Kamala Harris’ freedom flip-flop

Kamala Harris’ most consistent political trait may be a lack of consistency. Over the course of her long career, first in California and then in Washington, D.C., the Democrats’ 2024 presidential nominee has been plagued by plausible allegations that she’s hard to pin down and lacks a stable ideological core. She’s a flip-flopper—or, if you want to be charitable, she evolves quickly.

Over the summer, Harris’ evolutions kept on coming, with her campaign issuing rapid-fire disavowals of many of her previous positions. Because she ran her failed 2020 presidential primary bid on an ultraprogressive, big-government platform, many of her new positions are noticeably more oriented toward the mainstream—and freedom.

Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, have even embraced “freedom” as a central theme of their 2024 campaign. The word is emblazoned all over their rally sites. Lyrics about freedom pulsed over and over again between speeches at the Democratic National Convention (DNC). But what do Democrats mean by “freedom”? At best, it’s an inconsistent vision. At worst, it’s an attempt at radically redefining what American freedom means.

Flip-Flop Season

Harris was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2016 and first threw her hat into the presidential ring in 2019. In both roles, she positioned herself to the left of your average Democrat. For instance, she was one of just over a dozen co-sponsors of a Senate resolution in support of the “Green New Deal,” whose planks included “providing higher education, high-quality health care, and affordable, safe, and adequate housing to all.” Harris also co-sponsored and promoted the College for All Act, a plan from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) for government-funded college tuition, and twice signed on (in 2017 and 2019) to Sanders’ Medicare for All plans, which would have essentially ended private insurance in favor of socialized medicine.

Harris’ positions on some matters, especially health care policy, moved around a lot. Asked on the Democrats’ presidential debate stage in June 2019 who would eliminate private insurance, Harris raised her hand. On MSNBC’s Morning Joe the next day, she said she would not do that. The plan she eventually introduced was something of an everything-to-everyone scheme, allowing private insurance to coexist alongside a Medicare-for-anyone-who-wants-it option of questionable feasibility.

Then-Atlantic writer Edward-Isaac Dovere called her campaign strategy in 2019 “don’t pick a lane.” But authoritarianism in service of left-leaning goals was kind of Harris’ thing, even if she sometimes shifted on the particulars.

Yet in recent years, and especially since picking up the nomination for president, Harris has been flip-flopping toward freedom—at least on some issues. Since 2018, she has embraced marijuana legalization. More recently, Harris has changed her tune on fracking, single-payer health care, Supreme Court expansion, a mandatory gun buyback, and a federal jobs guarantee.

With each new flip-flop, Harris has been embracing more moderate and mainstream positions—and in most cases, this has led her in a less authoritarian direction. In 2019, Harris called it “a good idea” to force owners of semiautomatic rifles to sell them to the government. In August, a Harris spokesperson said she would not push a mandatory buyback program as president.

While running for president last time, Harris said there was “no question” that she was in “in favor of banning fracking,” an oil and gas extraction method that has helped lower natural gas prices and reduced reliance on coal but troubled environmentalists over concerns about potential ill effects. In July, Harris’ campaign told The Hill that a President Harris would not seek a ban on fracking.

As part of the Green New Deal Harris supported, the federal government would have “guarantee[d] a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the United States.” The Harris ’24 campaign has since said she does not support a federal job guarantee.

During her previous presidential bid, Harris said she was open to expanding the Supreme Court. In July, her campaign told The Hill she does not support this proposal.

The Harris campaign also recently reiterated her rejection of Medicare for All.

While Harris has not spoken out against President Joe Biden’s tariffs, she has criticized a more extreme tariff proposal from former President Donald Trump, calling it a “national sales tax on everyday products and basic necessities that we import from other countries.” Meanwhile, she’s embraced Trump’s plan not to tax tipped wages.

Whether these recent positions can be trusted to last is far from clear. If she flipped this easily toward freedom, she’s just as likely to flop back once she holds power—presidents rarely become more libertarian once they are in office.

But insofar as Harris is trying now to define herself for a new era on the national stage, at least some of what she says should have sticking power. And in this new era, we’re seeing a better Harris than we saw in some past iterations.

A Law-and-Order Progressive?

In these past iterations, Harris often talked big about being a progressive prosecutor while walking in a different direction—going to bat for officials accused of misconduct, for instance, or opposing marijuana legalization schemes.

During this period, her flip-flops were often away from meaningful criminal justice reform or accountability.

As district attorney (D.A.) in San Francisco, she opposed the death penalty. As attorney general of California, she favored the death penalty by fighting against a state court ruling it unconstitutional.

When she became D.A., she said she would only use California’s three strikes policy “when the third strike is a serious or violent felony.” In office, she pushed for it to be applied to someone whose third offense was simply being a felon in possession of a handgun.

Being tough on guns and alleged sex crimes are two areas where Harris has been consistent throughout her career—sometimes leading her to constitutionally dubious places. For instance, she fought to keep in place a law banning certain forms of handgun advertising and twice brought pimping charges (twice thrown out in court) against executives of classified advertising platform Backpage because it allowed sex work ads.

In this year’s election, Harris has certainly emphasized her past as a prosecutor, but mainly in broad strokes. In this version, she put away rapists, domestic abusers, and other violent offenders, but we don’t hear about her cracking down on misdemeanor offenses or threatening to jail the parents of truant children. Nor do we hear about things like ending cash bail, abolishing the death penalty, or ending mandatory minimum sentences—positions she staked in 2019, when the Democratic Party was in the midst of a criminal justice reckoning. Harris has, however, backed down on one position from back then: decriminalizing border crossings. “I would not make [illegal border crossing] punishable by jail,” Harris said in summer 2019, calling it “a civil enforcement issue, but not a criminal enforcement issue.” Her 2024 campaign told Axios that “unauthorized border crossings are illegal” and that Harris’ position was the same as that of the Biden administration.

The Freedom Candidate?

Nonetheless, Harris has gone all in on trying to position herself as the pro-freedom candidate in this election. This message has permeated her ads, her speeches, even her campaign imagery.

Harris says the words freedom and future “more than four times as often as Biden did,” according to a Washington Post analysis published August 8. In her first official campaign video, released in late July, images of Trump and his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio), flash across the screen while a Harris voice-over says, “There are some people who think we should be a country of chaos, of fear, of hate. But us? We choose something different. We choose freedom.” The ad features the Beyoncé song “Freedom,” which Harris has also been using at campaign events.

At a campaign event in Michigan in August, Harris said people should be able to make personal decisions without “their government telling them what to do.” Walz echoed this theme at an event in Arizona, saying, “I don’t need you telling me what books to read. I don’t need you telling me about what religion we worship. And I sure the heck don’t need you to tell me about my family.”

At a major Milwaukee rally in August, Harris and Walz took the stage backdropped by the word freedom repeated over and over in big, blue, all-caps block letters.

And DNC messaging was positively saturated with the word. On the final night, Harris spoke of letting Americans “make their own decisions about their own lives,” pledging to protect reproductive freedom, the freedom to vote, and the freedom to “love who you love openly, with pride.”

From a freedom perspective, Democrats have historically been much better than Republicans on issues surrounding romance, sexuality, and reproduction, so leaning into these issues now is in part a continuum of longstanding commitments and strategies. But it hits especially hard in an election where abortion is a central issue on voters’ minds, cultural backlash to LGBTQ acceptance is hot, and the GOP’s vice presidential candidate is getting dogged for trashing people without children.

Democrats’ message has been clear: Republicans are “weird” creeps who want to pry into all Americans’ personal decisions, while Democrats want to let you be who you are, love who you love, and decide for yourself whether and when to have kids. They want you to be free to vote in elections that won’t end up in rioting and years of lies and tantrums. It’s an appealing idea, and it does strike at (some of the remaining few) fundamental differences between the two major parties.

It’s “an aggressive new effort to challenge Republican claims to the language and symbolism of liberty,” noted New York Times writer Katie Glueck. “Using traditionally right-leaning words and phrasing, they are portraying themselves as the true champions of universal American values, and their conservative rivals as proponents of deeply intrusive policies that threaten fundamental freedoms.”

The Republican Party has long been selective on what freedoms it embraces, but lately it seems to be turning even further away from anything resembling liberty. Vance rejects basic principles of free speech and free markets while embracing economic policies traditionally reserved for the left. Conservative-led states have been bullish on censoring online speech, controlling what can appear in local libraries, and dictating what can be taught at any educational institution. Many in the party have gone from saying abortion should be a state issue to calling for a nationwide ban, while also threatening other American freedoms (like the right to travel out of state) in attempts to thwart people getting around state abortion bans. And under Trump, the party has turned broadly hostile toward immigration and suspicious of the electoral process.

Republicans are, indeed, “proponents of deeply intrusive policies that threaten fundamental freedoms,” as Glueck put it. But so are Democrats. And one only needs to tune in closely to their recent freedom rhetoric to recognize this.

Freedom Is Just Another Word

At the DNC, Hillary Clinton spoke of “the freedom to make our own decisions about our health” and the freedom “to worship as we choose or not,” along with “the freedom to work with dignity and prosper” and to live free from “fear and intimidation, from violence and injustice, from chaos and corruption.” Walz spoke of protecting “your kids’ freedom to go to school without worrying about being shot.” Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear spoke about the freedom to decide whether to pursue in vitro fertilization or whether to have children at all.

Herein lies the paradox of Democrats’ freedom rhetoric. Some of it embraces negative liberty, a freedom from other people—especially the state—using force to compel or prevent people from taking some action. But much of it centers on good things that people allegedly havea right to enjoy or access, or bad things that they allegedly have a right to avoid.

In Harris’ first campaign ad, she speaks of “the freedom not just to get by, but get ahead,” “freedom to be safe from gun violence,” and “freedom to make decisions about your own body.” Only one of these three things—the bodily autonomy plank—is plausibly a call to get the government out of “telling [people] what to do.”

For Harris, freedom from gun violence doesn’t simply refer to a world in which shooting someone is illegal. It’s shorthand for a whole host of Harris-endorsed gun control policies—including a ban on selling semiautomatic rifles, regulation of 3D-printed guns, and more rules around who can (and can’t) buy guns and how they can do so. The “freedom to be safe from gun violence” takes the individual right guaranteed by the Second Amendment and turns it on its face, using “freedom” to justify a whole range of regulations.

“The right to be safe is a civil right,” Harris said in June. But the federal government cannot guarantee everyone’s individual safety any more than it can guarantee individual happiness, or marital satisfaction, or ponies. Authorities can make basic rules to help protect life and property, but these already exist and any further insistence on guaranteeing “safety” is generally a coded call for policies that infringe on privacy and freedom. (Think warrantless spying on electronic communications, stop-and-frisk policies, COVID-19 curfews, or militarized police, to name just a few examples.) Once you make it the government’s mission to ensure all forms of safety, there’s basically no limit on what the government can do.

There’s a similar boundlessness to a “right not just to get by, but get ahead.” From a negative liberty viewpoint, we already have this right. There is no law mandating we all merely “get by,” and no law making it illegal to “get ahead.”

There are government policies that make getting ahead more difficult—things like high taxes, occupational licensing, and endless layers of bureaucracy. And there are policies that make even getting by difficult—such as regulations that keep housing prices high and excessive spending that drives inflation higher. A campaign to unshackle people from such burdens would be a true freedom campaign. But Harris hasn’t followed her right-to-get-ahead rhetoric with concerns of this sort. Rather, she has emphasized “a future where every worker has the freedom to join a union” and “where every person has affordable health care, affordable child care, and paid family leave.”

Once again, we see things framed not as freedom from force or coercion but as freedom to have or do certain things. Freedom is a collection of positive rights, to be provided by the government.

The problem with positive liberty is that securing it tends to infringe on liberty in other areas. Securing “free” birth control coverage, for instance, means foisting this cost onto health insurance plans and employers who sponsor them. “Free” child care means either literally conscripting child care workers into slave labor or—obviously more likely—forcing other people to hand over money (in the form of paying taxes) to cover the costs of child care for others. And so on.

This sort of “freedom” also comes with a hefty price tag. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has estimated that the Harris-Walz “Agenda to Lower Costs for American Families”—a small portion of their economic agenda—would increase the U.S. deficit by $1.7 trillion over a decade.

The DNC was full of freedom “phrased as delineations of public authority,” as Matt Taibbi put it in an August newsletter. “A lot of these freedoms are either new assertions of authority or efforts to overturn a longstanding emphasis on natural rights.”

Irreconcilable Attitudes

Isaiah Berlin explored the freedom from/freedom to distinction in his famous 1958 essay “Two Concepts of Liberty.” Berlin suggested that “those who believe in liberty in the ‘positive’ —self-directive—sense” do not “want to curb authority as such” but “want it placed in their own hands.”

The concepts of positive and negative liberty “are not two different interpretations of a single concept, but two profoundly divergent and irreconcilable attitudes to the ends of life,” Berlin wrote.

In the end, the Harris-Walz conception of freedom isn’t broadly compatible with freedom from excessive government interference in our lives, our schools, our businesses, our shopping carts, or anything else. You can find further evidence by looking at what policies the Harris campaign has been pushing.

The most worrying is what could be read as a call to institute federal price controls on groceries. In an August statement, the campaign pledged to help pass “the first-ever federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries—setting clear rules of the road to make clear that big corporations can’t unfairly exploit consumers to run up excessive corporate profits on food and groceries.” Vague words are doing a lot of work here. Who decides what is an “excessive” profit? How does one determine if a price increase is a reasonable response to market conditions or a way to “unfairly exploit consumers”? It’s possible the plan would be essentially toothless. But it’s also possible that Harris wants to start letting the federal government decide what grocers can charge, which is a recipe for creating shortages, lessening competition, and generally making prices worse in the long run.

The price-gouging plan continues a Biden-era theme of pretending that any economic ill can be blamed on greedy rich people. Biden has spent his presidency railing against “corporate greed,” “junk fees,” and “a lack of adequate competition” in the tech, health care, and telecommunications sectors while siccing the Federal Trade Commission on businesses that Democrats have decided are too big or too powerful.

As populist messaging goes, it might work. But as an actual economic strategy, it hovers somewhere between dumb, disingenuous, and dangerous. Alas, Harris and Walz seem intent on following the Biden blueprint.

In the Harris-Walz Agenda to Lower Costs for American Families, released the week before the convention in August, the pair pinned rising food, medicine, and housing costs on businesses engaging in deliberately anticompetitive practices.

A lot of economic promises coming out of the campaign have—as with Biden’s before them—revolved around stopping business behavior that reaches the threshold of illegality. If big companies are violating existing antitrust laws, we’ll go after them. If they’re doing illegal collusion, we’ll go after them. Harris and Walz have also pledged to push new legislation to make a wider swath of conduct illegal, including a law stopping corporate landlords from using big data to collude to “jack up rents” and the aforementioned ban on “price gouging on food and groceries.” The underlying principle in all of this: If they’re acting in dastardly ways, we’ll stop them, and then prices will fall.

The problem is that the mustache-twirling corporate villain theory of pricing is largely a fiction. Grocery prices rose because of things like pandemic-induced supply chain disruptions, rising wages for grocery store workers, and massive amounts of pandemic-era government spending; they’ve been falling recently not because corporations magically got less “greedy” but because the fallout from pandemic-related problems has started to subside. Rents are rising because we don’t have enough housing stock. And so on.

There are surely some bad actors out there who can be taken to task. But the idea that the government can cut prices across the board simply by enforcing (new or existing) antitrust laws is a ruse—a sleight of hand that sounds tough but amounts to nothing for your average American because it misdiagnoses the cause of those high prices.

It’s effectively “junk” populism, promising a radical transformation and delivering (at best) nothing or a few impotent, surface-level changes (like how Biden’s big war on “junk fees” boiled down to a change in the way cable bills are presented).

But the alternative to this useless populist posturing is even worse, because more government intervention in the marketplace threatens to drive up prices even higher, by driving up the cost of business, stifling innovation, preventing mergers that could lead to economies of scale, interfering with regular market signals, and things like that.

Either way, it’s an agenda completely at odds with “freedom,” of which economic freedom is every bit as vital as freedom in other realms.

A War of Words

Maybe, at her core, Harris is just a run-of-the-mill Democrat. She has sometimes misread the room—as in 2019, when she leaned a bit too hard into the party’s more progressive ideas. But she has never strayed too far outside the bounds of whatever moment the party is in.

Right now, that means backing off some Sanders-style democratic socialist policy prescriptions, while still flirting with what sounds like government price controls on groceries. Protecting the right to obtain an abortion but not the right to own certain rifles. Opposing the worst of “weird” Republican overreach while insisting on new types of Democrat-approved overreach.

Harris says she is for “freedom,” and that’s not entirely a lie—in many arenas, Democrats do encourage more personal freedom than their Republican counterparts do. But she’s also apt to slug social welfare spending, corporate regulation, and basically any other Democratic policy prescriptive into the definition of freedom—to seamlessly move back and forth between freedom from and freedom to.

In mixing up these diametrically opposed versions of freedom, the Harris-Walz campaign isn’t just “reclaiming” freedom from Republicans. It’s subtly trying to redefine freedom as Americans typically understand it—to cast it not as an absence of government intrusion but as more government intrusion, so long as this intrusion is done in the service of some goal that Harris and her fellow Democrats deem worthy.

Democrats’ new emphasis on freedom may initially seem like a welcome development—a return to the time when the party was better on civil liberties, at least, and perhaps even a signal that it’s prepared to loosen up a little in other realms too. But by somehow making freedom just another word for big government, the Harris-Walz rhetoric could actually do a lot of damage in the long run, completing the work Republicans have already been undertaking to muddy concepts like liberty and freedom beyond all recognition.