The strategy today - of cloaking discrimination in the garb of religious liberty - has been tried before, as Clarkson noted:Īs recently as the 1980s, Christian Right activists defended racial segregation by claiming that restrictions on their ability to discriminate violated their First Amendment right to religious freedom. This was analyzed in depth in in a January 2016 report, “When Exemption is the Rule: The Religious Freedom Strategy of the Christian Right,” by Frederick Clarkson, which I wrote about here when it came out. As mainstream acceptance of same-sex marriage began to seem inevitable, the religious right poured enormous energy into a bold attempt to redefine the battlefield in a never-ending culture war. The NPR/PBS poll results on freedom of religion actually illustrate the broader pattern of how American conservatives work around the basic liberal thrust of the Constitution. And of course, states had complete control of who would be allowed to vote - a right contested repeatedly throughout our history. Until the passage of the 14 th Amendment, for example, state governments were not limited by such guarantees of freedom, and state-sanctioned churches were once commonplace. But with such basic freedoms enshrined in our First Amendment, American conservatives have long been forced to express themselves in more circuitous, devious, or deceptive ways. Conservatives everywhere around the globe tend to share these same tendencies. There should be nothing surprising in any of this. They want to place more power in the hands of the state - to control the press, to stifle citizens' criticism and to limit voting. They want more restrictions placed on people. What’s more, it’s negative freedom - a supposed conservative value - that they object to. On these three key issues, conservatives display much greater antipathy to freedom than Democrats/liberals do.

While the numbers are almost all pluralities, with large numbers taking middle positions, Republicans and conservatives are consistently much more likely to think that rights have been expanded too far, while Democrats are much liberals are more likely to think they have been restricted too harshly. On the right to vote, Democrats thought it had been restricted, rather than expanded too far, by 44 percent to 5 percent (for liberals, 54-4), while Republicans thought the opposite by 25 percent to 6 percent (for conservatives, 20-10).On the right to protest or criticize the government, Democrats thought it had been restricted, rather than expanded too far, by 31 percent to 7 percent (for liberals, 40-7), while Republicans thought the opposite by 41 percent to 6 percent (for conservatives, 33-16).On freedom of the press, Democrats thought it had been restricted, rather than expanded too far, by 32 percent to 11 percent (for liberals, 37-10), while Republicans thought the opposite by 42 percent to 9 percent (for conservatives, 35-11).Let’s start with the three most clear-cut questions: And on all issues except religious freedom, conservatives and Republicans were significantly more likely to say rights had been expanded too far, rather than restricted too much. On all four questions - which hinge on questions of government restriction and thus “negative liberty” - conservatives and Republicans were more likely to say freedoms had been expanded too far, compared to liberals and Democrats.

For decades now - certainly since Ronald Reagan, if not before - conventional wisdom has held that conservatives and Republicans care more about freedom, while liberals and Democrats care more about equality. A slightly more sophisticated version holds that the distinction is between “negative liberty” (“freedom from”) and “positive liberty” (“freedom to”), a distinction usually attributed to Isaiah Berlin's 1958 essay ' Two Concepts of Liberty,” though it’s actually found in Eric Fromm’s 1941 book ' Escape From Freedom,' as highlighted by Conor Lynch here at Salon back in February - a point we’ll return to below.īut findings in a new NPR/PBS Marist poll neatly refute both versions of the claim. The poll asked if we have gone too far in expanding or restricting freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom to protest the government and the right to vote.

Quote about conervatives and liberas