During the Coronavirus, Considering 'Freedom' Here And Elsewhere - The New York Times

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My colleagues and I have been talking a lot lately about how distorted the American conversation about freedom has become — and even the American idea of freedom itself.

Take the debate about achieving both economic vitality and public health. Surely everyone wants as much of both as possible.

Yet a small but passionate and attention-snatching minority (with an assist from the White House) has managed to hijack what should be a conversation about figuring out the right balance. They’ve turned it into a cartoon, an either/or proposition in which even the suggestion that people should wear masks in public becomes a jack-booted assault on individual liberty, as my colleague Charlie Warzel wrote this week, drawing a compelling parallel to the warped debate over gun safety.

This raises a deeper question: What does it really mean to be free?

Before our office shut down and we all dispersed, one of the last editorial board meetings we held in person was with the prime minister of Finland, Sanna Marin. At 34, she’s the youngest female prime minister in the world.

She spoke about Finland’s challenges in coping with climate change, immigration and a movement of people to cities that is hollowing out rural communities. Again and again, as she talked about sustaining political consensus to confront these challenges, she returned to the importance of the sense of security Finns feel because of their strong social safety net, including free health care and university.

“It gives people freedom when you have a very strong welfare state,” she told us.

That formulation stands the American politics of freedom on its head. Franklin Roosevelt may have envisioned freedom from want, but in recent decades freedom here has come to mean freedom from taxes, freedom from regulation, freedom from having to wear a mask in public. The American left has largely conceded the rhetoric and even the idea of freedom to the right.

Told that some Americans look at Finland and fear socialism, the prime minister smiled. As neighbors of the Soviet Union, Finns had seen a socialist experiment up close and wanted no part of it. “We are an open-market society,” she said proudly.

Our columnist Nicholas Kristof, in a deeply reported exploration of the Nordic model, had the brilliant idea to look at what it’s like to work for McDonald’s in Denmark. The answer is that, even though Denmark has no minimum wage, you make about $22 an hour and get “six weeks of paid vacation a year, life insurance, a year’s paid maternity leave and a pension plan.” All that plus the Danish guarantees of medical insurance and paid sick leave.

To get a sense of what it’s like to work for McDonald’s in the United States, watch this video.

Please read Nick’s piece and consider whether, as he suggests, we might “approach the Nordic countries with a bit more curiosity and humility.”

Particularly now, during this pandemic, I think people like me who are lucky to have health care, housing and the benefits of a good education should be asking: If we’d never had any of these things, would we really consider ourselves free? It’s to confront that question that we’re conducting our project on The America We Need.

And if you want to see what a true assault on freedom looks like, please read our columnist Charles Blow on the killing of Ahmaud Arbery.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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During the Coronavirus, Considering 'Freedom' Here And Elsewhere - The New York Times
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