Progressives Also Seek Freedom — Just a Different Kind

Dr Jonathan Cole

5 December 2022

1.2 MINS

The modern Left is not actually against freedom, like many on the Right think. The problem with the Left is that it stands for a very selective freedom, born of a binary view of society that divides all people into oppressed and oppressor classes.

The Left is actually obsessed with freedom, but only for those currently suffering under the bonds of oppression (in its view). The Left is not interested in maintaining, defending or sustaining the freedoms of those who it deems to belong to oppressor classes. If anything, these classes have too much power, which is to say too much freedom, which they use to oppress and marginalise minorities.

Neo-Marxism

It naturally follows that the oppressed classes, which objectively lack fundamental freedoms, according to the Left, can only increase their freedom at the expense of the oppressor classes, which have much more freedom than is due to any class.

This view is predicated on a conflictual view of society which says that the freedom of one individual can only come at the expense of another, which makes politics a zero-sum fight to win freedom for your particular sect, and bugger the others. Why would you stand up for the freedom of your opponents when you are locked in combat with them to control and inhabit the finite space that exists in any society to be free?

A better view is to begin with the inherent dignity of the individual, irrespective of class (real or imagined), and to seek to ensure, enshrine, protect and defend those individual freedoms to the greatest extent possible, seeking to balance conflicting freedoms in a prudential manner that does not work from the perverse logic that some individuals deserve more or less freedom depending on historical contingency and biological attributes that no individual chooses, nor can escape.

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Originally published on Dr Jonathan Cole’s page.

Subscribe to his podcast, The Political Animals, for more insights.
Photo: BigStock

About the Author: Dr Jonathan Cole

Freedom

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