The Words We Have Allowed to Be Stolen

 The Words We Have Allowed to Be Stolen

How Freedom, Justice, Patriotism, and Socialism Were Rewritten by Power, Fear, and History

There are words we have allowed to be taken from us. Not misplaced. Not worn down naturally by the years, as a coin loses its face in a man’s pocket. Taken. Lifted from kitchen tables, courthouse steps, union halls, schoolyards, churches, hospital waiting rooms, then polished, branded, and sold back to us beneath flags, campaign lights, and the hard blue glow of the little machines we carry in our hands. Freedom. Justice. Patriotism. Security. Socialism. The people. They still arrive in the room with their old dignity, but they now come with guards around them. Say freedom and someone hears a gun, a flag, a refusal. Say socialism and another sees a gray apartment block, a bread line, a knock at the door before dawn. Say patriotism and one man hears a hymn while another hears boots on the stairs. Say justice and people begin reaching for handcuffs.

The words are still here. Their old bones remain. But history has changed the flesh around them.

The Greeks gave us one of the great early dreams of freedom, though it was not our freedom. In Athens, freedom belonged to the citizen who entered the public square, spoke, voted, judged, fought, and carried his portion of the city’s life upon his shoulders. In the funeral oration that Thucydides placed in the mouth of Pericles, Athens is praised as a place where “a spirit of freedom governs our conduct,” not only in public affairs but in the ordinary frictions of private life. It is a beautiful sentence. It is also a sentence with a wall around it. Women stood outside that freedom. Slaves stood outside it. Foreigners stood outside it. Athens could speak magnificently of liberty while the majority of human beings within reach of its streets did not possess the political standing the word promised. This is one of the oldest habits of power. A word speaks as if it belongs to everyone, while quietly keeping a gate around itself.

The Romans understood that freedom required more than an unlocked door. Their libertas was not merely the right to wander about without chains. It was protection from arbitrary mastery. A man might walk unchained through the street and still be unfree if a patron, creditor, landowner, or emperor held the power to ruin him on a whim. Cicero, writing during the Roman Republic’s long death, gave the old civic idea a moral body when he wrote, “We are not born for ourselves alone; our country, our friends, have a share in us.” Liberty was therefore not simply private escape. It had obligations. It was a condition maintained by law, shared duty, public vigilance, and a citizenry unwilling to become the property of any one man.

Then Rome became an empire, and liberty stayed on the coins.

The word remained. The ceremonies remained. The speeches remained. The condition thinned.

That is how power works when it has learned manners. It does not always burn the old word. Sometimes it places the word in a glass case. It puts liberty on a banner, strikes it into metal, repeats it during the parade, and lets the citizen admire the word while taking away the life inside it. The tyrant does not always announce himself as a tyrant. He often comes dressed as the savior of order, tradition, safety, greatness, or peace.

The Renaissance brought the old Roman words back into the Italian cities. Republic. Tyranny. Corruption. Virtue. But virtue changed its clothes. It no longer meant merely that a man was pious, gentle, clean in his habits, obedient to God. It became civic muscle. It was the ability to stand in a dangerous room, defend the city, recognize a tyrant before he had fully seated himself, and place the common life above private appetite. Machiavelli, who had no fondness for lace around the eyes, wrote that the tumults between the people and the great in Rome led not to the destruction of liberty but to “laws and institutions whereby the liberties of the public benefited.” He understood something our television age has forgotten. Conflict is not always decay. Sometimes conflict is the sound a republic makes when people who have been pushed aside insist on being counted.

Machiavelli’s virtù was not goodness in the Sunday sense. It was nerve, intelligence, force, timing, the ability to understand the weather of the world and act before the shutters began to shake. The word had moved from moral purity to worldly capacity. A man might be personally vain, cruel, or faithless and still possess political virtù. This was not an endorsement of cruelty. It was a refusal to confuse good manners with power, or piety with competence. The word changed because the city had changed around it. Florence was not Athens. It was a place of bankers, mercenaries, merchants, factions, princes, conspiracies, and restless wealth. Old language had to survive in a new storm.

Then Voltaire entered another room entirely. He had seen what church and crown could do when joined too tightly, when authority decided not merely what men must obey but what they must believe. He did not speak of tolerance as a weak tea poured for polite company. He asked, “What is tolerance?” and answered, “It is the consequence of humanity.” Then he added, “We are all formed of frailty and error.” That is a better beginning for public life than certainty. Tolerance, in his hands, became resistance to persecution, censorship, sectarian cruelty, inherited authority, and the old temptation to believe that one man has received permission from God to command the conscience of another.

Even there the word changes shape. To tolerate another person can still mean that one group has the power to permit another group to remain. I tolerate you. I grant you space. I will not crush you today. Voltaire widened the word toward something more generous and dangerous. Not merely permission, but humility. Not merely coexistence, but the recognition that human beings are fallible and that the state must not make a prison out of certainty.

Then came Marx, looking at the smoke above the factories, the children in the mills, the exhausted men walking home in the dark, the owner’s ledger, the black hands, the thin soup, the enormous wealth rising above the streets. He changed the way people heard certain words. Class was no longer merely accent, breeding, manners, the right fork at dinner, the proper school. Class became a question of who owned the machine and who stood beside it until his back gave out. Who held the deed. Who took the profit. Who made the thing. Who was used up making it.

“The history of all hitherto existing society,” Marx and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto, “is the history of class struggles.” It is a sentence with a hammer in it. One may argue with it, qualify it, reject its total claim, but it forced people to look at the industrial world differently. Capital was no longer simply money. It was money turned into authority. Labor was no longer simply work. It was human life spent making the world. The factory owner’s wealth and the worker’s exhaustion were no longer separate moral stories. They were part of the same machine.

Communism came out of that smoke and argument. It is important to say this carefully because we have become lazy with the word. Marx did not first imagine a secret police officer at a door. He did not begin with prison camps, purges, gray ministries, fear, silence, and a state that entered every room of a man’s life. He imagined the end of class domination, a world in which wealth could not purchase mastery over the bodies and labor of others.

Then history poured blood into the word.

Lenin. Stalin. The camps. The purges. The vanished neighbor. The empty chair at the table. The letter that stopped coming. The fear of speaking too loudly in one’s own kitchen. Those dead were not abstractions. They were men and women with children, old coats, favorite cups, bad habits, photographs folded in wallets. No decent person can wave them away because he prefers a theory. A word changes because of what is done in its name. Communism became inseparable, in the memories of millions, from authoritarian rule, political repression, forced conformity, and the machinery of fear.

But America then performed its own theft. Communism became a bucket into which everything inconvenient could be thrown. Unions. Public schools. Civil rights. Health care. Social insurance. Progressive taxation. Any effort to say that wealth carries obligations. Any suggestion that a country might owe its citizens more than a flag, a sermon, and an invoice. The crimes of totalitarian states became a club, and the club was swung at every question about whether a sick child should see a doctor, whether an old woman should keep her home, whether a worker should have enough strength to bargain with the corporation that owns the town.

The distinctions vanished.

A democracy that provides health care is not a prison camp. A public school is not the Gulag. A regulated market is not a state that owns the soul. A worker asking for dignity is not a conspiracy. A country that believes a child should not go untreated because his father lost a job is not on the road to tyranny. The refusal to make distinctions is not seriousness. It is the beginning of propaganda.

Freedom has suffered the same narrowing. Once it meant civic standing. It meant protection from arbitrary power. It meant the right to speak, worship, vote, print, gather, argue, and resist a king. Now it is too often offered as the right to be left alone when you are drowning.

You can see this version of freedom at a kitchen table at eleven o’clock at night. One yellow bulb over the stove. The refrigerator humming. A woman in her robe, bills spread before her. Insurance. Mortgage. Credit card. The emergency-room bill. A letter from a college full of congratulations and numbers that may as well be written in another language. Her husband lost his job three weeks ago. The factory did not close with a trumpet. No villain appeared in a black cape. A man came out with a clipboard. A woman from human resources stood beside him. They spoke of restructuring, efficiency, market pressure, regrettable decisions. By Friday afternoon, the parking lot was empty.

Men carried lunch boxes to their trucks. Some stood in small knots, smoking cigarettes they had promised their wives they had quit.

The woman at the kitchen table is told she is free. Free to compare insurance plans. Free to sell the house. Free to work nights at the drugstore. Free to decide whether the prescription gets filled this month or whether the furnace gets repaired before winter.

That is abandonment wearing a clean shirt and using the language of choice.

A man who is one illness from bankruptcy is free only in the thin legal sense. A young woman may be free to start a bakery, write a novel, go to medical school, begin a business in her garage, take a chance on one of those beautiful foolish ideas that make a life worth living. But she is not entirely free if one broken bone can pull the floor from beneath her family. Economic security is not the enemy of liberty. It is one of the floors beneath liberty.

Without that floor, freedom becomes a high wire stretched over a canyon. A few cross it beautifully. We applaud them. But a country cannot be built on the belief that everyone who falls deserves the rocks below.

This is where the media comes into the room. The press did not steal all these words. But too often it has helped carry the thief’s bags. Not because every journalist is wicked. Most are not. Many are tired, underpaid, rushed, frightened of losing work, pushed toward the sharp headline, the short clip, the little explosion of outrage that travels faster than a sentence of thought. They work in an age that has confused attention with wisdom and noise with importance.

But the press cannot become an auction house for anger.

Its task is not to repeat the language of power. Its task is to look underneath it. When a politician says freedom, the reporter should ask: freedom for whom, and from what? When a corporation says efficiency, the reporter should ask how many people lose their jobs, pensions, health insurance, or homes. When a governor says law and order, the reporter should ask whose law, whose order, and what becomes of the poor man who cannot afford a lawyer. When a candidate says the people, the reporter should look around the room and ask who has disappeared from the story.

The nurse working through the night. The mechanic with grease beneath his fingernails and pain in his knees. The mother who cannot find child care. The old man eating canned soup because the prescription cost more than he expected. The young woman with two jobs and no time left to read the speech in which someone claimed to speak for her.

A word is not evidence. A word is often the place where evidence has been hidden.

We have allowed political language to become a magician’s tablecloth. The hand gestures toward a flag, a Bible, a border, a factory, a police car, a frightened child. While we watch the hand, the real object disappears. Who paid for the policy? Who profited? Who lost? Who was not invited into the room? What does this promise look like at a kitchen table after midnight?

That is where every great political word should be carried and tested.

Does freedom survive there? Does prosperity? Does family values? Does law and order? Does national greatness?

A word that cannot survive the kitchen table is not a public principle. It is advertising.

The media too often speaks about the country as though it were weather. The economy is strong. Inflation is cooling. Housing is tight. Jobs are added. The market is nervous. But an economy is not weather. It does not blow in from the sea. It is made by decisions. Tax laws are decisions. Wage laws are decisions. Hospital prices are decisions. School budgets are decisions. Trade agreements are decisions. A factory closing may be the final act in a long chain of decisions made by men with names, offices, bonuses, lawyers, and private parking spaces.

The language of abstraction is often the language of escape. When a company says it is restructuring, ask who is being restructured out of a life. When a hospital says it is controlling costs, ask whether the patient gets the medicine. When a city says it is revitalizing a neighborhood, ask whether the people who lived there can still afford to remain. When a government says it is reducing waste, ask which public service disappears first, and whose life becomes harder when it does.

The language of management is not always the language of truth.

Nor should every public question be turned into a boxing match beneath hot lights. One person says a bridge is unsafe. Another says bridges have always been unsafe. A third says the real problem is people complaining about bridges. The moderator smiles, thanks the panel, and moves on.

Meanwhile, the bridge is still cracked.

False balance is not fairness. Fairness is allowing facts to weigh what they weigh.

There is another old trick in the political box. Find someone smaller and point at him. A politician who cannot repair a hospital will blame an immigrant. A corporation that has gutted a town will speak of personal responsibility. A leader who fears scrutiny will call journalists enemies. A movement with no plan for wages, housing, schools, health care, or dignity will find a scapegoat and point.

Who is asking us to hate whom?

Who benefits when the worker born here despises the worker born elsewhere? Who benefits when the poor blame the poorer? Who benefits when people are taught that compassion is weakness and cruelty is realism?

The answer is often the same. Those who have taken the most want us staring into one another’s empty pockets.

The words must be taken back. Freedom must include freedom from preventable terror. Security must mean more than walls, weapons, suspicion, and surveillance. It must mean clean water from the tap. A clinic open when a child is sick. An old man warm in winter. A family not ruined because a doctor has found something terrible on a scan.

Government is not a creature descending from the clouds with a clipboard and a frown. It is the name we give to the work we agree must be done together because no one person can do it alone. It can be clumsy. It can be corrupt. It can be arrogant, wasteful, slow, bureaucratic, and cruel. It must be watched, challenged, limited, audited, mocked, sued, and voted out.

But it is also the road crew standing ankle deep in slush at dawn. The water main beneath the street. The school bus turning the corner before daylight. The inspector with a flashlight in the basement of an old building. The public defender with cold coffee beside the telephone. The nurse who notices the old man has not eaten.

That is not tyranny.

That is civilization with a paperclip in its hand.

Patriotism must be recovered as well. Patriotism is not applause. It is not pretending the country is innocent because one loves it. It is not silence when the powerful misuse the flag. Patriotism is love with standards. It is insisting that a veteran not sleep beneath a bridge. That a child not go hungry in the richest country on earth. That a worker who has spent forty years lifting, welding, cleaning, driving, building, carrying, and making should not be tossed aside when his knees fail. That the law should have one face for the rich and the poor. That no leader should become so large that the republic must grow small around him.

Words are not decorations. They are the first walls of the republic. Before there is a prison, there is a label. Before there is a camp, there is a category. Before there is a purge, there is a phrase that makes a neighbor sound less human.

Parasite. Traitor. Vermin. Criminal. Enemy within.

Once a human being becomes a word, the grave opens more easily.

The task is not to make the country agree. A living country will never agree. Argument is one of the glories of a free people. The task is to make it possible for citizens to hear one another without first being instructed whom to fear. To return freedom to the frightened family at the kitchen table. To return justice to the victim and the accused. To return patriotism to the people who love their country enough to demand better from it. To return the word people to actual people.

The ones awake after midnight. The ones whose lives continue after the cameras leave. The ones who do not need to be made great again.

They need only to be remembered.

The historical quotations and their contexts are drawn from Thucydides’ account of Pericles’ funeral oration, Cicero’s De Officiis, Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy, Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary, and Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto. 

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Keywords:

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