What Liberty Requires Beyond Slogans

Liberty is the most flattering word in American politics, which is what makes it dangerous. Everyone claims it. Nobody runs against it. Both parties campaign on it, every faction insists it is the rightful heir to it, and the word does an enormous amount of work while asking nothing in return. Liberty as a slogan is free. It costs the person who says it nothing, commits him to nothing, and lets him feel like a partisan of freedom while the actual conditions of freedom go unmentioned and unmaintained.

Liberty as a project is the opposite. One of the most demanding things a society can attempt, because it is not a natural state that appears once government gets out of the way. It is a built thing. An inheritance. It is also a discipline, which is the part the slogan cannot say. Anyone who wants to keep it has to do three hard things: build institutions and keep defending them, cultivate a culture capable of sustaining those institutions, and extend freedom in full to the people you are most certain are wrong. Skip any of those and you are left with the slogan, which is to say with nothing.

The structure

The oldest mistake about freedom is to picture it as whatever remains when you take the state away. Remove the government, the thinking goes, and liberty is what is left standing. Remove the government and what remains is whoever is strongest.

A place with no law is ruled, informally and brutally, by whoever can take and hold, and the weak in such a place have no liberty at all. Only the temporary mercy of the powerful.

Liberty needs courts that will rule against the powerful, including the government that pays them. It needs property rights that hold even when violating them would be convenient. Contracts enforced against people with more influence than you. A rule of law that binds the rulers as tightly as the ruled. None of that is natural. All of it is built, usually against fierce resistance from whoever profits by its absence, and without it the abstract idea of freedom is not something a person can actually live inside. Expensive to build and easy to lose. Nearly impossible to recover once gone.

The instinct to shrink the state is sound as far as it goes. I share it. But “leave me alone” is a description of the goal, not a theory of how to reach it. Even the most minimal liberty, the bare right to be let alone, has to be defended by something. The thing that defends it is an institution, a law or a court, some limit on power that someone built and someone maintains. The difference between liberty and tyranny was never the amount of architecture. It is the blueprint.

The culture

You can have the courts, the constitution, the separation of powers, the bill of rights, all of it written down and ratified, and you still do not have a free society. None of those documents enforce themselves. A constitution is a piece of paper, and paper has never stopped anyone. The text alone has never stopped a would-be tyrant. A population that will not stand for its violation has. Judges who will not bless it. Officials who would sooner resign than carry it out.

The slogan never mentions this, because this is the requirement that implicates the listener. A free society needs citizens with particular habits, and those habits are not automatic. People who can lose an election and accept the result instead of burning down the system that produced it. A working willingness to argue rather than coerce, and to grant opponents a presumption of good faith. People who will solve a problem through voluntary effort rather than by running to the state. A people capable of governing themselves, because a people that cannot govern itself will be governed by someone else, and that someone will not be gentle.

This capacity is a kind of inherited capital, slowly accumulated and quickly spent. A free constitution handed to a people that lacks it does not produce freedom. It produces a short, chaotic interval and then a strongman. Liberty is maintained, not installed.

The institutions need a culture to run on the way an engine needs the right fuel. You cannot pass that culture into law. It is taught, mostly by example, in families and congregations, and in the thousand small civic places where people learn to cooperate without being made to. Let those places hollow out and the institutions keep their shape for a while, like a house after the foundation has gone, and then one ordinary morning they do not.

The discipline nobody wants

The hardest requirement, and the one that separates people who want liberty from people who want power and have learned to call it liberty. A free society is not measured by how it treats the people everyone agrees are decent. It is measured by how it treats the ones everyone agrees are wrong. The speech you find repugnant. The worship you think is false. The association you would never join. The man you are entirely certain is both dangerous and mistaken. Liberty either covers them or it is not liberty at all but a club, and a club that admits only the agreeable is defending its own comfort.

This is where nearly everyone defects, and they defect in mirror image. The progressive is sure that some speech is violence and must be stopped, that some views are too harmful to be given a platform. The urgency of justice licenses the exception. Over on the other side the argument starts somewhere else. Some enemies are too subversive to tolerate. The flag earns an exception, or the faith, or the nation. The other side broke the rules first, so the rules no longer bind. Both of them look across and see a danger grave enough to suspend the principle just this once.

Both are wrong, and for the same reason, and it is not a soft reason about being nice. Every power you build to silence your enemy is a power your enemy inherits. The censor’s office does not dissolve when the other party wins the next election. It changes hands. The tool you forge to crush the people you are sure are wrong is picked up, still warm, by the people who are just as sure about you.

The discipline liberty asks for is not tolerance as a warm feeling. You do not have to like the view you protect, and you need not pretend it is harmless or true. Colder than that. A refusal to build the machine even when you could, even when the target would seem to deserve it, because you understand that you will not always be the one holding the controls. The principle starts where your sympathy runs out. Before that point it was just tribalism with better branding.

The word and the thing

The slogan is more popular than the thing it claims to name because the slogan lets you have the feeling of freedom without the cost. Wave the word. Cheer your side. Demand liberty for yourself and the people you like, and feel the entire time like the defender of something noble. Meanwhile the institutions go undefended. The culture that carries them wears thin. The discipline to extend freedom to your enemies gets quietly dropped the first time it is tested.

A society can do all of that and remain, right up to the end, full of people sincerely chanting the word. Liberty is rare for this reason, and fragile, always one generation from being lost, because every generation has to choose it again. Including the expensive and unflattering parts the slogan leaves out. The culture has to be renewed in each generation. The discipline has to be exercised most when it is least comfortable.

The word is cheap. The thing is not. Everything that matters about freedom begins at the moment you stop saying the word and start paying for it.