I’ve made the recent discovery of the idea of positive liberty. The idea that liberty is not only about freedom from control (negative liberty) but also about the freedom to really be your own person (positive liberty). It’s a bit of a nuanced concept, explained fairly well here. As a very low level political philosopher and one who has barely studied political philosophy outside of a couple of classes in college and a few books since then, I have to tread carefully with this post.
But I think Trumpism and these Team Trump crazies are DECIDEDLY missing any idea of positive liberty in their thoughts. Trumpism is nearly entirely about being free from things. “No one can tell me what to do!” “I do my own research. I’m free from science.” “I don’t trust the government.” And Trump plays on long-held conservative beliefs that the government overreaches. Americans no longer trust most of the institutions because of Trumpism and it’s idea that the individual must be absolutely free from all constraints. This kind of free market ideology, that you must defeat the other at competition and silence the critics at restricting your freedom, is a terribly flawed intellectual concept because it really isn’t a complete concept of freedom.
Positive liberty has no emphasis at all on what you are free from. It’s the idea that you really only are free when you make your own decisions and are your own boss. It is a kind of self-actualization, a finding of the self. Trumpism has this idea, in part, in its wholesale embrace of deregulation and the free market, it must be acknowledged. But, as we all know, the market can be a RESTRAINT on liberty, fully considered. Slavery is a free market condition for example.
Or, in more modern terms, the illegal drug market is really a restraint on most users’ freedom. If you ask 100 people if they want to be addicted to any fairly dangerous illegal drug before they become addicted, 99 of them, I think, would say they would not want to be addicted. So positive liberty is the idea that a drug addict, like a slave, is not free. The drug addict does not have any real liberty, even if they are free to buy and use all the addictive drugs they want and are making the choice “freely” and without restraint from government. The drug addict would only be truly free if they can eliminate the addiction, or decrease its effect so much that the addict is able to make choices without regard for the drug and it’s addictive qualities.
So where does Team Trump fit into this concept of positive liberty? Beyond a kind of minimalist prosperity gospel, that only those that win at moneymaking are truly free, I don’t think it offers very much. Can you really become the full expression of yourself if you spend your time living in fear of illegal immigrants or woke liberals? Does the Trumpian idea of loyalty permit any positive liberty? I’d say decidedly not. Mark Meadows right now is totally unfree to do and say what he actually thinks. He is trapped. Jeff Clark now has to plead the 5th amendment because his “freedom” is now limited to the last constitutional defense against prosecution, the one that truly criminal minds use regularly. Why, because of loyalty and intimidation.
Is it self-actualizing to drive your big boat around the lake with 20 Trump flags streaming out the back? Do you become more of your true self by putting that “Don’t Tread on Me” sticker on the back of your Ford F-150? If you think you do, I’d suggest you are very very wrong. You are joining a tribe. A gang. A group without any real concept of liberty or freedom. A group that restricts your ability to see the real world and fully participate in society because it exists solely on the idea that others are flawed, and wrong.
One of the principal bedrocks of the conservative movements of the last 20 years has been the opposition to woke culture as a kind of monolithic mass media / liberal university groupthink that fails to see the complete world where other ideas, and other people who do not believe the same thing, exist. There is a deep deep resentment in Trump Country of this groupthink.
But of course, Trumpism is it’s own form of wokism. Team Trump is “woke” to the idea that the border is dangerous, that most foreigners are terrible people, and absolutely that those liberal professors and students, and most rich corporate bigwigs, just are all messed up and need to be abandoned. We need to Make America Great Again. Groupthink, and tribalism. NOT freedom.
I’d suggest that positive liberty and its emphasis on individual choice and becoming your own person DEMANDS a rejection of Trumpism and its narrow focus on the ability to be free from everything. Individual choice and rational decisionmaking hinges on not being so woke with Trumpism that you can see the forest for the trees. Team Trump is delusional with ideas of grandeur and rampant individuality to such an extent that society in its whole form no longer exists. Sad.
