‘Freedom’ on the Road to Ruin: An Australian Apology to America’s Freedom-Loving Hard Right

Contemporary America faces dep-seated problems ‒ not least because so many Americans have lost respect for their own electoral system and democratic institutions. America suffers too from unrelenting right-wing hyperbole in respect of significant social issues, including their conviction that only they understand, and value, freedom. Because of Australia’s restrictive responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis – a potential Presidential candidate - denigrates Australia as ‘not a free country; not a free country at all’. Australians may dismiss Governor DeSantis’s comments as laughable, but a chorus of hard right comments in support of his view invites a comparison of the different ways in which ‘freedom’ is understood in Republican America and in Australia. One consequence of DeSantis’s conception of ‘freedom’ is the extraordinary American death rate from the Covid-19 pandemic, which in the case of Florida – which DeSantis celebrates as the ‘freeest State’ – stood at about 48 times the Australian rate when he scorned Australia as indistinguishable from communist China. The roots of America’s present malaise are to be found in the evolving (mis)understandings of a set of keywords including ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’, ‘tyranny’, ‘individualism’, and ‘society’. The understanding of these keywords has now been impoverished by the radical right, and the Australian pandemic response was in fact designed to give freedom from the ‘freedom’ that the Republican right now eulogises. This paper therefore aspires to show that economic philosophy needs to be apprehended not only in terms of theoretical discourse, but also in terms of the ways in which its practical consequences are currently being manifested.