Andrew Harnik/AP Photo
President Joe Biden speaks at the North America’s Building Trades Union National Legislative Conference at the Washington Hilton in Washington, April 25, 2023, following the formal announcement of his run for a second term.
Anyone who thinks the abortion issue won’t be the central focus of Joe Biden’s campaign for re-election hasn’t seen the three-minute video released this morning, in which he announced, to no one’s surprise, that he’s seeking four more years in the Oval Office.
The video begins with a few seconds of montage showing some of the rioters at the failed January 6th insurrection, then cutting to a peaceful demonstrator outside the Supreme Court hold a sign reading, “Abortion is healthcare.” Then it immediately cuts to Biden, whose opening words are these:
Freedom—personal freedom—is fundamental to who we are as Americans. There’s nothing more important. Nothing more sacred. That’s been the work of my first term—to fight for our democracy.
Since the coming of the New Deal, if not before, “freedom” has been the favorite battle cry of right-wingers defending big business against governmental regulations and the government’s infrequent creation of non-market social provision. In the mid-1960s, Ronald Reagan termed Medicare (then just a bill before Congress) an attack on freedom. Barry Goldwater said the same about Social Security. Tax cuts for the rich were championed for advancing freedom; the Affordable Care Act and Dodd-Frank attacked for diminishing it.
But the right has defined itself by its opposition to freedom for those outside the circle of white patriarchy and the realms of wealth. Even as Goldwater attacked Social Security, he voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Generations of right-wingers have ferociously opposed the freedom of workers to organize and have even supported employers’ subjecting their workers to noncompete agreements that keep them from moving on to other jobs.
Until the mid-1970s, white Christian evangelicals were indifferent to, and even sometimes supportive of, women’s right to choose an abortion. But the rise of feminism during that decade, along with the growing number of women who took jobs outside the home, posed a threat to the patriarchal order that was fundamental to these fundamentalists. They quickly became the dominant force in the anti-abortion movement, even as most lay Catholics were abandoning it. In the great reshuffling of political constituencies in recent decades, they also became the largest bloc within the Republican Party, whose various bigotries Republican politicos felt compelled to enact into laws, and Republican judges to instill in rulings when they felt the law wasn’t bigoted enough.
Which has opened a rather wide door for Democrats in the 2024 election. Biden’s YouTube announcement of candidacy retakes the word “freedom” from the right and repurposes it in a way that appeals to a host of key constituencies: the suburban women who will be the swing voters in many states, and the young voters who may not be keen on turning out to support an octogenarian president, but who are also those directly affected by laws forbidding abortions and who are clearly libertarian on matters of personal and sexual autonomy.
Modern liberalism also has a more progressive definition of freedom, best stated by Franklin Roosevelt in his 1944 State of the Union address:
We have come to a clear realization of the fact, however, that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. Necessitous men are not free men. People who are hungry, people who are out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.
I don’t doubt that Biden subscribes to this definition, too, and his almost mind-boggling record of job creation following the pandemic is an achievement that historians are sure to credit him with. But I suspect this form of freedom—of reducing the number of necessitous Americans—along with those advanced by his other legislative victories, will take a back seat in his forthcoming campaign to his defense of freedom from governmental encroachment on a woman’s right to choose her own destiny, and his attack on Republicans’ determination to destroy it. As that determination has taken the form of Republican judges revoking established law, and Republican state legislators making it harder for voters to preserve abortion rights through ballot measures, Biden’s emphasis on freedom comports nicely with his defense of democracy—another of his well-chosen campaign themes.
Those themes come through loud and clear in his announcement of candidacy, and we’ll hear a great deal more of them between now and Election Day.
