On the Socratic perspective that there is no freedom in hatred

A lament on JD Vance’s foolery this week

We’re seeing this week JD Vance trying to lecture older societies, with actual historical experiences of fascism, about freedom. He’s rehashing the line that to police hate speech is to promote unfreedom. It is indeed, he says with the projection that characterises everything MAGA, “Orwellian”.

Thankfully, wiser people have pushed back, and explained to JD that things are not so simple. Let’s leave politicians to their politics here, hoping that the defenders of democracy can defeat the new barbarians of the 21st century, armed with their social media platforms. Things don’t look good right now, it has to be said.

Instead, let’s ask here about what model of freedom underlines JD’s sophism here.

In a word or words, JDs idea is what philosophers have called negative liberty. This is the idea that freedom is freedom from. Freedom from what? From any restrictions whatever. I am free when no one or nothing restricts me, at all in any way. I can say and do what I please.

It’s the model that the 1960s brought the cultural Left, as it turned away from its historical commitments to justice and solidarity into libertarianism. It’s the model that is also accepted by the neoliberal economistic Right. Here, freedom is the ability to truck and trade, with no concern for anything beyond your own self-interest, and shareholder value.