A lot of people in American politics make their living deriding “liberalism” as making the world “unfriendly to conservative values”. At seemingly any hour of the day or night, it is possible to hear such diatribes on AM radio or on cable networks like Fox News. It is an ancient formula: Stand for those who have power, but tell the people you are on their side by saying you want to maintain what they take to be core values, and blame a slippage in fairness and standards on those who take a “permissive” approach to their fellow human beings.

Here’s the thing: The word ‘liberal’ means ‘pro-freedom’. Liberal thinkers want individuals to enjoy more freedom; they want legal constraints on the arbitrary use of power; they want government of, by, and for the people. They also want people of a conservative mindset to have the freedom to live their lives free from political intimidation and control.

In a country like the United States, it is common for conservatives to be liberal and for liberals to be conservative, so long as we don’t treat these two terms as placeholders for differentiated structures of rigid political dogma. If you prize the Bill of Rights and the core principle that rights have primacy over power, that there are no people without rights or consequence, then you are both liberal and conservative.

• You favor the freedom of the individual and constraints on arbitrary, corrupt, and totalitarian exercise of power by office-holders, and…
• you value the foundational elements of the American democratic republic, so that order flows from the rule of law and not from the whims of impatient reformers.

These are liberal and conservative values, respectively, and this combination is possibly the most common political mindset of the American citizen. This is true both of those born in the United States and also of those who come seeking freedom and opportunity and become naturalized citizens.

The Constitution was crafted to provide the living space for such a civic culture—in which people could recognize their own rights and freedoms in the plight of others, and in which newcomers would arrive predisposed to wanting more freedom for their fellow citizens and a fair shake for themselves and their own families and communities. Read the Bill of Rights carefully, and read it again and again, and you will see the thread running through the ten Amendments is the idea that government must not be an exercise in unrestrained power, but rather a platform through which the civil society it serves can be freer and more imaginative.

Both of those words matter: Freedom and Imagination. The First Amendment is very clear that people have a right to the fullness of a life of the mind and heart that government cannot touch. Freedom is not just about the right not to be punished for having a thought or raising a point of criticism. It is also about the right to imagine beyond all accepted conventional wisdom, to invent, to suggest new institutions, to organize freely without governmental control of one’s words, meetings, and ideas.

You may find yourself tuned in to some of the impassioned pleas of self-described “conservative” commentators. Their professed fears and priorites might resonate with you. But when they tell you that “liberals” are against your freedom, they are trying to separate you from the defenders of your freedom; they are, by that rhetorical perversion, trying to take away your freedom and exert control over your mind and heart.

You cannot be a defender of freedom, if you do not have liberal sensibilities, at some level. When you demand the right to think and speak freely, to avoid being “canceled” for unpopular views, you are expressing a core liberal value. When you seek opportunity for small businesses, or organize a church picnic, funded by small-dollar untaxed donations, you are expressing core liberal values.

To emerge from this nightmarish time of suspicion and vitriol, of warrantless paramilitary “raids”, Congressional impasse, and apocalyptic accusations about the motives of “the other side”, we need to recognize that to be an engaged, productive, liberated American citizen is to be both liberal and conservative, and to have the right to define your own views, values, and aspirations, not to be defined by loud voices that demand allegiance to their one way of seeing the world.

There is no one true civic dogma. There is no one “proper ideology“. That is why the United States was created—to make it safe for ordinary people to live human lives free from any authoritarian thought control. That is why the Press and small churches, those needing redress for an injustice and those simply speaking their mind—or celebrating the 4th of July with their friends and neighbors, or drawing up plans for a new technology—are reinforcements for each other’s liberty, and part of the project of securing the blessings of liberty to future generations, as the Constitution requires us to do.

Be proud of the liberal in you; think creatively about what the conservative in you wants to defend. Don’t let anyone convince you that one should extinguish the other or that your fellow citizens are enemies to be feared. Do what you can to make our civic space an open forum for free and imaginative exercise of our humanity.