WORLD'S SHORTEST POLITICAL QUIZ

Guess where you can read the following political history:

You know, it is a word that originally meant that you were for freedom, that you were for the freedom to achieve, that you were willing to stand against big power and on behalf of the individual. Unfortunately, in the last 30, 40 years, it has been turned up on its head and it's been made to seem as though it is a word that describes big government, totally contrary to what its meaning was in the 19th and early 20th century.

Is it the pages of Reason Magazine? The declaration of some self-described "classicaly liberal" professor? Nope. Those words were spoken at last night's Democratic Debate by the party's frontrunner. This is what people mean when they complain about the Clintons' much-vaunted triangulation - although this particular argument is really worse than triangulation, in that rather than positioning herself between two bad boogeymen of the hard left and hard right, she's just defining her politics against left-wing "big government" (didn't her husband already declare it over?). And she's defining "individual freedom" against "big government" too. It's not a mystery why she would do this. Conservatives have done an impressive job of convincing people over the past decades that more government means less freedom. That's how they've peddled their attacks on the majority's ability to legislate against plutocracy. It's how they've pushed forward an agenda that leaves Americans less free - prisoners of fear of disaster, dislocation, and disintegration of their communities and their hopes for their families. Democrats have not done a great job over the past few decades of framing the debate in a way that elevates freedom from want and freedom from fear and challenges the idea that we are more economically free if your boss can fire you for being gay or fighting for more money. Right-wing frames are powerful. That means contemporary candidates need to either co-opt them or challenge them. Which choice they make is telling.