Opinion - Kamala Harris’s ‘Four Freedoms’

A clearer picture of Vice President Kamala Harris has come into focus over the last month.

From the Democratic National Convention, the debate with Donald Trump and now with the Unite America Rally hosted by Oprah Winfrey, Harris is drawing on what she sees as great about American history. It’s a history marked by unity, core values, dogged determination and yes, freedom.

Realizing she has little time before election day to leave a lasting impression, she’s drawing on the history of the most successful Democratic president of the modern era — Franklin Delano Roosevelt — and updating it for the present moment.

Harris’s appeals to “freedom” over the course of her campaign — the “aspirations and dreams of the people,” as she put it in the debate — or her “opportunity economy” all invoke the New Deal liberalism of FDR to attract voters concerned about traditional middle-class issues and social stability who are looking for a return of happy days.

The Harris campaign is mobilizing the rhetoric of FDR’s Four Freedoms. In the midst of the Great Depression at home and World War II abroad, FDR laid out Four Freedoms in his State of the Union Address in January 1941.

• Freedom of speech and expression.

• Freedom of worship.

• Freedom from want.

• Freedom from fear.

For many, Norman Rockwell’s famous paintings have provided the imagery for these promises. The first two freedoms — of speech and worship — were well-known rights in the Bill of Rights, and have been central to American democracy from the nation’s inception.

Freedom from want and fear were novel articulations of New Deal liberalism. They helped FDR further cement support for his Democratic coalition by connecting directly with Americans on the issues that mattered to them most.

Those living through the deprivation of the Great Depression had an acute understanding of what freedom from want meant — the ability to find work and feed their families.

Likewise, with the threat of yet another World War, Americans feared for their lives. Like FDR, they sought “the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.”

Crucially, FDR’s freedoms from want and fear implied that an active federal government would help Americans achieve economic stability and basic security, at a time when life felt precarious.

The Harris campaign has attempted to tap into the way the Four Freedoms resonated domestically and reframe that conversation in terms of present challenges. A campaign video aired at the Democratic National Convention even includes images of Depression-era mothers and D-Day, while the narrator extols “freedom from control, freedom from extremism and fear.”

Today, the Harris campaign emphasizes the continued importance of civil liberties, especially as conservatives increasingly endorse Christian nationalism at the cost of freedom of religion, and as censorship of books in school libraries has grown more popular.

Then as now, freedom from want translates to “kitchen table” issues. Harris regularly appeals directly to freedom from want as emblematic of the American Dream. She describes the importance of homeownership, small business opportunities and tax relief for the middle-class.

In the Unite for America event, Harris emphasized the need to create opportunities for homeownership, and her plan to offer down payment assistance. It was FDR’s policies that made homeownership a middle-class reality in the first place, by creating programs that federally insured mortgages and facilitated the construction of new homes.

As for freedom from fear, Harris has hammered Trump on his cozy relationships with “strongmen,” including Russian President Vladimir Putin and  North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and his well-known dislike of NATO.

In the debate, Harris warned, “It is well known that he admires dictators, wants to be a dictator on day one according to himself.” On the eve of U.S. entry into World War II, FDR warned that dictators imperiled the Four Freedoms, and “the dignity of human life.”

Despite Trump’s attempt to paint her as a Marxist, and to the dismay of the progressive left, Harris’s rendering of freedom, like FDR’s, is far from radical. It hews to traditional values while imagining future welfare. It is tied to patriotism, global democracy and conventional middle-class values.

It provides the roadmap for building a strong society by attending to grocery prices, prescription drug costs, housing availability, healthcare and family planning, educational access, global stability and safety from domestic and international extremism.

Of course, FDR’s message, and the Rockwell paintings that depicted it, spoke to an ideal American life in which white, patriarchal, nuclear families with food on the table and roofs overhead. This mythologized middle-class often excluded those who didn’t fit the archetype.

To present the promise of the four freedoms as something more inclusive, Harris regularly emphasizes the diversity of faces in her audience. She has also made an effort to share her personal connection and commitment to advancing civil rights and abortion rights.

For example, she supports the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, first introduced in 2021, and ensuring women have unfettered access to abortion and fertility treatments. Anything else, she suggested, would be “immoral.”

Still, embedded in Harris’s opportunity economy are the very same ideals that propelled the Democratic Party through the mid-20th century. Harris is attempting to attract voters by using the same ideological pitch and reminding them that FDR’s freedoms are their historical inheritance.

Giuliana Perrone is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a public voices fellow of the Op-Ed Project.

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