The more time I spend in and around Washington, D.C., the more I see and hear the same words over and over again: democracy, freedom, liberty. They hang from banners, echo through conference halls and punctuate politicians’ speeches. Georgetown University hosts programs (e.g., Georgetown Democracy Initiative, Free Speech Project, etc.) devoted to these words. Yet the more I hear them, the more hollow they begin to sound.
The problem isn’t that freedom, democracy or liberty don’t matter. Quite the opposite, these ideas are fundamental to political discussion. They’re what one could consider “flux” terms, having different meanings to different people and changing with the culture over time. Through dialogue, we’re able to reach a synthesis on what these terms can mean. Yet today, their meanings are increasingly reduced to buzzwords in order to serve the status quo. If we at Georgetown strive to be future leaders, we must prevent these terms from remaining hollow slogans by discussing and reimagining them as the “flux” terms they are.
Take democracy indices, for example. Each year, teams of researchers score countries on how “free” or “democratic” they are. Journalists, politicians and policymakers cite these charts and tables. Two of the most cited indices are the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index and Freedom House’s Freedom in the World report. Both these organizations assign scores based on elections, governance, political participation and related measures. Both criteria assume democracy is defined by a narrow set of civil liberties that are largely based on the system. There are many different kinds of democracy, and there are many different kinds of freedom.
However, what’s defined as “freedom” and “democracy” across these indices is methodologically uneven. There is a debate to be made on whether to emphasize civil liberties or focus on institutional design or executive constraint. These differing priorities result in the same country appearing more or less democratic depending on the index. It begs the question of if these concepts were meant to be standardized into data.
When these institutions publish their work, they often present it as empirical — as if the existing system is the only valid definition of freedom, democracy or liberty. The more we rely on these findings and forget that these are qualitative subjects, the more these concepts become operational in their function.
Freedom, for instance, is one of the most reiterated concepts in U.S. political life. A common attack between politicians is accusing someone of encroaching on your freedoms. The images of America and freedom are so intertwined that some citizens go as far as to call themselves “freedom-loving” Americans. Yet, for how much we speak of it, the concept it illustrates is strikingly one-dimensional. “Freedom” is often used as a catch-all for personal willpower: the right to consume, to own, to speak; the ability to do as we please so long as we don’t break the law or impede others. Qualitatively however, it’s a different story.
“Freedom of speech” is often construed as the freedom from consequence for undertaking a certain action on a social, cultural and legal level. In reality, the “freedom of speech” in the First Amendment only protects from government interference, not from social consequence: loss of job, suspension, social ostracization. As a concept, freedom exists not in isolation but in relation to others and the culture that contextualizes it. Even the government defines the limits of freedom in curious ways. Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, immigrants must disclose whether they’ve ever been affiliated with a communist or totalitarian party and, as of June 2025, this rule now extends to employment in any state-owned enterprise. So while we love to claim ourselves as the “land of the free,” an individual’s very eligibility to participate in “freedom” is conditional on their alignment with certain political and economic ideals. One has to wonder if this can truly be called freedom.
The same can be said for liberty. Today, liberty has become little more than a decorative word we substitute for freedom. “Liberty and justice for all” may sound nice, but if we have no real meaning for liberty, that phrase becomes a platitude. Liberty, as a concept, refers to the protections afforded to individuals from arbitrary control; it is inherently participatory, requiring connection to the systems that govern society. Civil, social and collective liberties are all different ways to distinguish individuals’ relation to power. There’s a lot to say about these relationships and their “flux” in society today, but when these distinctions are collapsed into a single vague notion of “being free,” we lose the nuance that the term “liberty” holds.
Words shape political imagination. When these terms have rigid boundaries, it halts and stagnates our political vocabulary. We become increasingly limited to even think of viable alternatives to the current structure. Being so close to the Capitol, we as Georgetown students have a responsibility to push the limits of what these words can signify through meaningful conversation.
This is not a call against the use of the terms themselves. We don’t need fewer debates about democracy or freedom; we just need different ones. That means acknowledging their contradictions, their histories and their potential. If we fail to do that, we risk a political climate of forever empty words.
Ege Alidedeoglu is a first-year in the College of Arts & Sciences. This is the second installment of his column “Thinking Through the Beltway.”
