Freedom and dignity are two features of liberal democracy. These are protected by laws but what happens if the laws are ignored by the governments sworn to uphold them.
Since the assumption of power by Donald Trump in January 2025, concern for the issues connected with a free society have entered public debate in the USA and elsewhere. Under Trump’s direction, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) has been arresting people deemed to be illegal immigrants and deporting them out of the country—without a hearing, without a decision by a judge, without any form of “due process.”
The ICE agents are often not even wearing uniforms and are using unmarked cars to capture and transport targeted individuals, first to a holding prison within the US, and then to planes deporting them abroad. They have even targeted people they claim (without evidence) are members of a criminal gang and sent them to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador where the US pays the Salvadorian government for space to imprison such persons.
Dictatorial regimes have long been known for the practice of kidnapping (“disappearing” or “renditioning”) people who they identify as “enemies of the state” or other undesirables. This practice appears indistinguishable from the criminal act of “kidnapping” long held to be a major violation of law within any civil state. A “gangster state” is one that violates the freedom and dignity of its own citizens by kidnapping any who express opposition to the state, with the goal of effectively ending freedom of speech and dissent within that state. The furor raised in the United States because of these actions by the Trump Administration, comes from the nature of political freedom that includes the long-held wisdom that: “If freedom is violated in one place, then it is violated everywhere.”
In other words, if a government assumes the right to kidnap people in some one category (such as illegal immigrants” or other “undesirables”) then in principle it is claiming the right to extend this practice to others that it targets as undesirable or as enemies of the state. The necessary structure of the democratic “rule of law” is revealed here. Any executive with police power is not legitimate unless it can be checked in the name of the freedom (and hence rights) of persons by following adequate “due process” requirements.
If anyone is arrested, they must necessarily have due process rights to bring the issue before a judge and exercise the right to defend themselves against possible false accusations, mistakes, or misidentifications. The now famous case of the arrest and deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia in the USA is a case in point. The government admits it made a mistake. If due process had been afforded Garcia, the entire horror of his situation for himself and his family could have been avoided. Only the universal right of democratic due process can protect the freedom of all of us from such grievous mistakes.
This is perhaps the most fundamental distinction between a democratic and a dictatorial regime. The authority of the executive in a democratic regime is hedged around by a network of due process requirements (habeas corpus, the right to a phone call, the right to know the charges, right not to be physically abused, etc.). This process must be afforded to all persons residing under the authority of the executive (that is, all residing within the country) precisely because the government may be mistaken in the case of “illegal immigrants” or anyone else. All people must have the right to tell their side of the story before a judge or other proper authority. Freedom, protected by due process, therefore, must be a universal feature within any democratic society.
Yale University political historian Timothy Synder wrote a little book called On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, a book that he had printed himself and distributed to people in person after Trump first came into power in 2017. At that time, he tells us, there was little interest. Today, after just a few weeks of Trump’s second term as President, the book has gone viral. (Incidentally, Synder also tells us he has accepted a position offered to him at the University of Toronto and will be soon moving to Canada.)
The twenty lessons in this little book are well worth paying attention to, lessons such as the first one (“Do not obey in advance”) are very important since most citizens have the habit of obedience, of which repressive governments take advantage to progressively end the freedom of their citizens. Nevertheless, I submit that there needs to be another maxim, missing from On Tyranny: one named “defend due process of law,” since, as we have seen above, it is the denial of due process that paves the road toward creeping tyranny. Synder comes closest to this with his second lesson: “defend institutions.” “It is institutions that help us preserve decency,” he says, and they do not protect themselves but require us to be their protectors.
Indeed, this is true if the institutions are premised on human freedom and dignity, but this way of putting the matter appears to ignore the fact that institutions themselves must be designed for protecting freedom and preventing tyranny. Tyrants do not always abolish institutions but rather colonize them for their own oppressive ends. Democratic due process of law is designed precisely to protect freedom. When Trump ignores this in the case of “illegal immigrants,” then we are all in danger. A key defense against tyranny has been breached.
Timothy Synder also has a more recent, full-length book, entitled On Freedom in which he explains what he takes to be the five fundamental characteristics of freedom. He names these: (1) Sovereignty, (2) Unpredictability, (3) Mobility, (4) Factuality, and (5) Solidarity. He also organizes the book around a distinction between “negative freedom” and “positive freedom.” If we think of freedom negatively as simply the getting rid of something—whether this be immigrants or those with the wrong point of view, or annoying facts, or by overthrowing some foreign dictator, or by getting rid of the Jews (as the Nazis put it)—then we endanger authentic freedom, which is always positive. Synder’s five characteristics of freedom, as he articulates them, all involve what is positive.
Freedom, most fundamentally, has to do with values, which Synder calls “the fifth dimension.” We live within the three dimensions of space, and the fourth dimension of time. But evolution has gifted human beings with a “fifth dimension”—that is, freedom and the values that arise from this. Life on Earth has introduced a fifth dimension, a new reality beyond the first four dimensions, one arising from temporality itself. And the first characteristic of freedom, sovereignty, is precisely about this fifth dimension: “A sovereign person knows his or herself and the world sufficiently to make judgments about values and to realize those judgments.”
All citizens must grow toward this capacity as many psychologists and spiritual thinkers have maintained. The great 18th century philosopher, Immanuel Kant,” called this developed capacity for free judgment, “enlightenment,” that is, “the capacity to use one’s understanding without guidance from another.” For Synder, sovereignty does not primarily apply to nation-states but to persons. We must design our educational and political institutions to cultivate sovereignty in our citizens. The slogans and lies of tyrants appeal to the many people who lack the capacity to think for themselves, who are ready, instead, to follow some charismatic leader.
Synder’s other four characteristics of freedom in many ways follow from sovereignty of persons. The second is unpredictability. Mature persons cannot be easily channeled by tyranny into conformity. Tyrants require conformity and malleability in the population. As mentioned above, Synder’s first lesson against tyranny is “do not obey in advance.” Sovereign persons are unpredictable, they do not easily obey, but are capable of making independent judgments and acting on those judgments.
The third characteristic is mobility. “We enable freedom,” Synder declares, “not by rejecting government but by affirming freedom as the guide to good government.” And freedom means social and personal mobility. Tyrants try to limit both. They lock up huge numbers in prisons (as they have been doing in the United States). They try to isolate immigrants, or some particular race, or some group as “enemies of the state.” Good government requires mobility for all persons, both social mobility and physical mobility, not only for the rich or the privileged. Tyrants like Donald Trump hate programs like “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI).”
The fourth characteristic of freedom is factuality. In a world that denies any meaningful distinction between facts and delusions or fantasies, there can be no mature sovereign persons making meaningful value judgements and acting on them. Truth itself is a value, and no authentic values can exist without the distinction between truth and falsehood. Tyrants promote big lies to cover up their corruption and what is really going on. One of Synder’s twenty lessons on tyranny is “believe in truth”—“to abandon facts,” he declares, “is to abandon freedom.”
The last characteristic of freedom is solidarity. Freedom itself is the highest value, Synder affirms, but it is a social phenomenon. Sovereign persons do not arise from nowhere but are educated to maturity by others, and by quality institutions and good education. Freedom is a product of, and requires, solidarity. It depends on quality institutions and on many people working together. And when solidarity results in a vibrant civil society and effective institutions of civil rights, then society approaches “justice.” Justice is what freedom produces when there is a social solidarity defending and enhancing freedom.
Synder’s work is clearly illuminating and worthwhile. It is valuable for helping US citizens resist the growing tyranny of the Trump administration as it seeks to remove due-process protections from its exercise of power and simply act arbitrarily outside of civil rights requirements. However, interestingly enough, the word “dignity” only appears two or three times in his book and does not even appear in the index. Yet I would argue that freedom is practically a meaningless concept without “dignity.”
Why should we value freedom? Why not arrest illegal immigrants and rid the nation of those supposedly taking our jobs and committing crimes? Why accord black people rights and freedoms when they apparently live in ghettos in big cities and commit the majority of (non-white collar) crimes nation-wide? Synder says that if we allow these things then we are opening the door to a slippery slope in which the authorities may come for us next. If we criticize the tyrant we may be targeted, arrested, or simply disappeared. True as this is, it reduces our reasoning to a utilitarian argument—we only protect ourselves by protecting all others.
However, the real question has to do with the fact that freedom enters our human condition as “the fifth dimension.” We are heirs to something that has emerged from the multi-billion-year cosmic process that is found nowhere else that we know of. That is human freedom, and our capacity to establish values and live according to these values.
In the words of French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, to be human is to “contain more than is possible to contain.” With the emergence of freedom in human life, the universe has created a creature inherently possessing what Kant calls “dignity,” that is a creature who transcends the factual world in which things appear to have no intrinsic value but can be used as human beings see fit. We can use the horse, or the tree in the yard, or the chair on which we sit as we see fit; we can own them and can manipulate them for our advantage.
But one cannot legitimately do this with human beings. Why not? Because human beings have dignity: an intrinsic worth that is beyond the world of “things” and that demands to be respected as intrinsically valuable. This is what it means to have “human rights.” As Kant puts this: “always treat every person as an end in themselves and never merely as a means.” Human freedom gives us a universal and equal dignity and that is precisely why we must respect freedom and create our institutions around this respect. Every person possesses intrinsic value as an “end in themselves.” A person is a free, moral being who cannot be used simply as a means.
Freedom, most fundamentally, is not a possession that we can use as we see fit for our own advantage. It is a sacred gift of the cosmos that brings with it our intrinsic human dignity, and that is precisely why it must be respected and why tyranny must be resisted. Why must illegal immigrants have due process that protects their freedom and humanity? Precisely because they are human beings who carry within them the same inviolable dignity that we all possess.
This is the real reason why we have the obligation (intrinsic to our freedom) to develop personal sovereignty and judgment. It is why we need to respect the unpredictability of value judgments, why we need mobility in society, why citizens must embrace truth and the factual basis of life, and why there must be solidarity. This must be a solidarity with all humanity, not just citizens of any one country. All of these are necessary because of our common human dignity.
Dignity should be at the heart of Synder’s work, but it is sadly not found there. And dignity should be the foundation of our own commitment to promoting democracy, freedom, and justice everywhere on Earth. People cannot be arbitrarily arrested or “disappeared” by the authorities simply because they have inherent dignity as persons. To be a human “person” is to participate in the deep mystery of the emergence of freedom in the universe, and with it the emergence of inviolable dignity. All this is lost if we go with the prevailing utilitarian nightmare in which people are simply nothing more than objects to be manipulated or controlled, and it is thought that the end justifies any means.
Indeed, to complete this line of thinking, the “solidarity” that we need is planetary solidarity. We need to be faithful to both freedom and freedom’s necessary correlate, human dignity, on the planetary scale. If a national constitution protects our dignity, it is only because it considers dignity to be truly universal, manifesting the inviolability of our common humanity. That is why we need to be thinking in terms of a Constitution for the Federation of Earth.