Freedom, equality, and self-governance

The 3 noble founding ideals embodied in America. Also, how has the definition of socialism changed over the years?

Full Transcript:

Scott Rasmussen  0:08  

Good morning, happy Monday, Scott Rasmussen here. Welcome to my podcast: Scott Rasmussen's Number of the Day. I'm gonna do a short version today, focusing on a small number, but a big concept. The number is three. I want to focus on three of our noble founding ideals, three of the ideals that we celebrated on the Fourth of July weekend, three of the founding ideals that make America what it is the three ideals freedom, equality, and self-governance. You know, these are words that mean different things to different people, they mean different things at different times in the life of our nation, but they get to a core idea, something that an old professor of mine called the American Creed, and that's the idea that Americans believe that we all have the right to live our lives as we see fit. We can all make the decisions for our own lives, so long as we respect the rights of everybody else to do the same. Now, exactly how you draw those borderlines is always a point of contention. Exactly what you mean by freedom, equality and self-governance is an ongoing dialogue. And for people, you know, I run into people periodically who say, well, that's wrong, you know, words have a meaning and go to the Webster's dictionary and you tell what you can learn what it means. Actually, that's not true. In my own case, I'm 64 years old right now, the term middle-aged means something much different to me today than it did when I was a 40-something. In the B-block, I'm going to talk about the word socialism and how it has changed, how our understanding of what it means has changed over the last couple of generations and then talk about, again, those three noble ideals: freedom, equality and self-governance.

Welcome back to Scott Rasmussen's Number of the Day. I'm Scott, the number today is three. I want to talk about three of the noble founding ideals embodied in America: freedom, equality, and self-governance. You know, and what I want you to think about is those words mean different things in the 21st century than they did in the 18th century. I don't mean fundamentally different. Freedom is still freedom, it's a very important concept. The idea of equality although it's never been practiced perfectly in America or anywhere else in the world, it has some connotations, and there are different ways you can look at it, different lights you can shine on it to get different aspects of a sense of equality. 

But I want to start with the term socialism to make the point. You know, there's been a lot of chatter in America over the last, I don't know, couple of years that somehow this idea of socialism is becoming popular. Bernie Sanders was a socialist. And you know, he nearly toppled Hillary Clinton for the 2016 nomination. I gave a big challenge in the Democratic primaries to Joe Biden this year, surveys, my own surveys, and many others showed that between 35 and 40% of Americans liked the idea of socialism. They had a favorable opinion of socialism, a majority of millennials like the concept. To older people, who remember socialism, who remember the Cold War, who remember how horrible it was, you know, when you had governments try and political forces trying to manage an economy, you know, they were horrified with this. What's wrong with the young people? Why are they liking socialism? In fact, they were missing the point. I did a lot of polling to figure out what is it that people have in mind when they talk about socialism? And it turns out the word doesn't mean anything close to what it meant historically, or to what the ideology was a generation or two ago. In fact, rather than being seen as a competition to capitalism, it wasn't a case of do you like socialism, or do you like capitalism? It wasn't that great Cold War ideology struggle. Turns out that among people who say they like socialism, 80% of them also like capitalism, they like free markets. Turns out that people who say they like socialism today, well, they don't think that means higher taxes and a more powerful government, only one out of three people who like socialism, think it should be, it leads to a more powerful government or to higher taxes. And in general, you know, there is this sense that no, that's not what we're talking about. So, you know, I've done a lot of poking around to figure out exactly what people do have in mind when they talk about socialism today. Don't have a great answer, but it is something about decision-making should be closer to home. We want to have more control, you know, locally rather than nationally. But it's not a sense of this is an economic system to replace capitalism. And by the way, it's also not a belief, people given a choice, tend to think that capitalism and free markets are more fair than socialism. 

The reason I'm going through all of this is to show you that or to make the point that, the meanings of words can change over time. And the meanings of the words freedom, equality and self-governance have changed. There, in the case of these terms, and especially in the American experience, there are some core parts of it. You know, America was founded on the idea that we needed to have freedom from the government, partly from the British government, from a distant government, but also from any government. The idea that you know, a majority of voters could tyrannize the rest of the country was something abhorrent to the founders and it remains that way to most Americans today. Respect for individual rights is a key part of freedom. But other people would say, you know, there's more to freedom than that. We need to talk about some positive freedoms. Those are the types of things Franklin Roosevelt talked in, talked about in the New Deal. So, as we get into the 21st century, we need to kind of have a national discussion. What is it that we mean by freedom? What does that mean to Americans today? And then, once we get that sense of meaning, how do we get our political system to catch up and move in that direction? Same thing on the terms equality and self-governance, you know, there's a lot of focus these days, on the racial inequalities in our land, and that's a historic legacy. It goes back centuries. 

And while we don't have the legal restrictions in place that we did for most of our country's history, there are still echoes, there are still the consequences of that racial discrimination. So, right now we have, you know, a real focus on racial inequality. But there are other inequalities that people focus on, too, some are concerned about gender inequality or economic inequality or political inequality. And when De Tocqueville came to America back in the 19th century and wrote his classic treatise on Democracy in America, he began with this comment that the thing that distinguishes America from every other place in the world is a sense of their equality of condition. That everybody in America believes that has some kind of equality. De Tocqueville wasn't fooling himself. He commented on slavery, he commented on other issues, but there was a sense that, at least in terms of the way we stood before our government, at that time all white people could say, 'Yes, we have some equality of condition.' I think we've lost that today. And so, amidst all the discussions about racial inequality and other forms of inequality, we need to talk about the variable basic idea of what do we mean by equality? And then finally, self-governance. I'll talk about that brought some thoughts in the C-block. And while you're waiting for that, please take a moment, share this podcast with your friends and take a moment and subscribe to Scott Rasmussen's Number of the Day. 

Welcome back to Scott Rasmussen's Number of the Day. I'm Scott and the number today is three. Talking about three noble ideals related to the founding of America: freedom, equality and self-governance. We've never lived fully up to these ideals. Nobody on the planet ever has. You know, we're a little bit closer today than we were a generation ago. We'll be a little bit closer a generation from now than we are. But it's important to think about what those ideals really mean. How do we define those terms because sometimes, different folks might see them in slightly different ways? In the B-block, I mentioned some thoughts on freedom and equality. I think the most important thing to talk about self-governance as an ideal is that most people get confused about it. They, you know, I think there's sort of a sense that, okay, self-governance means you vote, and therefore you get to pick your leaders, that's democracy. And you know, in an ideal world, democracy is balanced with all kinds of protections for minority rights because we don't want to have a tyranny of the majority. But when you go beyond that, self-governance means something far more than just voting for leaders who will rule over you. Self-governance is governing our daily lives, the things and choices we make for ourselves. It means the choices we make as consumers about where to shop or where not to shop, or whether to wear a mask or not to wear a mask or who knows what, where we send our kids to school. There's a lot of choices and all of those are part of the self-governing model. The idea is governing is far too important to be the responsibility of the government alone. We all have a role to play in it. We all have some responsibility to govern our own actions. And all of us, by the way, we interact with other people, play a role in governing society. I'll be back tomorrow morning with another edition of Scott Rasmussen's Number of the Day. Look forward to chatting with you then. Have a great day.