On Freedom

by Timothy Snyder

Freedom never just means government leaving us alone; nor does it mean our leaving government alone. The forms of freedom must be daily practice. The forms of freedom legitimate government and guide individuals.

You were not born free. But neither were you born to be a vessel of lies. Your destiny is neither subjugation nor automation. You can evaluate, transform, and take responsibility. Declare yourself free. Then accommodate yourself to tender virtues and bruising facts, to friends and neighbors, to fellow citizens, but not to expectations or algorithms. Life can be much better than it seems to us now, as individuals and as citizens. We can become free. Our political divisions draw us away from freedom as principle, making it harder to get to freedom as practice. They have been hardened by the collapse of local news, the rise of oligarchy, and the reach of social media. The algorithms push us toward mindless controversy and away from mindful discussion of priorities. The repetition of mechanized clichés makes our political discussion endlessly stale. The mechanization has to be addressed by government policy, but the human misunderstandings are for us to resolve.

Some conservatives proclaim that they want freedom but that sadly it must be traded for security. This is almost never true. In general, we need freedom for security, and security for freedom. Others proclaim freedom as the highest value but have trouble saying what this means. Right-wing characterizations of freedom tend to be negative, which is a dead end. If we take negative freedom to the extreme, we just reach oligarchic chaos. This then intersects with the fascist idea that we need a Leader who is above the law and should be allowed to stage coups.

Certainly, the state can be oppressive. But the actual alternatives are better government and worse government. We can and should be very creative about the justification and shape of government. But the choice of no government means groundless faith (real or fake) that some larger force will organize matters for us. It just brings bad government, tyranny by the ruthless and the rich. Annulling govern...

Americans on the Left make a different mistake: they fail to acknowledge freedom as the value of values, preferring equality. Recognition of our equal dignity is, to be sure, necessary for any discussion of freedom. But equality is a beginning rather than an end. There is no tragic choice between freedom and equality. They work together. The forms of freedom, all five of them, create the conditions for less inequality in practice. Without the virtues kept alive by free people, equality loses all substance in...

It is freedom that enables us to choose and combine values, including those thought to be progressive. Although the Left often concedes the language of freedom to the Right, people on the Left do propose policies that would further freedom. They just usually fail to make their case in those terms. What seems to be a permanent clash between Left and Right reveals an unspoken (and as-yet-unspeakable) American consensus: freedom is indeed the v...

We link the words democracy and freedom, and rightly so. Freedom is the value of values, and the case for democracy must begin with it. Democracy is the system toward which the forms of freedom lead, the best resolution of freedom as a principle. “We the people” will be sovereign in government only when individual persons are sovereign in their lives. Only the unpredictable voter (in the unrigged district in the unmonetized election) gets the attention of the candidate. A person who is socially mobile will believe that better futures are possible and will vote for the candidate who offers one. A person who expresses solidarity will care about the votes of others; a person who cares about factuality will count the ballots. Democracy remains the best available way to address differences in value commitments. Just as the forms of freedom favor democracy, democracy favors the forms of freedom. Democracy marks sovereignty by establishing the vote as a political coming-of-age. It opens avenues for unpredictable action, since no one knows in advance who will run for office (you could) or who will win a fair election. It promises mobility, since votes can bring policies that change how life is lived. Democracy leaves behind a trail of facts, a record of people ruling themselves. And it expresses solidarity: when the rules are right, all Americans have a voice. The rich and powerful can organize in secrecy; the people as a whole cannot and generally don’t want to.

Freedom requires a sense of past and future, and democracy produces political time. Democracy invites deliberation, insisting that we take the time we need to declare and accommodate values. Its enemies are always in a hurry to make us angry or efficient or both. We need a sense of an open future, which democracy provides. Democracy divides time into foreseeable intervals, from election to election. It creates a sense of durability, since elections are a procedure for creating a new government on a regular basis, something that other regime types lack. Democracy hinders aspiring tyrants from staying in power until death. Democracy ensconces us in the greater history of our own country: our own choices are part of a deeper past and, we may hope, a brighter future. Democracy is not only a procedure but an awakening. It is fifth-dimensional politics, just as freedom is fifth-dimensional life. It does not arise on its own. It needs us and our values. Democracy is a verb disguised as a noun. Its supporters must believe in it and improve it.

A democracy has the quality of being “responsive to all of its citizens,” says the political theorist Robert Dahl. This is not America, not yet. Applying the principles that the American Founders elucidated until they are made consistent, we should seek an ever more extensive understanding of what liberty demands: not negative but positive freedom, not for the few but for everyone.

Citizens who happen to live in Washington, D.C., which is more populous than Wyoming or Vermont, are not allowed to elect representatives to Congress. Citizens who live in Puerto Rico, which is more populous than twenty-one of the fifty states, cannot vote for president. They elect a resident commissioner to Congress, but that official has no vote. Americans should not be denied representation by the accident of where they were born, or where they find a job, or where they fall in love. Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., should be states. Fifty-two is a nice number: about the number of weeks in a year, the exact number of cards in a deck, and precisely four times the number of original colonies. For each stripe there could be exactly four stars. It would be an elegant flag.

Americans sometimes say that their country is a republic, meaning that it need not be a democracy. This makes no sense. Both words commit us to the same principle: we should rule ourselves. In the ancient cases, the practice of “rule by the people” (democracy) or the definition of government as a “common matter” or “the people’s issue” (republic) meant assemblies of citizens. In the American system, voting (democracy) is meant to create a government that is representative of the common good (a republic). As Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison, the “avowed object” of democracy is “the nourishment of the republican principles of our constitution.” Americans who describe the system as a republic rather than a democracy are citing Madison, who was comparing the American representative system to ancient assemblies. He was not saying that a republic excludes while a democracy includes. He had in mind representation as a means of inclusion: whereas the chaos of ancient democracies prevented the people from ruling, voting would enable orderly government. Madison thought that an electoral democracy would allow the meaningful participation of a far greater number of people than was possible in older forms of democracy. In this he was absolutely right. Having a republic means paying attention to that greater public. It asks us to pursue our own freedom by knowing the situation of others and by creating the appropriate institutions for knowing the preferences of all. Those who car...