quote:

---

Understanding the meaning of freedom

By George Lakoff | July 4, 2006

NOT SINCE the Civil War has America been more divided politically. The Civil War was fought over the question of what freedom in America was to be. The issue was in the open for all to see: human slavery, the bluntest effrontery to the idea of freedom.

The Culture War today is once more about the question of what freedom is to be in America. But it is subtler. No slaves. Instead, ``detainees" in Guantanamo, held without due process; more than a million young African-Americans in US prisons, many held for nonviolent or victimless crimes; torture in Abu Ghraib and at secret destinations in Egypt and Syria; government spying on ordinary citizens. No slaves. Instead, illegal immigrants who want to come here to do back-breaking work for low pay and few rights. Remarkably, all this is in the name of ``freedom." It is a right-wing conservative conception of freedom and it flies in the face of the freedoms declared by the Founding Fathers and expanded upon since.

For more than two centuries, Americans demanded successive expansions of freedom -- progressive freedom....

---