Take a moment to appreciate the pillars of your daily life: casting a vote regardless of your gender or race, the guaranteed respite of a weekend, breathing air that won’t make you sick, or publicly criticizing your government without a knock on the door. It is comforting to believe these are America’s innate, natural blessings, bestowed by visionary founders and nurtured by a steady, inevitable march toward progress. That is a fantasy. These freedoms were not gifts from the enlightened benevolence of the powerful; they were prizes wrested from their grip through decades of bitter struggle, protest, and bloodshed. They are not the natural state of America, but the hard-earned scars from a perpetual war against its default settings.
And if you trace the bloody, contentious lineage of every one of these liberties, you will find yourself standing not with the sober defenders of tradition, but with the troublemakers. You will find the liberals, the progressives, and the radicals—the people their contemporaries dismissed as dangerous, un-American, and naive. History, in its sanitized version, sandblasts their edges, transforming them into noble statues. In reality, they were insufferable agitators, the inconvenient conscience of a nation forever trying to settle for a comfortable hypocrisy.
It was the classical liberals of the Enlightenment, not the loyalists craving stability under a crown, who gifted us the radical, destabilizing concept of inalienable rights enshrined in the Bill of Rights. It was the abolitionists, a fringe movement branded as fanatics and a menace to the Union, who fought to end the barbarism of slavery, an institution a conservative South not only defended but fought a devastating war to preserve, cloaking their defense of human property in the language of tradition and economic necessity. It was the suffragists, ridiculed, jailed, and force-fed for their "unwomanly" demands, who secured the vote for half the population. It was labor unions and progressive reformers, denounced as socialists and anarchists, who literally fought in the streets with fists and strikes for the weekend, the end of child labor, and the very concept that a worker should not be disposable. The forty-hour workweek is not a corporate perk; it is a battlefield memorial.
Arrayed against them, at every single step, was the formidable, predictable force of conservatism. Their arguments are a tired, broken record playing across the centuries, a masterclass in defending hierarchy by dressing it up in principle: it will ruin the economy (the defense of slavery); it violates states' rights (the defense of segregation and Jim Crow); it is government overreach (the defense of polluting industries and unsafe workplaces); it destroys the traditional family (the defense of denying rights to women, LGBTQ+ people, and interracial couples). Their political genius lies in their relentless ability to frame the defense of their own power and privilege as a principled, almost patriotic, stand for "liberty," all while opposing the actual, tangible expansion of liberty to more people. It is a philosophy of "order" that consistently chooses the order of the powerful over the justice for the powerless.
So the next time you enjoy a fundamental right, do not thank a patrician founding father who owned other human beings or a benevolent corporation that would reinstate child labor if it were profitable. Thank a radical. Thank a protestor. Thank a liberal who was called every name in the book for having the audacity to believe America could be better than it was.
The uncomfortable, undeniable truth is that the conservative movement has historically been a primary antagonist in the story of expanding American freedom, while it is liberalism that has been the engine. The grand, tragic irony of modern politics is that so many now comfortably enjoy these hard-won liberties, secured by the relentless pressure of the left, while simultaneously vilifying the very tradition of thought that made them possible. It is the ultimate act of historical illiteracy, biting the hand that freed you, all while singing hymns to the jailers it defeated.
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