For decades, Republicans have made “freedom” and “liberty” their watchwords, hitching their campaigns to professions of limited government and do-as-I-please personal autonomy anchored in a narrative of rugged individualism. This framing is perhaps symbolized best by the championing of an unfettered freedom to own guns, but it stretches to freedom from regulation, from taxes, from limits on religion in the public sphere. Bush used “freedom” twenty-seven times in his second Inaugural Address, calling it “the permanent hope of mankind.” The term flowed naturally into rhetoric about patriotism and American exceptionalism. Bush told the graduating class at West Point, eight months after 9/11, that the American flag stands “not only for our power, but for freedom.”
Yet there has always been a measure of inconsistency, if not outright hypocrisy, in the G.O.P.’s use of the word. Bush’s freedom also meant invading and occupying Iraq and making alliances with authoritarian governments. More recently, Republican legislators and governors elected as guardians of personal freedom have banned books and barred classroom discussion of shameful elements of American history. Most dramatically, G.O.P.-led legislatures have taken away the freedom of tens of millions of people to end a pregnancy in the state where they live. More than anything else, it was the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, in June, 2022, overturning Roe v. Wade, that sparked a reëxamination for many voters, including self-described conservatives and independents, of what “freedom” means. Now Democrats want the word back.
Harris was on her way to a maternal-health event in Illinois when the Court issued the Dobbs decision. The most printable words that came to her mind, she later said, were “How dare they.” On the first anniversary of the ruling, speaking in North Carolina, a battleground state, she described the post-Dobbs campaign for reproductive freedom, which encompasses in-vitro fertilization and contraception, as the latest chapter in the nation’s struggle to expand the limited rights guaranteed by the Constitution. She cited the fight for women’s rights, in Seneca Falls; equal rights for Black Americans, at a lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina; gay rights, at Stonewall; and farmworkers’ rights, in the vineyards of California. She spoke of “a promise of freedom—and freedom for all.”