When I ran for president four years ago, I said we're in a battle for the soul of America, and we still are.

The question we're facing is whether in the years ahead we have more freedom or less freedom, more rights or fewer.

I know what I want to do so to be, and I think you do too.

Hello, and welcome to Positively Dreadful with me, your host Brian Boyler.

That audio we played for you at the top comes from the announcement video Joe Biden released when he launched his re-election campaign.

If you haven't seen the full video, Google it, give it a watch.

You can find it in last week's Big Tent newsletter.

I wrote about it because I found it striking, and it struck me for a few reasons.

One is just how true it is.

Without knowing how Biden characterized his election stakes for freedom, you can probably guess because threats to freedom, nearly all coming from the right wing, are advancing everywhere.

The freedom to choose when to become a parent is already lost to millions of women in America.

The freedom to be an out and healthy trans person is slipping or gone in many states.

The freedom children ought to have to learn and learn safely is under attack, both by local Republicans who are banning books and by actual gunmen who aren't all Republican per se, but they derive unfettered access to assault rifles from Republican power.

The freedom for majorities to choose who governs the country was already shot full of holes before the 2020 election, and then it came under a literal violent assault on January 6th.

So if Democrats lose the presidency in 2024, and if they lose the presidency, they almost certainly lose the House in Senate 2, Americans will be at risk of becoming much less free.

The stakes aren't negligible little bits of freedom, but huge swaths of it.

On the other hand, if Democrats win the election, some freedoms might and I have to stress might actually be restored.

The right to abortion in particular could be restored nationwide, and Democrats could conceivably create a true democracy through election reforms.

So those are real lasting stakes of the election, and Biden boiled it down in a succinct and striking way.

But it also struck me because it's just kind of weird to see Democrats get geared up to contest an election on the grounds of abstract values.

For as long as I've been alive, that's what Republicans did.

Democrats would campaign to make life simpler or more modern.

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