Timothy Snyder, On Freedom

Political ideas in our time are changing sides. In the Cold War, liberals like Isaiah Berlin made freedom their rallying cry for causes like anti-Communism, civil rights, gay rights, feminism, and decolonization. Conservatives like Michael Oakeshott supported some liberal causes, especially anti-Communism, but their values of choice were order and tradition. Flash forward to 2024, and many liberals have jettisoned freedom, as being too individualist and “neo liberal,” placing their politics in service of equality instead, on behalf of all manner of “subaltern” identities. The radical disrupters taking over the White House have jettisoned order and tradition and are making “freedom from” government, regulation, order, law, precedent, and occasionally common decency, their rallying cry. In the twenty-first century, the revolutionaries are conservative, and the defenders of the old order are liberal.