… for nothing left to lose.

Thank you, Janis, for the reminder on this first day of early voting in NM.

There is a word I keep expecting to hear more often from the American left.

Freedom.

Not because Democrats never use it. They do. Reproductive freedom. Freedom to vote. Freedom to marry. Freedom of speech. Freedom of religion. But mostly as a modifier. A collection of freedoms.

I keep wondering why freedom itself isn’t the organizing principle.

Look around outside of our shores. This week Germany’s president warned that his country risks something resembling the political fragmentation of the Weimar era, fueled by disinformation and anti-democratic extremism. War continues grinding through Ukraine, including attacks on civilian infrastructure as winter approaches. Fighting has intensified again in Yemen, around one of the world’s critical shipping corridors. Commercial ships have been struck by drones in the Black Sea. Oil and fuel supplies are tightening as conflict spreads through the Middle East.

Underneath much of it is a very old human question: Who gets to control whom?

And here at home in America, we are exhausted.

An AP-NORC poll released October 1 found only 17 percent approving of the president’s handling of the cost of living. Sixty-five percent said current unusually high prices were a result of Trump administration policies. Another AP-NORC survey found something perhaps even more revealing: only about two in ten registered voters thought either major political party was particularly concerned with helping people like them.

That is not merely partisan dissatisfaction. It’s total alienation.

And this is where I think Democrats—and the broader democratic left—are missing an extraordinarily simple piece of language:

Freedom.

Not freedom as the flag-waving possession of one political tribe. Not reduced to the right to buy something, carry something, refuse something or be taxed slightly less.

The older, larger concept. The principle this country actually claimed to be about.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, some deeply imperfect men wrote something astonishing:

“That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

Read that carefully. Government was not described simply as the enemy of liberty. Government existed to secure liberty.

Life. Liberty. The pursuit of happiness.

And when government instead became destructive of those things—when power became arbitrary, unaccountable and detached from the consent of the people—the Declaration argued that government had violated the purpose for which it existed. We have spent decades allowing the word freedom to become much smaller than that.

Freedom ought to mean that government cannot tell you whom you may love.

Freedom ought to mean that your neighbor’s religious beliefs do not determine your medical care.

Freedom ought to mean that the state cannot punish a newspaper because its coverage displeases politicians.

Freedom ought to mean that you can cast a ballot without intimidation and expect it to be counted.

Freedom ought to mean that a politician cannot simply place himself above laws that constrain everyone else.

Freedom ought to mean that your child can pick up a book without somebody else’s religious doctrine deciding whether it may exist.

Freedom ought to mean that a gay kid in Oklahoma and a trans kid in Texas and a Christian kid in Massachusetts and an atheist kid in Alabama all possess the same right to become themselves.

But freedom isn’t only protection from government. That’s the part we seem to have forgotten.

A person drowning in medical debt isn’t especially free.

A woman who cannot leave an abusive husband because his job provides the family’s health insurance is not entirely free.

Someone working two jobs while wondering whether this month’s rent increase finally puts him on the street possesses plenty of theoretical liberty. It may not feel much like freedom.

A parent choosing between insulin and groceries does not become freer because government refrains from interfering with the choice.

This is not just MAGA, Republicanism. This is also the fault of neoliberal Democratic principles set in place during the Clinton presidency in the 90’s. We turned away from the New Deal Democratic philosophy to align closer to business interests.

Franklin Roosevelt understood the danger, pulling America out of the Depression.

In 1941, with authoritarianism consuming much of the world, Roosevelt described four essential human freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.

Those last two matter.

Freedom from want. Freedom from fear.

They acknowledge something that much of American political language has since forgotten: liberty can be taken from us by more than government regulation.

Poverty can take it. Disease can take it. A monopoly can take it. An employer can take it. A violent spouse can take it. A mob can take it. A billionaire with vastly more political influence than the people who work for him can take some of it. (And can fiddle with elections internationally, too, I might add.) And yes, an authoritarian government can take it very quickly indeed.

The common denominator is not left versus right.

It is power.

Who has it? Who doesn’t? Who can exercise it over somebody else without meaningful restraint?

This is why I find the left’s political vocabulary so frustrating sometimes. We have dozens of individual policy arguments—healthcare, wages, reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, voting rights, unions, education, housing, corporate concentration—and then spend enormous amounts of energy explaining each one independently.

They are not independent. They are variations on the same proposition:

A human being should have enough autonomy, security and political power to direct his or her own life.

There is a word for that.

Freedom.

Healthcare? Freedom from having illness destroy everything you spent your life building.

A living wage? Freedom from desperation.

Social Security? Freedom from destitution after a lifetime of work.

Unions? Freedom for workers to negotiate with concentrated economic power rather than face it individually.

Reproductive rights? Freedom over your own body.

LGBTQ rights? Freedom to live and love without somebody else’s morality being written into law.

Voting rights? Freedom to participate in the government that exercises power over you.

A free press? Freedom to know what that government is doing.

Due process? Freedom from arbitrary state power.

Separation of church and state? Freedom of religion—which necessarily includes freedom from somebody else’s religion.

None of this requires inventing some brave new political philosophy. We already wrote it down.

Life. Liberty. The pursuit of happiness. Consent of the governed.

And the remarkable passage immediately following those famous words warns about a “long train of abuses and usurpations” that gradually reduces a people under absolute power. The authors were talking about George III, of course. But the principle survives perfectly well. Free societies do not depend upon benevolent rulers.

They depend upon limits on rulers.

They depend upon courts, legislatures, elections, journalists, laws, civil servants, citizens and institutions capable of saying no.

That isn’t obstruction. That’s the machinery.

A recent Gallup/Kettering survey found 56 percent of Americans saying the rule of law in the United States has weakened, while 78 percent agreed that government officials should always follow the law and Constitution. Two-thirds still considered democracy the best form of government.

That doesn’t sound to me like a country clamoring for a more complicated ideological vocabulary.

It sounds like one searching for something much more basic.

A life I can afford. A government I can trust. A vote that matters. A body that belongs to me. A family nobody can outlaw. A newspaper the president cannot silence. A religion I may practice—or decline to practice. A job that doesn’t own me. A doctor I can afford to see. A retirement that doesn’t end in terror. A country in which political defeat means you lost an election, not that somebody gets to become your ruler.

Freedom.

It is an extraordinarily American word. Past time to reclaim its full meaning. Democrats, are you listening? Hear it now. We prisoners wish to say a word.