Why Republicans Talk About Freedom and Democrats Don’t

Freedom, as a rhetorical tool and a slogan, is politically advantageous. Since FDR presented the “Four Freedoms” in 1941, our political leaders have uttered the word a lot. That’s not a conclusion influenced by recency bias, either.  Text analysis  from two American scholars shows freedom is more rhetorically popular than ever. Below is a graphical representation of how often our presidents have employed the term: You can see that after a hundred or so years of middling usage, the word’s popularity surged with US presidents in the 20th century. While in the last forty years it went through some peaks and troughs, freedom has remained a prominent political term. An infographic from the analysis  highlights this really well: However, it’s clear that Obama and Clinton are bucking a modern rhetorical trend. In fact, Obama is on pace to say freedom “ less often than any president since Warren Harding ” — who served from 1921-1923. Why are Democrats not saying freedom as much? The answer is rather obvious: modern conservatives have hijacked the word freedom. (I’m certainly not claiming to be the first to notice this, I merely thought it would be interesting to compile various bits of research on the subject.) Just look at FiveThirtyEight‘s analysis on political buzzwords used in Democratic and Republican campaigns dating back to 1948 . The results are unsurprising: As the anti-government wing of the GOP has grown, so has their party’s asymmetric use of freedom. Yet their fondness for the phrase was not created in a vacuum. The word’s recent unprecedented popularity stems, in large part, from their collective reaction to Obama’s presidency. To understand why their base loves hearing “freedom,” you must empathize with how Tea Partiers are feeling. To them, Obama appears to be a revolutionary socialist, a Muslim, and a black person who wants to dramatically transform America…for the worse. He dares to “ spread the wealth ” in a time of increasing income inequality. More than that, in their minds, they’re watching a president marching towards a complete government takeover of health care. To these
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