You may recall the now-iconic phrase that emerged during the Tea Party rise in our national politics around the 2010 elections:  “Take your government hands off my Medicare!”   Now there was a valid point to it–Republicans in Congress were threatening to pass a budget that would end “Medicare as we know it.”

But the directive also betrayed a deep confusion about the role of the national government in citizens’ lives, suggesting that a major social safety net program was not a program of government.  Indeed, political science research published in 2010 found that 40 percent of Medicare recipients surveyed denied that they had ever benefitted from a government social program.

Laughable as this level of civic ignorance struck many of us at the time, in fact it poses a significant threat to the stability and security of American society.  If citizens badly misunderstand their basic relationships with government, then they are more vulnerable to the distortions and appeals of demagogues.

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The ongoing Covid pandemic has unveiled another faultline in our political reasoning, one more threatening to the Republic because it mimics the nation’s founding principles.  This is the apparently widespread confusion about the nature of freedom and its connection to liberty.  Around the country, many Americans have appeared at school board meetings and other political gatherings to protest loudly that such public health requirements as vaccine and mask mandates violate their freedom.

And they gave been encouraged in this grave error by Republican governors in a number of states, most notoriously those in Florida and Texas, who have prohibited their cities’ and towns’ mask mandates even for vulnerable children in schools.  This mistaken association of freedom with democratic American governance literally threatens citizens’ “unalienable Rights” to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”  One has to look only at the growing numbers of children in America’s hospitals, suffering from Covid.

Liberty and freedom can be used interchangeably.  They are defined in very similar terms, and even in terms of each other.  But perhaps it is no accident that neither the Declaration of Independence nor the body of the American Constitution mentions “freedom.”  Instead, both documents use the language of liberty to set out the new Americans’ goals of a society liberated from unjust tyranny and of a democratic society of representative self-governance.  Only such a society–and government–could provide the conditions of life required for a truly free people.

The Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments to the Constitution, constitute the first governing document to focus on individuals’ freedoms.  The most familiar are the First Amendment–including the rights to free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, and a free press–and the Second Amendment, the right to keep and bear arms.  Such rights, these freedoms, can only be created and sustained in a stable democratic society.

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And these freedoms have never been absolute.  Imagine a people where each person is totally free to do whatever they wish–for themselves, to other people.  Can you see a society built of such a group of people, or do you see anarchy?  Societies can only be built on rules, and on rules about the rules.  And so, if they are to exist, societies must decide when and where to limit individual freedoms.

You have no right–no freedom–to falsely yell “FIRE” in a crowded theater.  You have no right to treasonous behavior.  You have no right to own a surface-to-air missile launcher.  You have no right to subject other people’s children to the risk of avoidable and potentially fatal diseases at their schools, or to subject fellow customers and employees to such risks.

Societies do not only place necessary limits on individuals’ freedom.  They also create freedoms where they would not otherwise exist.  The freedom to choose the sort of life we wish to live, the sort of work we wish to do, even the sort of person we wish to be, do not exist in nature.  These freedoms exist only in the real options, the choices, that the societies we live in develop and protect.

Liberal democratic societies provide us with the widest range of choices, and therefore the most far-reaching freedoms.  The freedom to marry whom we love and to build families.  The freedom to choose from among countless occupations and careers (so long as we have access to good educations; that many don’t is another story).  The freedom to participate in political processes (again, so long as this freedom is not constrained by, for example, new voting laws that limit rightful access to the ballot).  The freedom to think about and participate in religion as we will or won’t.  The freedom to create–art, ideas, technologies, scientific discoveries, cures.

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In their misunderstanding and misuse of the idea of freedom, the ersatz patriots among us put at risk the very foundation of our freedom, our liberty. Liberty is our freedom from tyranny, whether the tyranny is at the hands of foreign occupiers, or imposed by an authoritarian leader, or by a right-wing minority who would be unconstrained by the rule of law and democratic principles.

There is a through-line that connects the angry, anti-mask protestors at local American school board meetings, to state governors who move to prohibit local officials from protecting their youngest citizens, to armed men illegally entering the Michigan state capitol to intimidate the legislature from supporting necessary public health measures in the middle of a deadly once-a-century pandemic, to the treasonous insurrectionists who invaded the nation’s Capitol Building on January 6, 2021, at the behest of an American president to overturn a legitimate presidential election.

These minorities seek to impose their views and interests over those of American majorities, democracy be damned.  It is no small irony that they march under the banner of freedom while stalking our liberty.