Commentary: Democrats' promise of 'freedom' has been a disaster

The theme of this election, the Democrats tell us, is to be freedom, as the theme of the 2022 election was said to be democracy. Democracy will not work as a theme after the Democrats spent four years endeavoring to jail a Republican contender and remove him from ballots, to allocate large sums to prop up foredoomed Republican candidates in Maryland and Illinois, to exclude from the ballot and debates any and all third-party candidates, and to forgo a competitive party convention to replace a withdrawing President Joe Biden. Democracy is dead, long live freedom!

But what sort of freedom? Obviously not economic freedom, which would doom the electric vehicle crusade, as well as the efforts to nationalize elder care, day care and primary and secondary education. The abolition of underwriting of federal student loans carried out by the Obama administration had nothing to do with economic freedom, nor do the recurrent efforts to relieve freely contracting persons of responsibility for their payment, or the extra-constitutional efforts to impair the rights of landlords and mortgage lenders in the interest of COVID relief.

What is meant by freedom is only one kind of freedom: reproductive freedom, or, more accurately, non-reproductive freedom. Situation ethics is affirmed as a principle of constitutional law. All government efforts, including those enjoying widespread popular consent, to induce caution are to be ritualistically condemned. In John Milton’s words: “License they mean when they cry, Liberty! For who loves that must first be wise and good.” Milton’s theme is that of a recent book by Jeffrey Rosen, the director of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia: “The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America.” The crusade for unrestricted abortion on demand seeks to abolish waiting periods, counseling requirements, exposure to alternatives such as adoption and public aid, and implementation of such measures in other states, whose policies are to be undermined by state or national legislation. Those who assist abortion migration would not look with favor on a law offering inner-city Baltimoreans free transportation to and from Virginia gunshops to avoid Maryland’s firearms regulations. But all respect for the structure of a federal government must be subordinated to the sacred cause of abortion promotion.

The difficulty with all this is that abortion on demand has proven to be a disastrous social policy. The assumption of the Roe v. Wade justices that it would eliminate or reduce the tragedy of unwed motherhood has proven to be totally misplaced. As Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and her Nobel Prize-winning husband George Akerlof showed in a 1996 article they published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the new regime of legal permissiveness rapidly changed sexual mores. Those who altered their sexual behavior in reliance on the newly invented right to abortion frequently did not exercise it, whether because of lack of means, procrastination, parental or spousal pressure, fear that they would later be unable to become pregnant, or a maternal instinct militating against the killing of a fetus. The assumption of the Roe justices rested on a gigantic mistake of fact; within a few decades, the incidence of unwed motherhood multiplied nearly tenfold in the general population, and the assumption of responsibility via “shotgun weddings” plummeted.

The Democrats will shortly learn that freedom without responsibility is not a good political mantra, nor one that appeals to those charged with the upbringing of adolescents.

The Republicans for their part must offer more than the negation of vulnerable positions. The alienation that led to former President Donald Trump’s implausible victory rested on a sense by many that unwise government actions were costing them control over their own lives. Decentralization rather than socialism or license is the cure for this ill. Three measures that might usefully be considered, and that are virtually unmentioned include:

1) Enactment of the TEAM Act, which would empower building-level employee organizations 2) a modest tax credit, of perhaps $25,000, to encourage the installation of second kitchens and accessory apartments in owner-occupied single-family homes, to relieve shortages of small-unit housing at a cost far less than the $350,000 per unit of federally subsidized new construction and 3) a requirement as a condition of federal aid that each public school have its own building-level community board, a reform instituted with success in Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand in the 1980s.

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George Liebmann is president of the Library Company of the Baltimore Bar and the author of various works on law and politics, most recently “The Tafts” (Twelve Tables Press, 2023).

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