| "Freedom" is a flexible and powerful word in the United States. Yet it has multiple, mutually exclusive definitions depending on who is invoking it and why. Franklin D. Roosevelt's "freedom from want" in the New Deal era suggests something quite different from "freedom from taxes" espoused by politicians in the '90s. To identify the varieties of freedom and liberty in American presidential campaign discourse and differences across political parties and over time, I analyzed 88 speeches from 28 Republican and Democratic presidential nominating conventions (1952-2004). About half of the 760 terms were defined in opposition to foreign enemies (usually Communist), and very few were critical of liberty. Republicans used freedom terminology more often than Democrats, and there was evidence that the two parties defined freedom differently. I found no linear trends in the quantity or type of freedom usage over time, but there appeared to be cyclical rises and falls. |
