Mike Pelchat of Webster is a retired pharmacist and current history student.

Freedom and liberty are two very important words in the American lexicon. They are engraved in our national consciousness and figure prominently in our trinity of founding documents. They have also served to form the basis of powerful ideologies which have shaped domestic policy in the United States since its founding.

At their best, these ideologies served to inspire. In the mid-18th century, they inspired Americans to take on the most powerful empire in the world and form a nation based on natural rights and liberty, the “woke” ideas of their time.

In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson put forth these natural rights as the basic principles upon which to form a new nation. Jefferson envisioned an “Empire of Liberty” spreading across North America and Europe, an empire based on his concept of liberty; “the unobstructed action according to our own will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others.”

His definition, though, excluded a whole race of people, a disconnect that would persist well into the next century. In the mid-19th century, a relatively unknown Illinois pelican and the infant Republican Party would take Jefferson’s ideology of freedom and liberty and take it one step further. Abraham Lincoln’s perspective on freedom and liberty was an inclusive one.

He saw the liberty promised in the Declaration as including all men, Black and white. Freedom and liberty, according to Lincoln, meant that all men should be free to improve their situation, that “each man is naturally entitled to do as he pleases with himself and the fruits of his labor” and that government existed to create the conditions necessary to protect that freedom.

At its worst though, freedom and liberty can be used to create a restrictive and destructive ideology. Until the Civil War, freedom and liberty for white Southerners required the enslavement of tens of thousands of Black Africans. For most white people in the South, the Declaration’s promise of liberty only applied to them and they created a society and economy built on the forced labor of slaves. Their idea of freedom and liberty ultimately ripped a nation apart and brought about four years of bloody conflict.

Where is the disconnect? How can ideologies based on the same concepts take us in two different directions? To explain, we need to consider another of Jefferson’s self-evident truths and founding principles: equality. Adding equality to the equation allows freedom-based ideologies to lead to a positive and inclusive path.

Remove it and we have a situation such as now in the United States where personal freedom and individual liberty have run amuck. A situation where the concept of the common good or sense of community is cast aside in favor of a warped interpretation of “live free or die.”

In her book on the Declaration, political theorist and professor of government, Danielle Allen maintains that freedom and equality are in lockstep, that total freedom requires total equality. If one reads the Declaration, really reads it, you find Jefferson’s self-evident truths are really one single thought.

Equality, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are linked. It is an all-or-nothing proposition. You have to have them all or you have none. You cannot have a situation where promoting freedom and liberty for one favored group requires denying it to another. When that happens, none of us are truly free.

Writing in Boston in 1747, Samuel Adams expressed some of his observations on liberty. Though he was writing for Boston in the mid-18th century, he could very well have been writing about contemporary America. There was nothing, Adams wrote, which men would fight more passionately for or fear losing more than liberty. The word liberty, Adams wrote, “emitted a charming sound.”

Yet, Adams felt that the people of Boston, much like Americans today, admired liberty more than they understood it. Adams noted, “men happily extolled it when they meant nothing by it save their own well-being. They unfurled tributes when they intended only to oppress without control or restraint of laws all who are poorer or weaker than themselves.”

This is where we find ourselves today. The words freedom and liberty are very much in vogue. Politicians use them in almost every sentence. Special interest groups take pains to include them in their group names. They are used to convey to the world the impression that the speaker or group represents patriotic Americans everywhere and that they are the true inheritors of the founding generation and that to oppose what they say or do is somehow un-American.

But, they are just words, words meant to impress or mislead, nothing more. Groups like the Freedom Caucus or Moms for Liberty no more represent Jefferson’s or Lincoln’s idea of freedom or liberty than did the Ku Klux Klan. Their idea of freedom or liberty is the dark, restrictive version where individual liberty is supreme, disconnected from equality or any sense of community.

Their version is only bestowed on those who look like them or think like them and those who oppose them are somehow unworthy of the freedom promised to all Americans. Their version rationalizes the denial of rights and liberties of one group as simply protecting the rights of liberties of another.

In the 1964 presidential campaign, Republican nominee, Barry Goldwater told the nation that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” He got it both right and wrong.

Throughout our history, Americans have made great sacrifices in the defense of freedom. When defending the expansive, inclusive version of liberty, he got it right, no sacrifice is too great.

However, when defending liberty detached from equality, devoid of any sense of community, the liberty of live free or die and every man for himself, he got it wrong.

Extremism in the defense of that version of liberty is a vice. Defending liberty for some by depriving it from others is ultimately destructive to liberty. As Lincoln once said, the best defense for liberty is the “spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men.”

Destroy this spirit, he said, and we have sown the seeds for liberty’s destruction.

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