Historian Douglas Brinkley points out that Bush’s use of “freedom” as political rhetoric pulls a fast one on liberals. The word had mostly been adopted by Democratic and progressive movements. Think of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms,” Brinkley said, or the “Freedom Rides” into the segregated South during the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, or the “freedom movement” to end the Vietnam War in the same period.
But Brinkley, whose book on John Kerry’s Vietnam service, “Tour of Duty,” became grist for a conservative attack on the Democratic candidate during the presidential campaign, says conservatives have given the word a different spin.
“The right has hijacked the word ‘freedom’ from the progressive movement,” he said. “It’s now becoming associated with the global liberation policy of the Republican Party. The left hasn’t put up much of a fight to stop it.”
–From a Washington Post piece comparing President Bush’s inaugural address to the 1968 Rascals hit “People Got To Be Free.”
