“Freedom is a fragile thing, and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction.”
That’s not an original thought, of course; in fact, it was a line delivered in the 1967 inaugural address of the new governor of California, a retired actor named Ronald Reagan. It’s a bit ironic that some of the people resurfacing these words nowadays are certainly not ideological descendants of the 20th century’s most successful conservative politician.
Like me. I’m no Reagan fan; I’d say the policies put in place by the so-called Father of Modern American Conservatism set the stage for today’s economic distress and dysfunctional politics. In fact, changes in tax policy during Reagan’s presidency in the 1980s increased poverty and worsened income inequality – that is, the rich got richer while the middle class and the poor got poorer. That’s according to research from the 1990s that was funded in part by the National Institutes of Health – one of the health agencies that the current regime in Washington is gutting.
Which brings me to what’s really my point today, captured in that notion advanced by the new Governor Reagan: “Freedom is a fragile thing, and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction.”
And here we are: witnesses in this generation to the demise of American freedom as we have known it. Reagan, the Cold Warrior, was talking about threats from abroad, from the sort of tyrants who the current president obviously admires. But today, our freedom is at risk because of erosion from within.
Consider what the second presidency of Donald Trump already has brought us:
- Freedom of thought and expression on college campuses is at risk. What university will next face a cutoff of federal funds based on some flimsy excuse from Washington about what’s being taught?
- Freedom of movement is no longer assured for even legal immigrants, as foreign students are snatched off the streets in broad daylight, apparently because they wrote articles in campus newspapers disagreeing with Trump’s policies.
- Women’s freedom to control their bodies has been restricted. Some states are even reaching beyond their borders to try to arrest doctors who performed legal abortions on those states’ residents.
- Freedom from diseases that had been all but eradicated is imperiled by the installation of an anti-science wacko – I think that’s the proper term – at the helm of the federal health bureaucracy.
- The freedom of our public schools to teach some of the complexities of American history is being restricted by the MAGA thought police.
- And the freedom to be who you are, if you are LGBTQ+, is being curtailed. Trans people are being told, essentially, that they don’t really even exist.
This is not a conservative government, not a limited government, of the sort that Ronald Reagan imagined. This loss of freedom is happening in service of authoritarianism. And it’s not happening only because the White House has fallen into the hands of a toxic narcissist; no, it is being fully embraced by the Republican majority in Congress.
Back in 1967, after Ronald Reagan delivered that line about the threat to freedom, he read a quotation that he said was from 1748: “The deterioration of every government begins with the decay of the principle upon which it was founded.” Those words came from Baron Montesquieu, a French judge and political philosopher, who came up with the theory of the separation of powers. That principle of Montesquieu’s tremendously influenced the framers of our Constitution; they agreed that the integrity of government could be maintained only by separating its powers – law-making, adjudication, execution. So we have three independent branches of government: the Congress, the presidency and the courts.
But in these opening months of the 47th presidency, the Republican-run Congress has ceded its power to the president. And the right-wing ideologues from Silicon Valley who are shaping the Trump White House approach to government – people you may not have heard of, like Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land – are people who quite directly say that America needs a sort of CEO, which in the context of government is a dictator. American democracy, they say, is a failed experiment.
I think we need to prove them wrong. We need to resist the eager dismantling of government by the Trump-Musk regime, which is in service of that anti-democratic ideology; we must insist that our representatives in Congress actually do their job, and exercise oversight that the executive branch really needs. We must support those who are trying to assert the rule of law in the face of a regime that is contemptuous of courts, which says judges who rule against the president should be impeached and that government should penalize law firms that challenge his interpretation of the law.
Ronald Reagan was right: “Freedom is a fragile thing.” In the face of that fragility, we all need to do our part to strengthen freedom – by insisting on the principles that ensure it, and standing with those who are trying to protect it.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.