EDITORIAL: Democrats: The party of freedom?

The great Kamala Harris remake began with abandon in Chicago, with eager Democrats enthusiastically anointing the vice president as their 2024 presidential nominee. Joe Biden is now a distant memory.

The challenge for Ms. Harris will be to sustain her chameleon-like transformation. After serving in an administration that triggered the worst rising prices in four decades, she wants voters to believe that she’s now an inflation warrior. After arguing that we must “start from scratch” with ICE and failing in her role as border czar, Ms. Harris now casts herself as an aggressive advocate for border control. After appeasing radical greens by coming out against fracking, she now reverses course in search of votes.

Two months ago, Ms. Harris was considered a political lightweight who churned through staff members at an alarming rate and had accomplished little of substance. Today, she’s the second coming of FDR, JFK and Barack Obama all rolled into one.

The makeover extends beyond the vice president. During the convention, Democrats attempted to rebrand the party as representing “freedom.” Wednesday night was even designated Freedom Night. Ms. Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, devoted a portion of his oration to this.

“When we Democrats talk about freedom,” he said, “we mean the freedom to make a better life for yourself and the people that you love, freedom to make your own health care decisions and, yeah, your kids’ freedom to go to school without worrying about being shot.”

Yes, if unrestricted abortion is your key metric of freedom, the Democratic Party has you covered. But the progressive agenda, in fact, is otherwise overwhelmingly authoritarian and based largely on coercion. “It can be reasonably argued that the most consistent theme running through the progressive approach to public policy,” Roy Cordato has written for the John Locke Foundation, “is its reliance on the use of force or at least the threat of force to achieve its goals.”

It’s fair to ask now that Mr. Walz has raised the point whether Americans would even recognize the left-wing version of “freedom.” The freedoms guaranteed in the Bill of Rights are prohibitions on government behavior and require no special dispensation from others. The freedoms envisioned by Democrats such as Mr. Walz — guaranteed health care, jobs and housing, free college, free child care, etc. — all require the forcible participation, financially or otherwise, of others to provide them. Dependency is the antithesis of freedom.

If Democrats are the party of freedom, would they agree that Americans should be free to decide against joining a union? To start a small business without interference from dozens of state, local and federal agencies? To rent out their property to willing lessees without being told how much to charge? To own a weapon for self-defense? To home-school their children or to otherwise seek refuge from the foundering public school system? To peddle their products without price controls? To work as a hair-braider absent government permission? To run for office as a member of a third party?

Should they be free to protest outside abortion clinics? To choose their own doctors and pay for their own medical care under a government-run system? To use their own property without undue government interference? To keep more of their own hard-earned money? To freely enter contracts involving jobs and wages? To make decisions about their own child’s medical care? To make choices based on their religious convictions? To walk on the beach during the pandemic? To purchase a gas stove or a gasoline-powered SUV? Should they be prohibited by law from “misgendering” someone?

Democrats have spent decades creating and nurturing an aggressive federal administrative state that has its fingers in each nook and cranny of everyday life. These agencies — and the unelected bureaucrats who toil for them — have accumulated enormous power and usurped legislative functions with little or no oversight. The separation of powers is an afterthought. Yet if federal judges raise questions about the constitutionality of this arrangement, Democrats howl with dismay. Freedom indeed.

Republicans may have their own blind spots when it comes to “freedom.” But if Democrats think they can redefine the word for political gain, they must truly believe H.L Mencken’s observation that “nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.”