> If we're only interested in protecting negative freedoms, how about we protect the Freedom From Want?

From some book reviews:

> “Freedom is not just an absence of evil,” Snyder writes, “but a presence of good.... It takes collective work to build structures of freedom, for the young as for the old.”

> In other words, we are not born free; we are born helpless. Many others are involved in making us free, including our parents, the builders of our playgrounds, our fellow citizens and the caregivers of our old age. “We need structures,” Snyder says, “just the right ones, moral as well as political. Virtue is an inseparable part of freedom.”

> He sees five “forms of freedom” that create free individuals within society. There’s sovereignty, which Snyder defines as “the learned capacity to make choices”; unpredictability, “the power to adapt physical regularities to personal purposes”; mobility, “the capacity to move through space and time following values”; factuality, “the grip on the world that allows us to change it”; and solidarity, “the recognition that freedom is for everyone.”

> So a child on the way to sovereignty becomes familiar with both their own body and a world containing other people and objects, and can imagine how to change the world. By choosing a mix of values in dealing with the world and choosing a future, the sovereign person becomes unpredictable.

* https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2024/11/14/Timothy-Snyder-Our-Pro...

> Negative views of freedom foster a zero-sum mindset, as though each of us must strive to be free from the burden of being part of a society. This fuels racism, xenophobia and misogyny as tools to keep others from getting a piece of the pie. A population so resentful of others’ progress is an easy target for leaders who promise a strict government regime to curb others’ access to education, health and safety. Even now, mass incarceration mimics an apartheid state, depriving millions of civil rights such as voting, largely along racial lines.

> Snyder takes readers through historical and contemporary examples to demonstrate how we can make progress, and are much better served, by embracing positive freedoms. A positive freedom that guarantees everyone access to affordable healthcare would give many in the middle class the liberty to pursue career opportunities without losing health benefits. The development of children’s minds in well-funded schools ensures creative and thoughtful individuals who invent new solutions that will benefit our nation’s future.

> What we see in the United States today — attacks on the governmental institutions that provide support to all and the emergence of an educational system devoted to maintaining white supremacism — robs the American people of the critical skills they need to recognize authoritarian rhetoric and to see the promise of democracy and equality.

* https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-09-13/on-freedom-...

I have not yet read the book On Freedom yet (on hold list at my library), but have read some of his other work (e.g. Bloodlands). I have listened/watched some of his book tour talks and find he makes a reasonable argument (and given his knowledge of history, he has plenty of examples to show how things have gone down in the past).