On August 22, Vice President Kamala Harris gave the speech of her life, accepting the Democratic nomination for the presidency. That speech was strong on delivery but weak on policy, making it ideal for rallying the faithful but less so for winning over her many political skeptics. But the speech was then pushed from the top of the news cycle by the announcement that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had given up his effort to run as a third-party candidate. Instead, Kennedy announced he would join forces with Donald Trump in a move that may restore some of Trump’s campaign momentum lost at the Republican Party convention, where the former president’s acceptance speech rambled on far too long.

It is a maxim in politics that a concrete indictment has more legs than a general denunciation of a political opponent of the sort that Harris offered with such lines as, “In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man, but the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious.” So what was striking about the Kennedy endorsement of Trump was that a lifetime Democrat of the purest type had issued a stinging indictment, filled with particulars, of what he regarded as the systematic betrayal of small-d democratic ideals by the Democratic Party. This included a full-scale attack to keep Kennedy off the ballot—which may prove to have been a strategic miscalculation if it turns out Kennedy, the historic Democrat, would have drawn more votes from Trump than from Harris.

In his announcement, Kennedy started with general criticism and then got personal:

The Democrats stood against authoritarianism, against censorship, against colonialism, imperialism, and unjust wars. We were the party of labor, of the working class. The Democrats were the party of government transparency and the champion of the environment. Our party was the full world against big money interests and corporate power. True to its name, it was the party of democracy.

As you know, I left that party in October because it had departed so dramatically from the core values that I grew up with. It had become the party of war, censorship, corruption, Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Ag, and Big Money.”

But here in America, the DNC also prevented opponents from appearing on the ballot, and our television networks exposed themselves as Democratic Party organs.

That last accusation showed the deep disconnect between the public face of the DNC and its inside game, leading, most notably, to the defenestration of President Biden, done as an act of party survival. The effectiveness of that barb thus lent a certain credibility to his point-by-point condemnation of the party’s politics, each of which would take an extended essay to parse. Other points also drew blood. The Democratic Party is pro-union, which in all too many cases makes it anti-worker, as sometimes workers prefer to be non-union. For instance, workers voted to keep the United Auto Workers out of Mercedes factories in Alabama in May 2024, even after voting in that union at a Volkswagen factory in Chattanooga one month earlier.

There also is little doubt that government control of information during the COVID pandemic included badgering media platforms into playing along with the party line, and working to muffle dissent. Yet the Biden administration received an undeserved pass—based on arcane technical standing—in Murthy v. Missouri, where the Supreme Court shielded the administration’s detailed assault on dissenting voices from public review.

Kennedy’s endorsement thus presents an opportunity to review the performance of what has now become the Biden-Harris administration. But by the same token, it should not, with or without Kennedy’s support, insulate Trump from criticism, which includes, as my Hoover colleague David Henderson notes, both candidates’ failures to rein in excessive public spending.

Harris’s playbook is filled with blank pages on matters that desperately need to be fleshed out.

For perspective, examine how Democrats seek to reclaim the use of the term freedom, taking a Beyoncé song of that name and adding to it the lyrics “freedom from control, freedom from extremism, and freedom from fear.” The rewriting supports the party’s call for “protecting reproductive rights, same-sex marriage, access to affordable health care, a choice of what to read at school, and safety from gun violence.” It is an odd list, which can be best analyzed by first looking at the traditional definitions of liberty that have long been accepted.

The first point about any analysis of freedom is to specify the correlative duties that it imposes on others. To deny that these duties exist is to condemn everyone to life in a Hobbesian universe in which force and fraud are the tools of the trade, inducing universal fear of a violent death. So, the initial premise of freedom is that all individuals owe to all other individuals the duty to refrain from these roughhouse techniques so that they can live in harmony with others. That general insight does not resolve the empirical dispute whether gun control laws, for one, exacerbate an uncertain situation or improve it.

Other actions that remain unprotected under Harris’ selective definition of freedom include the ability to enter voluntary arrangements with other individuals for their mutual advancement on such matters as trade, commerce, investment, and charity. The protection of same-sex marriage rightly falls within the protected category, but the insistence that third parties participate in arranging such ceremonies does not. Any consistent conception of religious liberty is utterly inconsistent with Democratic efforts to endlessly pillory people like Jack Phillips because, as a devout Christian, the Colorado baker chooses not to serve couples seeking wedding cakes for same-sex weddings. His freedom remains off the Democrats’ list, and indeed exposes him to the threat of re-education by official government commissions. The ongoing legal saga is a worthy reminder that competitive markets do not require that every merchant chase after every customer. Selective protection of liberty creates a threat that a political democracy riven by prejudice could allow political factions to undermine their opponents (as with misinformation campaigns), especially if the ostensible freedoms do not secure constitutional rights.

Note also the economic pieces wholly missing from the Democrats’ preferred list of freedoms. These classical liberal pieces are inconsistent with any progressive regime that forces employers, on pain of government sanction under the National Labor Relations Act, to negotiate with labor unions against their own will, or that blocks agreements that do not provide for minimum wages. In a word, the grander conception of economic liberties does not make it onto the selective list of freedoms protected by the Democratic Party. The tragic consequence is that government-sanctioned monopolies will displace decentralized markets.

But what about the rest of the program? The protection of reproductive rights sounds uncontroversial until we unpack the notion. Every person has the right to refrain from sexual relations, but it is a very different question whether, if a woman gets pregnant when not subject to coercion, she has the right to remove the fetus. Before Roe v. Wade, the universal rule was that the mother owed a duty to protect her unborn. The ambiguous label “reproductive rights” is now used to make sure that an unborn child has no rights at all.

The party’s position on health care clashes with any conception of liberty, which maintains that no one may claim the right to demand another person provide various health care services against their will, or to tax one person to pay for the care of others. That sense of coercion evokes the efforts of the Biden administration to mandate vaccinations for people who feared being denied access to public facilities, military service, and university attendance. Such extreme coercion, moreover, is hardly ever needed if people are allowed to decide voluntarily to vaccinate themselves if they fear the contagion risk more than the vaccine risk no matter what the CDC says or does.

It can be objected that these quick critiques of the gaps in the analysis of freedom fail to do justice to the depths of the problem. But that objection applies with far greater force to political sloganeering that endorses only a selective set of freedoms, without ever asking whether there are other views to consider. Freedom includes the freedom to doubt, which is not on the Democratic Party’s list.

© 2023 by the Board of Trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University