Biden's "freedom" pitch and the coming political realignment

As the right retreats from the theme of "freedom," the left sees an opening

In the final days of the 1964 presidential campaign, a professional pitch man and public speaker named Ronald Reagan recorded a video on behalf of the Republican nominee for president of the United States, Barry Goldwater. In the pitch, conventionally known as the “A Time for Choosing” speech, Reagan fixated on one word and theme above all else.

Freedom.

The Cold War, in his telling, was about whether we “lose this way of freedom of ours.” He wondered if Americans “still know the freedoms that were intended for us by the Founding Fathers.” For Reagan, America was apparently the only place with liberty on the entire surface of the Earth: “If we lose freedom here, there’s no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.” Maybe he hadn’t traveled much. He extolled “individual freedom consistent with law and order” and bemoaned “the assault on freedom” and worried that “freedom has never been so fragile.” He derided “those who would trade our freedom for security.”

The pitch for Goldwater didn’t work, but the pitch man outperformed his own product. A decade and a half later, Reagan would be elected president on a similar rhetorical platform of freedom, freedom, freedom, and freedom. And the frame of freedom that he insisted on would become the mantle of the right. Every strand of the right’s project — from deregulating the economy to busting unions to lowering taxes on the rich and corporations to imperially adventuring in foreign countries — all of it could be justified by the “freedom” pose.

And in those years, the left committed a blunder, largely accepting the right’s dubious claim to ownership of the concept of freedom. The left pursued other themes. It pursued justice, equality, solidarity, coming together, hope, change, the future. But it somewhat accepted, often unconsciously, that freedom was the right’s thing.