The Freedom Party

Nine years after Donald Trump expressed the emerging ethos of the American right in a single imperative statement—“Make America great again”—the Democratic Party has found its rejoinder. Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota and Kamala Harris’s running mate, has popularized a similarly direct command: “Mind your own damn business.” More than a mere campaign slogan, it sums up an entire political vision. It suggests exactly what kinds of freedom Americans can expect to enjoy in a blue America—and what forms they can’t. 

At the most immediate level, the statement expresses the Democratic Party’s uncompromising defense of abortion rights. Kamala Harris has refused to endorse any limits on the procedure. As governor of Minnesota, Walz signed a bill that repealed a ban on coercing a woman into having an abortion. When Democrats say they oppose limits on abortion, they really do mean it. 

But Walz’s statement has a broader application, as the candidate himself has made clear. At a recent campaign stop in Bethlehem, PA, Walz presented the Democratic Party as the true heir of some of the more libertarian impulses of yesterday’s GOP. 

“There was a time when Republicans talked about freedom, they actually meant it. In the long-ago time it feels like,” he told the crowd. “Because right now when they talk about freedom, the freedom of government to be able to invade your bedroom, the freedom of government to invade your exam room, the freedom of government to invade your school libraries.”

Along with this strange celebration of yesterday’s GOP—a move symbolized by the Harris campaign’s loving embrace of the Cheney family—Walz’s statement is notable for its bizarre warning that Republicans want the government to “invade your school libraries.” Given that these libraries exist in governmental institutions—namely, public schools—the government can hardly be said to be invading them. It’s a statement as jarring as the old Tea Party slogan, “Keep your government hands off my Medicare.” 

In both cases, the seemingly incoherent statement expresses a consistent political view. The Tea Party protester’s cry can be understood as a claim that entitlements are not so much government programs funded by current revenues as a kind of national pension system. As a budgetary matter, this idea is simply false. But it has always been at the heart of the program’s popular appeal. As FDR told one of his advisers, “We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their … benefits. With those taxes there, no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program.”

Similarly, the idea that voters have no right to say what books should appear in the libraries of the schools they pay for seems, at first glance, utterly confused. But it reflects a belief that public schools should conform to the will of trained experts, rather than that of local constituencies. In this sense, keeping government out of schools really means keeping the popular will out of schools. It is a statement of opposition to democratic accountability. One can object to this view as inconsistent with our political traditions, but it has its own internal logic.

Indeed, the Democratic Party’s thoroughgoing embrace of rights language tends to take a whole range of contentious subjects out of the realm of political contestation. A right can’t be subject to political horse-trading. It can’t be debated by the local school board. It must be recognized no matter what the people say. This may be justified in any given case. But modern liberalism’s reliance on what the legal scholar Mary Ann Glendon has called “rights talk” is one element of its anti-democratic tendency.

This dynamic should affect how we understand the Democratic Party’s claim to be the “party of government.” It’s certainly true that the Democrats are more likely to support public programs and public institutions than Republicans are. But there is a lingering question about who these institutions are actually serving. When children are graduating without the ability to read books, is it more accurate to say that the purpose of these institutions is education, or that their purpose is to serve as a jobs program for teachers and administrators? 

Republican politicians point to these problems as a reason to slash government services, abolish federal departments, and lean on private alternatives. In education, this approach has met with some real success, as the rise of homeschooling (detailed in a recent report from the Johns Hopkins School of Education) has shown. In other areas, however, starving the beast is likely to prove a less appealing solution. In the face of a national crisis like Hurricane Helene, citizens want a vigorous response from the executive. That requires funding FEMA, not abolishing it, and making sure it actually serves the interests of Americans.

Whichever party manages to assume the mantle of efficient government—of public services that actually benefit the public—will have a chance to build a true governing majority. Such a party will have to embrace democratic accountability, even when it’s tempting to say “mind your own damn business.”