Life in retirement is notoriously open-ended. While pondering what trivial errand you can postpone until tomorrow, you might find yourself lazily channel surfing. It was in that state of suspended animation, I’m embarrassed to confess, that I found myself checking out offerings on C-Span’s various channels. That public-service cable organization broadcasts a bewildering array of frankly nerdy offerings, ranging from programs put on by the Heritage Foundation—the conservative think tank that produced the now-infamous Project 2025—to lectures of stupefying political correctness. If you want to seriously consider seppuku, you can even watch congressional hearings.
Shortly after Democrats nominated Kamala Harris as their presidential candidate, I stumbled on a C-Span discussion sponsored by the liberal Brookings Institution. The webinar, “Takeways from the Democratic National Convention,” was moderated by Doyle McManus, a columnist at the L. A. Times. It featured three senior fellows from the Brookings Governance Studies program: Elaine Kamarck, Gabriel R. Sanchez, and E. J. Dionne. I was not familiar with Sanchez, but I knew of Kamarck from her work with William A. Galston at Third Way, a center-left think tank devoted to curbing the Democratic Party’s drift away from bread-and-butter economic issues. Dionne, of course, is a columnist for the Washington Post and an occasional contributor to Commonweal.
The conversation among the commentators was largely upbeat, each judging the convention to have been a success, especially in pulling wayward elements of the Democratic coalition back into the fold. An untested Kamala Harris, it was agreed, had risen to the occasion. Democrats across the party’s ideological spectrum put their disagreements aside to present a united front. Unlike President Joe Biden after his disturbing debate performance, Harris now had a realistic chance of defeating Donald Trump.
I share the panelists’ conviction that there is now one overriding political and moral imperative, and that is keeping Trump out of the White House. But where the Democratic Party is headed is a different question. Asked what the convention’s fundamental message was, Kamarck answered forcefully. “I can summarize it in one word and the word is freedom,” she said. “The underlying thing here was abortion…. It was about fundamental freedom.” The country, she went on, is built on the idea of freedom, and it is imperative that Democrats wrest that value away from Republicans. The Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe has helped them do that. “It’s a winning theme,” she said.
Asked if Harris and Walz could counter the inevitable Republican attacks on them as radicals and socialists, Kamarck argued that the country itself has moved somewhat to the left. Dionne agreed, saying that since the 2008 financial crisis Americans are more comfortable using government to break up concentrated power. He called government regulation a form of “positive freedom,” a way of creating opportunity for all. Democrats can now more easily make the case that government can play a positive role in people’s lives.
Harris’s emphasis on abortion rights, Kamarck said, was the key reason behind the convention’s passionate mood and the brighter prospects for Democratic success in November. Americans will punish those responsible for taking away a right women had relied on for fifty years. Sanchez agreed, and approvingly quoted vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz’s applause line, “Mind your own damn business!” There was no acknowledgement during the webinar that abortion is a morally complicated issue, one that is not only about personal autonomy. That’s because two lives are involved.
I hope I am wrong, but I remain skeptical that a majority of Americans believe that government plays a positive role in their lives. Ronald Reagan’s legacy—his insistence that government is the problem, not the solution—remains a powerful force in our politics, evident in Trump’s outrageous lies about the government’s persecution of him and his followers. Of course, “Mind your own damn business!” is a sentiment that strongly resonates with Americans. Kamarck might be right that emphasizing personal freedom in this way will be a winning strategy for Harris. This is, after all, the country of the “self-made man” and the “rugged individualist,” even if those clichés grossly distort the actual history of this country. Individual success usually depends on the work of others as well, and just as often on inherited advantages or luck. I doubt, however, that “mind your own business” is a good governing strategy, not if you wish to address the nation’s economic and cultural divides. That would require acknowledging our mutual dependence on one another, something that Catholic social teaching emphasizes—and that the abortion issue encapsulates in a stark way.
The appeal to “freedom” is part of American democracy’s DNA. It has often gravely distorted the moral vision of Americans. Hard as it may be for us to believe, slavery was once understood as the rightful exercise of a slaveowner’s freedom. Celebrations of freedom have driven much of our political and cultural debates since the 1960s, whether it was Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose or Marlo Thomas’s Free to Be…You or Me. But it has also paralyzed our political life. When I hear Democrats howling about freedom in such an absolute way, I see every plutocrat smiling and nodding his head. When it comes to their freedom, their money, and their power they whole-heartedly agree: “Mind your own damn business!”
More than twenty-five years ago, in an essay for the New York Review of Books titled “A Tale of Two Reactions,” the historian Mark Lilla explained how this sweeping embrace of both personal and economic autonomy “brought serious political reflection down to absolute zero.” He argued that the cultural revolutions of the sixties and the economic revolution brought about by Reagan’s sanctification of the free market in the 1980s were “complementary, not contradictory” developments. Both were essentially libertarian, and both were rooted in the “ethos of democratic individualism.” As a result, it became nearly impossible for liberals to criticize abortion, sexual promiscuity, pornography, or drug use, or for social conservatives to question the economic sovereignty of individuals or corporations. Any exercise of public authority became suspect. As Margaret Thatcher famously put it, “There’s no such thing as society,” a dogma at odds with Catholic doctrine.
As a consequence, Lilla writes, the possibility of a “meliorist politics” that could challenge excess in both the private and public spheres disappeared. Reaganism ushered in the era of “greed is good,” while the popular culture of the sixties and seventies celebrated bourgeois hedonism. Most Americans have had few problems reconciling these two trends. They work hard “for ephemeral pleasures and for status and esteem,” while “spending weekends immersed in a moral and cultural universe shaped by the Sixties,” Lilla argued. In both spheres, neighbors are expected to mind their own damn business.
Lilla even anticipated the rise of Trump. “A political agenda making peace with one revolution while rejecting the other will be doomed to failure,” he wrote, noting how voters ignored Bill Clinton’s private moral failings while embracing his call for an end to the “era of big government.” In a similar fashion, Trump’s appalling private moral failings combined with his reputation as a grifter have failed to dent his popularity. His followers see libertarianism, in both his personal and professional life, as a strength. And that fact should give pause to Democrats as they try to recast themselves as champions of absolute personal autonomy.
Even if Kamala Harris defeats Trump in November, her embrace of “mind your own damn business” morality will make it difficult to argue that government should restrain individual economic decision-making. A victory for Harris will stave off worse things, but it will not restore the sort of “positive freedom”—state power used to protect the vulnerable—needed to tackle the nation’s economic and cultural crises.
