“Freedom and Liberty For All” – What Does It Really Mean?
KSQD 90.7FM “Be Bold America!” Sunday,
June 20, 2021 at 5:00pm
“The real threat to our future is Biden and the well-heeled powerful forces who want us to lose sight of what made America great in the first place. It’s not our diversity. It’s our freedom.” – Laura Ingraham – Fox News
What is freedom, really? It is when someone says, “It’s my freedom to not get vaccinated”? Is it when, in the view of Laura Ingraham, that well-heeled forces are trying to get her to lose sight of what made America great in the first place?
What did make America great in the first place? If it isn’t our diversity that is adopted in our country’s motto, e pluribus unum (out of many, one), then what is it? Who are these “well-heeled” forces anyway and are there no “well-healed” powerful forces threatening our future from the alt-right?
Victor Frankl, psychiatrist and Nazi concentration camp survivor said that his concentration camp guards had more liberty than he, but that he had more freedom than his captors. What did he mean by this?
Have we lost the definition of freedom? Have we manipulated it to support our selfishness or political beliefs?
Interview Guest:
Thomas J. Main is a Professor at the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs of Baruch College, CUNY. He is author of The Rise of Illiberalism (Brookings, forthcoming Fall 2021), The Rise of the Alt-Right, (Brookings 2018) and Homelessness in New York City: Policymaking from Koch to de Blasio (NYU Press 2016). His research interests are: liberal democracy and its challenges, bureaucracy and public administration, urban politics, homelessness, and the American Constitution and founding. Prof. Main holds a Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University, a two-year MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and a BA from the University of Chicago. He is currently writing a book on welfare and workforce policy in New York City for Cornell University Press.
