Count on Vice President Harris to embroider tonight the concept of “freedom” that the Democrats have sought to make the theme of their convention. The freedom the Democrats are pushing, though, is crosswise with how the Republicans think of the great concept. Democrats feature freedom as given by governments. Republicans focus on liberty from government interference with certain inalienable rights with which all men are endowed by their Creator.

This is a matter to mark in the homestretch of a campaign that had no backstretch. One can think of rights given by the government as a kind of nickel-plated version of freedom. If government can grant these ersatz rights, after all, government can also repeal them. Endowments by God — man’s Creator — are not subject to repeal. Which is why the Framers referred, in the Declaration, to certain rights as inalienable. President Coolidge called them “final.”

We first started dilating on this theme in an editorial called “Lost in Egypt.” It remarked on a now-famous broadcast interview given in Egypt by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She cautioned countries aspiring to constitutional government against modeling their new parchments after America’s Bill of Rights. She recommended, say, Canada’s or Europe’s new rights bills, which are much longer than our Bill of Rights, which has fewer than 500 words..

Those constitutions grant all sorts of rights — direct from the government. Rights to housing, say, rights to one’s name, or to health care — matters, in other words, that man’s Creator had refrained from establishing as rights. “Why not take advantage of what there is elsewhere in the world?” Ginsburg asked. The Framers might have answered by distinguishing between positive rights and negative rights. They gave pride of place to the negative ones.  

Positive rights are like the empty promises doled out in, say, Communist China’s constitution. Its 35th article arrogates it to government to declare that citizens “shall enjoy freedom of speech, the press, assembly, association, procession and demonstration.” Article 36 ensures “freedom of religious belief.” What the communists declared they were granting, of course, they turned around and revoked.

Our Framers vouchsafed those rights in a different way. The Constitution didn’t grant anything. It laid a prohibition on government. This is marked in the first phrase of our Bill of Right in the immortal words — “Congress shall make no law . . .” That encapsulates the concept of a negative right. The Rights Bill is riddled with “no”s and “not”s. The right to keep and bear arms is secured by the Second Amendment’s command that it “shall not be infringed.”

The Republicans — historically the party of limited government — long held to that conception of freedom. The Democrats are now trying to rebrand as the “party of real freedom,” as Governor Shapiro put it. That’s like FDR’s effort to enshrine positive rights like “Freedom From Want,” which marked the rationale for the New Deal expansion of the welfare state. It’s akin, too, to Eva Perón’s mantra: “Where there’s a need, there’s a right.” 

Governor Walz echoed that paternalism, touting nanny-state imperatives like “the freedom to make a better life for yourself,” the “freedom to make your own health care decisions,” or “your kids’ freedom to go to school without worrying about being shot dead in the hall.” GOP limits on government power, Mr. Walz avers, leave “corporations free to pollute your air and water, and banks free to take advantage of customers.”

We are not suggesting that no role obtains for government in meeting the needs of the citizens it serves. We’ve been ardent champions of America’s own civil rights struggle. We, though, have come to share the Founders’ wariness of big government. We have more wariness of government interference than of the abuses of corporations that Mr. Walz marks. When it comes to freedom, Marxism and monarchy have at times a similarity. 

The Democrats’ vision is of an expansive federal government, playing a role in citizens’ lives from “cradle to grave,” as Britain’s socialist Labour party put it, and in the economy. No doubt such “rights” — how about a Bill of Perks and Benefits? — might appeal to some voters. In the Democrats’ vision, though, is there room for any part of American life to go on without government oversight — i.e., with real freedom?