight from freedom.”10 The grand paradox of freedom therefore grows out of the ambiguity at the heart of freedom. Freedom is a call to responsibility that can be frightening. For some people, freedom is a “cherished goal,” whereas for others it presents a threat and “a burden too heavy for man to bear.”11 Earlier, he had arrived in America as a refugee from Nazi Germany. From his experience he concluded that “millions in Germany were as eager to surrender their freedom as their fathers were to fight for it; that instead of wanting freedom, they sought for ways of escape from it.”12
The same temptation and dynamic can also be seen at the early stages of liberation, and not just at the end. It illustrates again that freedom is never simply a matter of either-or (bondage or freedom) but of more-or-less freedom. There is an obvious sense in which we can be described accurately as “free” or “not free.” People who are imprisoned are obviously not free, so that when they are released and out of the prison gates, they are free. Yet that simple term free masks the deeper sense in which they may be externally free but far from fully free. In the case of many prisoners, that lack of full and real freedom is the reason for the high rate of recidivism and the fact that, unless they experience a deeper change in life, so many soon find themselves back behind bars again.
The classic example of this ambivalence toward freedom was the Israelite exodus from Egypt. Once the waters of the Red Sea had closed over the horses and chariots of their pursuers, they were genuinely free. God had rescued them from Egypt, and the “house of bondage” lay behind them. But were they fully free? Plainly they were free and they were not free, as they themselves betrayed in their infamous “3 Gs”—their grumblings (and the ten incidents of complaints that mirror the ten plagues), their going back (or their repeated threats to do so), and the other gods they lapsed into worshiping (and in particular the golden calf of the Egyptian bull-god Apis).
Walzer calls this effect the “attraction/revulsion” principle of freedom and slavery. The Israelites may have groaned under the harsh conditions of slavery, but they were also more attracted to the world of their taskmasters than they may have admitted to themselves. After years in the Egypt of the great pharaohs, a society that was the most advanced and prosperous of its day, the Israelites must have become somewhat naturalized and Egyptianized despite themselves. They may have been slaves in Egypt, but they had grown accustomed to a slave’s-eye view of the lifestyle and comforts of Egypt. They had been at the bottom of the social order of Egypt, but the bottom rung in Egypt was still higher than the top rung in other parts of the world, and their hankering after “fleshpots,” “leeks,” and “cucumbers” showed how they had grown accustomed to the benefits of the good life in Egypt.
To underscore the point, their freedom had not brought them to the Promised Land of milk and honey, but only out into the howling wilderness, which by contrast with Egypt was harsh and barren, so even their newfound freedom faced them with a daily reminder of all they had lost and were missing. The people of Israel, Savonarola thundered in his diatribes at the “bonfire of the vanities” in sixteenth-century Florence, had become “half-Egyptian.” More graphically still, their own Hebrew prophets later charged them with having “committed whoredoms in Egypt” (Ezek 23:3 KJV).
In sum, the ambiguity of freedom looms large again and has to be faced. It was one thing for God to free the Israelites externally and quite another for them to grow fully free, and to confuse negative freedom with full positive freedom was to court disillusionment. Liberty is deeper and more difficult than liberation. Personal and social transformation takes longer than revolution. Self-reliant responsibility is far harder than easygoing entitlement. With their characteristic candor, the Jewish sages noted wryly that it took one day to take the Israelites out of Egypt, but forty years and counting to take Egypt out of the Israelites.
Put differently, there are situations that can make freedom appear deceptive and far too costly. Freedom trumpets its irresistible offer, but then it appears dishonest because the cost is hidden in the small print. Who in their right mind would not wish to be free? But have we all read and agreed to the hefty price tag that it charges—whether to live with freedom, to defend freedom, or to sustain freedom? For there are situations where the challenge of rising to the responsibility of freedom seems like a challenge too many, and there is a moment when it is tempting to duck the responsibility and sink into a nonresponsible passivity and then submission. At such a moment, it is easy to fall for the deceptive idea that there is tyranny in freedom, and then to fall for the equally deceptive but even more disastrous idea that there is freedom in tyranny. How else can it be explained that so many Russians still long for a restoration of the Soviet Union, so many Haitians continue to hanker after the days of the Duvaliers, and so many Iraqis regret the overthrow of Saddam Hussein? How else can we understand how so many Americans drank the Kool-Aid at Jonestown or surrendered themselves and their children to David Koresh in Waco? How else is it that America today is all about rights and entitlements, and so little about responsibility?
Real freedom is difficult, demanding, and disciplined. Freedom is a task that takes time, that takes training, and that takes transmission. Freedom is hard work and a long-term project, and nothing is more inviting than abdicating from the weighty burden of freedom. Abdications from royal thrones are rare and often surrounded with shame, as in the case of Edward VIII stepping down from the throne to marry his mistress, Wallace Simpson. But the abdication of citizen-kings and queens is routine and easy. The responsibility of freedom may be arduous, but there is always a strong man willing to take over the burden. There is always a utopian ideology offering to submerge the loneliness of individual responsibility in the warm embrace of a cause, the offer of free stuff, bread-and-circuses diversions, entitlement programs, and in the end a welfare mentality that will end in a general dependency. Far too often a large part of the citizenry will be ready and willing to surrender its freedom and to serve a leader or a movement that beckons with the best offer of an easier life.
Nietzsche scorned the enervating effects of freedom and democracy for this reason: It was a breeding ground for the “last men” he despised, those little people who were obsessed with health and happiness, who took no time to think about life, and who had little courage to live. “The democratic idea favors the nurturing of a human type prepared for slavery in the most subtle sense of the term. Every democracy is at one and the same time an involuntary establishment for the breeding of tyrants, taking the word in all its connotations, including those of a spiritual nature.”13
At a lower level still, the paradox of freedom can descend to a truly diabolical state, and each of the great secular revolutions has demonstrated its own horrifying violations of freedom perpetrated in the name of freedom. In 1794, Robespierre captured the paradox at its vilest in his rationale for France’s reign of terror: “The government of the Revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny.”14 The “despotism of liberty”? What an extraordinary and revealing phrase. When the great Austrian statesman Metternich watched what happened in the French Revolution, he remarked tartly, “When I saw what people did in the name of fraternity, I resolved, if I had a brother, to call him cousin.”15
The paradox of freedom is no respecter of individuals or of religions and ideologies, but there are religions and there are generations that are more vulnerable than others. President George W. Bush generously challenged the idea that Arabs desired freedom and democracy any less than Americans, but the Iraqi people and its leaders did not prove worthy of his trust. Other Arabs have argued openly that Muslims tend to glorify authoritarian leaders because of the centrality of the notion of submission (the root meaning of Islam). When the Syrian poet Adonis was asked why Arabs were so prone to submit to dictators, he answered, “Some human beings are afraid of freedom.” Was it, he was asked, because Muslims identified freedom with anarchy? “No, because being free is a great burden. It is by no means easy. . . . When you are free, you have to face reality, the world in its entirety. You have to deal with the world’s problems. On the other hand, if we are slaves, we can be content and not have to deal with anything. Just as Allah will solve all our problems, the dictator will solve all our problems.”16
Many Muslims would dispute this claim, but they must counter it in life rather than words. So too must Americans, for the rhetoric of freedom will no longer do. Responsibility and self-reliance were once powerful features of the American character and way of life, and Americans have inherited powerful political brakes to stop the advance of extreme authoritarianism on their side of the Atlantic.
But the best brake pads wear thin, and responsibility is not a prominent feature of the easygoing leisure-and-entertainment society that America has become. There have long been repugnant extremists on the right, such as the white supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan, but those who monitor the left-wing extremism now marching out of the shadows of American political life should remember Governor Huey Long’s pronouncement: “When fascism comes to America it will be called ‘anti-Fascism.’” The press and many Americans tend to use “alt” (alternative) only of right-wing extremism, but one of its original meanings was “anarchists, lunatics, and terrorists.” Witness the expressly fascist style of “antifa,” or the self- proclaimed antifascist movement, with its violent anarchist and Marxist roots, and the ugly violence of its masked and hooded assaults on defenders of freedom of speech.
Tocqueville, after all, commented long ago on the contradictions at the heart of democracy. The people are
excited by two conflicting passions: they want to be led and they wish to remain free. As they cannot destroy either the one or the other of these contrary propensities, they strive to satisfy them both at once. They devise a sole, tutelary, and all-powerful form of government, but elected by the people. They combine the principle of centralization and that of popular sovereignty; this gives them a respite: they console themselves for being in tutelage by the reflection that they have chosen their own guardians. . . . By this system the people shake off their state of dependence just long enough to select their master and then relapse into it again.17
Again, will it be said that freedom was too hard a challenge for Americans to overcome? Here, then, is the fourth question on the checklist to be answered constructively: Have you faced up to the central paradox of freedom?
Why is it so difficult to be free and self-restrained? What are some of the factors today that undermine a strong sense of personal responsibility? What is the state of civic education in the circles in which you grew up and now live? No American who loves freedom can afford to ignore the paradox of freedom. The thrust of this fourth question is plain. Freedom is the greatest enemy of freedom, and only those who understand freedom realistically can hope to escape the toils of the paradox. Are Americans facing the paradox realistically, or has the entitlement society greased the skids toward its return? Are young Americans trained in a robust, responsible, and self-reliant freedom that can resist the siren seductions of the paradox, or has political correctness dulled the independence of their minds? Only by facing up to the paradox of freedom can Americans survive and thrive as a free people in true freedom.