Since the 1960s, the very conception of the word freedom has diverged into two separate and contradictory notions. The first notion, predominantly held by middle and upper-class whites unknowingly, has come to identify itself with the idea that rights are something to be provisioned by the government and are a zero-sum game; if one person has rights, another person cannot have those same rights. Government action, then, is only justifiable in so far as it helps them keep exercising their God-given rights, but when it helps other people, however, restore those rights, it is an attack on their own personal liberty. The second notion is more collectivist and has gained increasing attention by today's youth, and it is simply that everyone has a freedom to exercise their inalienable rights and it is the right of the government to protect everybody's rights.

Furthermore, this notion holds that government action to protect these and support these rights is necessary for the preservation of a free society. In theory, the different conceptions of liberty could live peacefully together as each preaches the promise of individual liberty, however, in application they are always at odds with each other. The clash between these two views of freedom is what has marked various freedom movements from the beginning of the '60s to the modern age. For the most part of American history, white males had all the privilege in the world and they had been conditioned by dominating societal views about the superiority of the white race and so there was only one practical conception of freedom. Any policy by the government that gave legal rights or support to marginalized groups was there by an attack on their privilege.

Instead of viewing it as equalization of the years worth of institutionalized oppression it was rather seen as an attack on their personal well being. In the '60s, things began to shift. Traditionally marginalized groups began to be vocal and aggressive towards the institutions that have enforced their oppression for over a century. This created a divergence in popular culture between traditional views of freedom. These new movements made a bold claim, that freedom was universal and applied to all members of within a society. They held that if just one member of a free society didn't have the same ability to succeed, they were not in a truly free society. If the government and social institutions pushed people into poverty for factors most people can't control, they were not living a truly free society. These valid arguments were often met with great apathy from the middle class and rich whites, which led to a lack of action on these pressing issues.

When the tension that these movements had been placing on the government grew too large, however, change began to happen. The changes were slow, and often ineffective, but they symbolized a step in the right direction for our country. Johnson's administration passed key policies that helped expand welfare to many struggling African-Americans and expanded job core training to women. After great political mobilization on behalf of the civil rights movement, they were able to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1963 which turned over a new leaf in southern politics. While only small things were being done to equalize the playing field, it was just enough to anger complacent white Americans who had grown accustomed to a certain degree of privilege.

This anger arose in congruence with growing discontent with the Democratic politicians for not doing enough to improve the lives of disadvantaged groups. Those who held that there was an attack on the masculine, an attack on the white race, were able to capitalize on the divide in the Democratic party by the late '70s and regain massive political power. They were able to do this by organizing grassroots activism, by appealing to fringe religious sentiments, and appealing to a sense of racial unity amongst whites. They were incredibly effective and were able to bring their conception of freedom to the government once again. They slashed previously establish welfare programs, tried to belittle and halt the progress being made by the minority communities, by women, and by members of the LGBT community.

However, many Americans held the opposing conception of freedom and continued to advocate for unconditional freedom through litigation and activism, but they were increasingly less effective as time went on. Despite this, it still lived on, only to see a resurgence in recent years due to the increasing relevance of these issues as more and more is made public about the true extent of institutionalized oppression. We can best see this fundamental divide between competing notions of freedom through the lens of the civil rights movement, the resurgence of the feminist movement and the Roe v. Wade Decision, and the lack of policy Reagan and H.W. Bush pursued in light of the AIDS epidemic plaguing the LGBT community in the eighties.

In 1954 the Supreme court ruled that it was unconstitutional to have racially segregated public schools in the case of Brown versus the Board of Education. This marked an early victory for the civil rights movement and energized them moving forward. However, white middle-class families took up major issues with this new ruling. The major reason why was because it implied equality and it implied interaction with people who were viewed at as lesser. Furthermore, it was strongly held that giving those who formerly didn't have access to quality public education access to quality educational institutions would devalue the education of all members of society rather than just being a means to make society, as a whole, better off. It was almost as if they believed public education was a right to be provisioned, although they shied away from directly answering the question as to why they believed that.

However, given the South's deeply enshrined racist culture, it is likely that the anger towards integration of public schools came from a place of white superiority. Children were moved into private schools, moved into districts without many African-American students, and many people even founded private or religious schools just so parents could know their children wouldn't be in a class with an African-American. The South continued their resistance of this court case for many years after the decision, however, the most famous case involved the Little Rock Nine. Students in the capital of Arkansas were admitted into a previously all-white school and were the first African-American students to ever be admitted into the school.

People threatened a protest to deny the students from entering the school and the Governor quickly mobilized the Arkansas National Guard to escort the students into the school. The debacle made national news and it quickly caught the attention of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Soon the Army was deployed to handle the situation after urging the school board to not defy the court's ruling. To some, the integration of public schools was seen as an expansion of everyone's positive right to receive a quality education. However, many white Americans viewed it as an attack on their rights, often claiming that expanding rights to others made them worse off. The reaction to the Supreme Court case illustrates how deep the division between competing notions of freedom ran as it raised the question of who gets to exercise their government protected rights. Whites, who had traditionally held the most rights and privileges, saw the expansion of the rights to more people as an attack on their superiority, which had deeply racist and authoritarian origins.

As tensions developed between the left and right, between those who fought to protect the status quo and those who sought to destroy it, the supreme court continued to add fuel to the fire. This is best illustrated with the monumental case, Roe versus Wade. After nearly a decade of tireless efforts to expand women's bodily and social autonomy, the court decided in 1973 that women, given the guidelines of the 4th amendment had a right to receive an abortion in the first and second trimester of pregnancy. This case greatly expanded on the conventional definition of privacy and became a heated political discussion. Human rights activists and most women praised the decision as a wonderful step forward in the fight for human rights.

However, many anti-feminists and Republicans took up arms against it, often calling it an abomination. They adopted a strategy of grassroots activism to campaign against abortion, flipping the moral and religious arguments to their favor, changing the debate from bodily autonomy to one of whether murder was wrong. This brilliant move also allowed for them to claim that abortion was the freedom to murder unborn children rather than a medical procedure used only in the worst case scenario. Arguments against abortion were often rooted in misogyny, hatred of women, then in actual science and as such demonstrated that men saw the constitutional right to an abortion, which granted women greater bodily and social control of their lives, as an attack on their traditional role of the breadwinner. The government offering their legal support to receive an abortion allowed women to free themselves from men and control a greater degree of their own bodies and lives and this was the root of the positive rights notion of freedom, expanding freedom to all. The debate about these issues has continued on into the modern age and the same arguments are being made now as they were back then, and the notion still remains the same.

When Ronald Reagan became president due to the reactionary measure the new conservatives took as a backlash to the extension of freedoms to African-American citizens and to women since the onset of the mid-1950s, there was a terrible epidemic threatening a large portion of his population. This was the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s that threatened a large portion of gay men in the United States. The issue persists throughout the decade and into the nineties and no effective or helpful legislation was passed to help solve or alleviate the issues. One proposal involved the quarantining of gay men into one confined area. This was the case because President Reagan and President Bush did not see it as the government's duty to protect marginalized peoples as they were seen as lesser than and there was no legal precedent in doing so. So too they saw homosexuality as a sin and they used this to justify the lack of policy action and the lack of expanding positive rights to gay men. Others, however, saw it as the government's duty to step in and provide aid to their citizens, especially when so many were dying from preventable diseases, regardless of trivial characteristics, such as sexuality. This view was the positive right view and they held that citizens had the right to rely on the government for aid and for healthcare.

These particular events in American history have demonstrated the profound impact that this division has on the American political system, American culture, and even the economy as a whole. Politics has since been divided about these notions of freedom since Franklin Roosevelt first started implementing these programs back in 1941, and even more since Lyndon B. Johnson pioneered the great society. Republicans have fallen into representing those who strongly hold on to the first notion of freedom, the notion of negative rights. Coincidentally, they also represent a solid proportion of white Americans who have benefited from a government that keeps others from reaching their full potential to succeed.

Likewise, the Democrats have become the party of expanding positive rights to all members of society and represent a greater portion of marginalized groups who would benefit from government support in correcting the antiquated societal barriers erected by our ancestors ever so long ago. The framework of conflicting notions of freedom also explains why our culture has become increasingly isolated by political party, as the political language amongst both parties has become ever so colloquial and separate from the language of the others that neither of the parties has proper modes of communicating without misunderstanding being imminent. Naturally, this leads us to create circles of people with similar beliefs, which only reinforces those beliefs further. The divergent political language that stems directly from the competing notions of freedom is precisely why we face a culture that has is marked with fierce political polarization.

The fight between those who believe rights are a zero-sum game and those who believe that right should be expanded to all and protected by continued government support is still raging in American politics. Many today argue that protecting the rights of immigrants means less protection will be provided towards red-blooded American citizens. This argument is made despite the fact that all American citizens have full legal rights to government-funded institutions, including public schools, welfare, social security, and the right to vote; immigrants have none of these rights. Furthermore, Immigrants don't have any of the rights guaranteed to American citizens by the Constitution of the United States, yet many still have argued that giving them greater access to public resources is an attack on their well-being.

The fundamental issue then between the two is a difference of language, and this is precisely why the divide has been so president in American history since the 1950s. While both sides, while proponents of either notion of freedom, use the same words, speak the same language, they aren't saying the same thing. When either side refers to freedom, they are speaking to their ideological base who believe in the same notion of freedom. This is why no rational policy can be reached regarding the pervasive issues of racial, sexual, gender discrimination because neither party has addressed the disagreement about what discrimination and freedom mean to the two major political ideologies who each propagate different notions of freedom.