I was in the United States for that now-infamous presidential debate between Trump and Biden, which I watched with my Australian children. Fifteen minutes in, my teenage daughter turned to me and asked, ‘330 million people and this is the best you can do?’ The next morning, folks at the local coffee shop in Atlanta, Georgia, echoed this sentiment. An African American police officer told me his grandmother made him promise to always vote because it took them years to get the vote. ‘But the thing is,’ he shook his head, ‘on one side of the TV, you got a convicted felon, and on the other side, it’s Weekend at Bernie’s.’ Then Biden dropped out, and now a new candidate is ahead of Trump in the polls.
Kamala Harris has made 'freedom' the catchcry for her campaign. In her first ad, she reads over Beyoncé’s song 'Freedom': ‘We choose freedom; the freedom not just to get by, but to get ahead. The freedom to be safe from gun violence. The freedom to make decisions about your own body. We choose a future where no child lives in poverty. Where we can all afford healthcare. Where no one is above the law’.
Freedom is a word that has typically been used in conservative circles; according to PEW research, Republicans are more likely than Democrats – 12 per cent to 6 per cent, to bring up ‘freedom’ as something that gives their life meaning. Kamala Harris choosing to launch her campaign around this word speaks to her political acuity. What could be more American than 'freedom'?
For a nation ‘conceived in liberty’, I suspect much of how this election will play out will hinge on different understandings of the word ‘freedom’. Yet it’s a term that has two distinct and separate meanings depending on whether you're red or blue. This divergence reflects a longstanding philosophical divide about the role of government, the nature of individual responsibility, and the very purpose of society.
Conservatives tend to understand the word ‘freedom’ to mean a literal individual freedom from government intervention. It means lower taxes, freedom of speech and freedom to bear arms. The state is a necessary evil at best, whose primary function is to protect individual liberties, and not to interfere with them. Economic freedom is paramount in this view — people and businesses should be able to operate with minimal regulation, taxation, or interference. Conservatives are more likely to believe that the free market, when left to its own devices, will reward innovation and personal responsibility, and that government overreach will stifle these virtues.
Liberals, by contrast, tend to conceive of freedom as the ability to achieve personal fulfillment, which requires government to play an active supporting role. For them, freedom has less to do with the absence of interference; rather it’s about ensuring that all social groups have the means to exercise their freedoms meaningfully. Freedom from discrimination, freedom from fear, freedom from ignorance. This perspective is especially evident in their advocacy for social freedoms — such as the rights of LGBTQ+ individuals, reproductive rights, and protections against discrimination. Liberals tend to see government not as a threat to freedom, but as a necessary instrument to protect it, and to expand it, particularly for marginalised groups.
'To the listener, freedom sounds self-evident. But its meaning has always been, to an extent, ambiguous and dependant on context. Both understandings play on the deep-rooted assumption that those who suffer oppression should be liberated, it just depends on which freedom will hold more appeal to voters in swing states.'
Conservatives prioritize economic freedom, while liberals place greater emphasis on social freedoms and the conditions necessary to realize them. Conservatives emphasize individual responsibility, believing that freedom flourishes when people are left to their own devices. Liberals, however, stress collective responsibility, arguing that a just society must ensure that everyone has an equal opportunity to be free.
Shortly after the assassination attempt on his life, Donald Trump spoke at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, promising a ‘new era’ of safety, prosperity, and freedom for American citizens of ‘every race, religion, colour, and creed’. Trump’s track record demonstrates an understanding of freedom rooted in unfettered personal and economic autonomy, unrestrained by government regulation. It’s an understanding of freedom that might come at the expense of global cooperation or progressive social change. And critically, this particular brand of freedom is about a populist resistance to elite control and tends to resonate with ‘forgotten’ Americans who feel left behind by the political establishment.
Nobel Prize-winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz defines freedom in a recent interview as this: ‘if you don’t provide a decent standard of living, you’re taking away freedom from hunger. If you allow everyone to carry AK-47 automatic guns into the schools, you take away the freedom of fear, even for kindergarten children.’ These ideas are echoed in Harris’ campaign ads, and stand in stark contrast to Donald Trump’s campaign ads which invoke fear that freedoms are under threat, especially from illegal immigrants.
A recent Trump campaign ad shows video footage of people of colour scaling a wall while unsettling music plays in the background; the voiceover claims Kamala let in millions of illegal immigrants. Viewers are meant to realise that the freedom at stake in this election is nothing less than national sovereignty.
It’s common knowledge, but worth restating, that both Harris and Trump are descended from immigrants, but with drastically different spins on the freedom the United States offers. Trump’s grandfather was an immigrant who came to America to make his fortune in the California goldfields in 1885, ‘the peak year of German immigration’, according to biographer, Gwenda Blair. Grandpa changed his name from Drumpf to Trump, in part because German immigrants were often targets of discrimination in the early 19th century. For them, the United States was a place where one had the freedom to build wealth however one saw fit. Donald Trump grew up in a 23-room house with ‘a chauffeur and a maid. The kids were driven to their private schools in a limo,’ Blair says. He went on to make even more money thanks to ‘freedom’ from economic regulation.
Kamala Harris is the daughter of immigrants — her mother moved from India to the United States when she was a young academic researching a cure for cancer, and her Jamaican father came to Berkeley, California to complete his PhD in of Post-Keynesian economics. Kamala’s parents met while working together in the Civil Rights movement; they had two daughters, both of whom are lawyers, one of whom might be the next president. Free to pursue a career, free from violence and discrimination.
Kamala Harris knows that to win the presidency, she will need African American votes in swing states like Georgia where the word ‘freedom’ has a very particular meaning emerging from a very particular context. On the eve of the Civil War in 1861, Georgia’s population of enslaved people stood at around half a million – 44 per cent of the state’s population – and second only to Virginia in its overall number of enslaved people and slaveholders.
Even though Harris is still coasting in a post-nomination honeymoon period, she has reason to be optimistic. The day after President Biden dropped out of the 2024 race to the White House, more than 44,000 Black women joined a Zoom in support of Kamala, with an estimated 50,000 additional attendees. A friend of a friend of Kamala told me, ‘I cannot convey the feeling of inclusion . . . when we descendants of American slaves—not too long ago relegated to Coloured Only water fountains, the back of the bus and jobs that existed only to serve whites — can now have friends close to people in power.’
To the listener, freedom sounds self-evident. But its meaning has always been, to an extent, ambiguous and dependant on context. Both understandings play on the deep-rooted assumption that those who suffer oppression should be liberated, it just depends on which freedom will hold more appeal to voters in swing states. For many, especially people of colour living in a southern state like Georgia with a history of slavery, to finally see a woman of colour on the head of the ticket with a white man standing behind her, that looks a lot like freedom. In a divided America, if Kamala can convince the country that her understanding of ‘freedom’ is preferable for most Americans in 2024, she just might win this race.
Sarah Klenbort is a writer and sesional academic at Queensland University, where she teaches creative writing. She also teaches memoir at the Queensland Writers Centre. Sarah's work has appeared in Eureka Street, The Guardian, Best Australian Stories, Overland and other publications here and overseas.
Main image: Democratic presidential candidate, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at a campaign rally at the Fiserv Forum on August 20, 2024 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.