Who does that candidate consider as equals?
I'm asking because there's a back side to those placards demanding freedom and liberty which escapes our attention by not facing the news cameras. Would that etymology had steered the word "freedom" to standing for without constraints etc. and "liberty" to that freedom which is tempered like a sub-atomic particle by force fields from other people's freedom to make a molecule, as it were. Our language, as the savvy reader has no doubt bemoaned aplenty, has put the two in a blender and assigned bare differences in the final product for either.
The lexicon would rather have us veer toward "equality" to express that tempered freedom/liberty, and that brings us around to something French, nudge, nudge, say no more.
We Americans never did adopt the égalité of their sloganeering but latched onto the liberté part big time. Equality here has been diluted by the co-option of words and our practice of politics.
I think a candidate is known as much by what the gamblers call "tells" such as where there is an outstretched hand to an equal and a confirming look in the eye, its rhetorical equivalent, or conversely by wordsmithing like equal opportunity does not mean equal results.
It's a simple question which bears on all citizens and denizens, but more so on those who can see the backs of their own placards. The other side of the coin, if you will. This freedom/liberty you're seeking, craving, demanding and perhaps even demagoguing, can it survive, exist, sustain or so much as be rationalized in the face of universal application of that freedom?
To whom do you regularly extend consideration of their freedoms, such that you temper your own freedom?
Now that's the debate prompt you'll never hear.
After all the smoke and mirrors, after all the misdirects, straw men, tautologies and ad-hominem attacks, after all the best the persuaders' arts can conjure, who does that candidate consider as equals?
