The F-Word

So it’s come to this. The insight we need for this fraught age — when the culture wars are, in part, language wars — is an egg’s. “ ‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’ ” The line, of course, comes from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and it is followed by a rejoinder that the veteran broadcaster Carol Off might have employed in her thoughtful examination of the weaponization and abuse of language today. “ ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’ ”

The publication of Off’s insightful volume came after the two political conventions in the United States, but I devoured an advance copy during the Democratic conclave in mid-August and was struck by how the book underlined the principal theme of the gathering that sent Kamala Harris into the general election campaign against Donald Trump. Indeed, in phrasing that could have been ripped from At a Loss for Words, the right-leaning Wall Street Journal editorial page began its summation of the proceedings by saying, “Democrats in Chicago this week are casting themselves as the party of ‘freedom,’ which is surprising since liberty is usually a Republican theme. But like so much else in U.S. politics these days, it pays to inspect what they mean by the word.” This book certainly offers a payoff, especially with its detailed inspection of the various uses of the word “freedom” in contemporary politics.

It’s worth recalling what the delegates heard at the Democratic convention. “We believe that true freedom gives each of us the right to make decisions about our own life — how we worship, what our family looks like, how many kids we have, who we marry,” the former president Barack Obama said on the second night. “And we believe that freedom requires us to recognize that other people have the freedom to make choices that are different than ours. That’s okay!” The next evening, the Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro said, “It’s not freedom to tell our children what books they’re allowed to read. No it’s not. And it’s not freedom to tell women what they can do with their bodies. And hear me on this, it sure as hell isn’t freedom to say you can go vote, but he gets to pick the winner. That’s not freedom.”

When Tim Walz, the Carhartt-wearing governor of Minnesota who identifies on social media as a “veteran, hunter, gun owner, and dad,” rose to accept the nomination for vice-president, he said, “When Republicans use the word freedom, they mean that the government should be free to invade your doctor’s office. Corporations free to pollute your air and water, and banks free to take advantage of customers. But when we Democrats talk about freedom, we mean the freedom to make a better life for yourself and the people that you love. Freedom to make your own health care decisions, and yeah, your kid’s freedom to go to school without worrying about being shot dead in the hall.”

This kind of tug-of-war over the word is not exclusively an American phenomenon. Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the Conservative Party in a country whose governing class struggled to understand the meaning of the so‑called Freedom Convoy, is on record saying, “Together, we will make Canadians the freest people on earth, with freedom to build a business without red tape or heavy tax; freedom to keep the fruits of your labour and share them with loved ones and neighbours; freedom from the invisible thief of inflation; freedom to raise your kids with your values; freedom to make your own health and vaccine choices; freedom to speak without fear; and freedom to worship God in your own way.” Such pronouncements bring to mind those of John Diefenbaker, who famously proclaimed, “I am Canadian, a free Canadian, free to speak without fear, free to worship God in my own way, free to stand for what I think right, free to oppose what I believe wrong, free to choose those who govern my country. This heritage of freedom I pledge to uphold for myself and all mankind.”

But it is in the United States, a country that defines itself as the “land of the free,” that the word has its most poignant and seemingly malleable power. There it is tossed around like a verbal grenade. It is the fulcrum on which the lever of politics pivots, because for every volley of freedom talk the Democrats may deploy, there is the Lee Greenwood ballad that I first heard at the Republican National Convention in Dallas forty years ago — a de facto national anthem that became a standard element of a Trump rally. It goes this way: “And I’m proud to be an American / Where at least I know I’m free / And I won’t forget the men who died / Who gave that right to me.”

Set to music or not, this freedom fetish — the underlying principle unassailable, its use in American politics apparently unavoidable — has a long history, and it is against this background that its potency is revealed.

The end of the nineteenth century brought a collision between those who, in Off’s characterization, “demanded equality with those who enjoyed wealth” and those who “tried to keep government out of their lives, so their privilege remained intact.” A generation later, Franklin Delano Roosevelt spoke bravely of the Four Freedoms in his January 1941 State of the Union Address. Soon thereafter, four Norman Rockwell paintings were reproduced in consecutive issues of the old Saturday Evening Post that riffed off the president’s remarks: one painting each for freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. These paintings remain some of the most beloved images in American culture.

After the Second World War, “freedom” was part of the rallying cry against Soviet Communism, with the West describing itself as the “free world.” (I suppose it’s okay to share this now that George H. W. Bush is dead: the domain of the former president’s private email address was @lotfw.com, a playful adaptation of “leader of the free world.”) Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the greatest American speech in the twentieth century — his “I Have a Dream” address — as part of the August 1963 protest that was officially known as the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. For Democrats, the word grew increasingly prominent in abortion debates over the freedom for women to control their own bodies. For Republicans, it animated their holy grail of economics: free markets. The pep rally for Trump supporters on the eve of January 6, 2021, began at Freedom Plaza. Of course it did.

In this context, the advice that Off provides is sensible if not easily attainable. What is necessary, she argues, is “bringing everyone — left and right — into the tent and working out a balance between personal liberty and social responsibility in full recognition of the complexity of our societies.” She notes that that was “something the Greeks and Romans failed to do.” It’s a tall order for a country that has no special preference for complexity, except in the new NFL regulations governing who can move when and who can stand where and when one team kicks off to the other. (There’s probably a book to be written about “freedom” in pro football, though I wouldn’t review it in these pages.)

Americans love to quibble about the difference between a democracy (one of the other fighting words examined by Off) and a republic, and they continually argue about whether the United States is one or the other. Strictly speaking, the distinction is clear, and as long ago as 1787, Benjamin Franklin, responding to an inquiry after the Constitutional Convention completed its work, told the prominent socialite Elizabeth Willing Powel that the delegates had produced “a republic, if you can keep it.”

Yet all of us, perhaps especially the author of a book that also examines words like “democracy,” know what we mean when we speak of democratic values. The term is easily understood but hard to define. Here’s my try: a political system whose leaders are chosen by voters; constrained by constitutional and historical values; dedicated to the advancement of the entire polity rather than a narrow faction or a single leader; suffused with a sense of fairness; guided by the assumption of a shared destiny; dedicated to broad rights; and determined to produce or preserve fluid social mobility. (Actually, the complexity of the idea struck me as I set out to write this paragraph. I started out easily enough but found myself continually adding phrases and clauses, mindful that I left out a few elements — proof, I suppose, that democracy and simplicity are mutually exclusive concepts after all.)

Given such complexity, is the common description of democracy, etymologically rooted in the Greek demos, meaning “the people,” and kratia, meaning “power” or “rule,” sufficient? Or is it merely an efficient shorthand? One way or the other, it is bracing to remember that, as Off points out in her discussion of Alexis de Tocqueville, North American democracy had little appeal in early nineteenth-century Quebec. (Clearly, the war against Indigenous people there, and elsewhere, was at base anti-democratic.) Later, a number of Quebecers displayed an unseemly congeniality to fascism. As Pierre Elliott Trudeau wrote in 1958, “Historically, French Canadians have not really believed in democracy for themselves; and English Canadians have not really wanted it for others. Such are the foundations upon which our two ethnic groups have absurdly pretended to be building democratic forms of government.”

Modern democracy’s gravest tests, at least until now, occurred in the 1930s and 1940s, especially in Italy and Germany but also in North America. The greatest contemporary test, foreshadowed by George Orwell, has arrived in the United States. The left believes the challenge comes from Trump, who in his four years in the White House produced 30,573 false or misleading claims, according to the Washington Post. But the claims that democracy is in crisis come, too, from the right, whose denizens believe just as fervently that democratic rule is under assault. In reality, the threats are everywhere, and especially on social media and other forums that traffic in untruths. “The platforms that disseminate the most information to the widest number of people are biased against facts,” Off observes. Two pages later, she adds:

There are fewer and fewer independent mediating forces to separate truth from fiction — and fewer and fewer of us who believe them.

Off also takes on the awkward and ill-defined word “woke,” a quite old African American vernacular term that has been stretched in both meaning and geography. Poilievre sees it everywhere and criticizes it constantly. “Woke has one purpose and only one purpose,” Off quotes him as saying in the House of Commons. “It has plenty of pretexts but only one purpose: control. It is designed to divide people by race, gender, ethnicity, religion, vaccine status and any other way one can divide people into groups.” Its predecessor was “politically correct,” which, of course, was intended as a contradiction in terms when hurled as an accusation. So effective a phrase was it that Trump used it as a one-sentence dismissal of the news anchor Megyn Kelly’s question about his boorish behaviour. A related epithet is “critical race theory,” which has seeped into the popular argot from academe and, in time, become incendiary when employed by conservatives. In all these cases, the backlash against the terminology has been perhaps more pronounced than the backlash against the original concepts being described.

Newsrooms have struggled with the labels “pro-life” and “pro-choice” for a generation. (When I was the executive editor of a metropolitan newspaper, I banned both, preferring “abortion-rights advocates” and “opponents of abortion rights,” both imperfect but perhaps less judgmental.) But “choice” is yet another fighting word, meaning — to those who support legal abortions — that those who are pregnant should have the choice of whether to abort or carry the product of that pregnancy. (Note how carefully I crafted that sentence.) “The problem with brands like pro-choice and pro-life,” Off writes, “is that they exclude the ambiguities and contradictions in people’s attitudes toward abortion.” She’s right. Besides, “choice” really is an over-broad word, with meaning beyond the American abortion wars.

Perhaps it isn’t, as Alice said, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” Perhaps it’s whether we can mount an offensive for the truth in our discourse and in our politics, cease fighting about the strict definition of words, and make peace with the ambiguities and contradictions of life. If we could do all of that, Off rightly suggests, we might finally make our world safe for democracy.