For decades now — certainly since Ronald Reagan, if not before — conventional wisdom has held that conservatives and Republicans care more about freedom, while liberals and Democrats care more about equality. A slightly more sophisticated version holds that the distinction is between “negative liberty” (“freedom from”) and “positive liberty” (“freedom to”), a distinction usually attributed to Isaiah Berlin’s 1958 essay “Two Concepts of Liberty,” though it’s actually found in Eric Fromm’s 1941 book “Escape From Freedom,” as highlighted by Conor Lynch here at Salon back in February — a point we’ll return to below.

But findings in a new NPR/PBS Marist poll neatly refute both versions of the claim. The poll asked if we have gone too far in expanding or restricting freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom to protest the government and the right to vote. On all four questions — which hinge on questions of government restriction and thus “negative liberty” — conservatives and Republicans were more likely to say freedoms had been expanded too far, compared to liberals and Democrats. And on all issues except religious freedom, conservatives and Republicans were significantly more likely to say rights had been expanded too far, rather than restricted too much.

Let’s start with the three most clear-cut questions:

• On freedom of the press, Democrats thought it had been restricted, rather than expanded too far, by 32 percent to 11 percent (for liberals, 37-10), while Republicans thought the opposite by 42 percent to 9 percent (for conservatives, 35-11).
• On the right to protest or criticize the government, Democrats thought it had been restricted, rather than expanded too far, by 31 percent to 7 percent (for liberals, 40-7), while Republicans thought the opposite by 41 percent to 6 percent (for conservatives, 33-16).
• On the right to vote, Democrats thought it had been restricted, rather than expanded too far, by 44 percent to 5 percent (for liberals, 54-4), while Republicans thought the opposite by 25 percent to 6 percent (for conservatives, 20-10).

The pattern here is unmistakable. While the numbers are almost all pluralities, with large numbers taking middle positions, Republicans and conservatives are consistently much more likely to think that rights have been expanded too far, while Democrats are much liberals are more likely to think they have been restricted too harshly. On these three key issues, conservatives display much  greater antipathy to freedom than Democrats/liberals do. What’s more, it’s negative freedom — a supposed conservative value — that they object to. They want more restrictions placed on people. They want to place more power in the hands of the state — to control the press, to stifle citizens’ criticism and to limit voting.

There should be nothing surprising in any of this. Conservatives everywhere around the globe tend to share these same tendencies. But with such basic freedoms enshrined in our First Amendment, American conservatives have long been forced to express themselves in more circuitous, devious, or deceptive ways. Until the passage of the 14th Amendment, for example, state governments were not limited by such guarantees of freedom, and state-sanctioned churches were once commonplace. And of course, states had complete control of who would be allowed to vote — a right contested repeatedly throughout our history.

The NPR/PBS poll results on freedom of religion actually illustrate the broader pattern of how American conservatives work around the basic liberal thrust of the Constitution.  As mainstream acceptance of same-sex marriage began to seem inevitable, the religious right poured enormous energy into a bold attempt to redefine the battlefield in a never-ending culture war. This was analyzed in depth in in a January 2016 report, “When Exemption is the Rule: The Religious Freedom Strategy of the Christian Right,”  by Frederick Clarkson, which I wrote about here when it came out. The strategy today — of cloaking discrimination in the garb of religious liberty — has been tried before, as Clarkson noted:

As recently as the 1980s, Christian Right activists defended racial segregation by claiming that restrictions on their ability to discriminate violated their First Amendment right to religious freedom. …

Instead of African Americans being discriminated against by Bob Jones [University], the university argued it was the party being discriminated against in being prevented from executing its First Amendment rights. The Supreme Court disagreed.

The fact that the religious right has been much more successful this time around (most notably in the Hobby Lobby case) has everything to do with political power having reshaped the courts, and nothing to do with the actual meaning of religious liberty. As I noted in my previous article, “the worst violations of religious liberty actually came from the anti-gay religious right itself — from a 2012 constitutional amendment in North Carolina, which criminalized the performance of gay marriage. The law was successfully challenged by the United Church of Christ in 2014.”

In fact, the preface to Clarkson’s report was written by the UCC’s general minister and president, the Rev. John C. Dorhauer. The North Carolina law made it clear that genuine religious liberty was the last thing the religious right was interested in. Still, it’s a powerful propaganda tool, as reflected in the NPR/PBS poll, in which religion was the only issue where the Republican/conservative response at least gave the appearance of favoring freedom — although not as strongly as the Democratic/liberal response.

Democrats thought religious freedom had been restricted rather than expanded too far, by 27 percent to 9 percent, while Republicans thought the same by 34 to 17 percent. So Republicans were more likely to endorse both views, but were almost twice as likely as Democrats to say that religious freedom had been expanded too far.

Taken all together, the four NPR/PBS freedom questions and the responses tell us everything we need to know about how Republicans and conservatives really feel about freedom. The only area in which their anti-freedom bias is muffled is precisely the area in which that “freedom” has been vigorously redefined around the “right” to infringe on the rights of others.

Conventional wisdom aside, this poll shouldn’t be the least bit surprising. Since the 1970s, the General Social Survey has asked questions about whether unpopular views should be heard — for instance, those of atheists, communists, socialists, homosexuals, racists and advocates of military rule. Questions are posed in three different forms — about allowing someone to speak, allowing a book to remain in the library or allowing someone to teach in a college or university. As one might expect, liberals have consistently been more tolerant than conservatives of all the usual suspects — but they’ve also been more tolerant of racists and militarists, too. Conservatives, in contrast, are consistently more willing to restrict others’ rights.

The truth is, conservatives love to talk about liberty, but they’ve always had peculiar ways of defining it. “Religious liberty” is just one example of a broader strategy. As I wrote back in 2012:

Both Ron Paul and his son, Rand, oppose the 1964 Civil Rights Act, because it outlaws private acts of discrimination. This is an “infringement of liberty”, they argue. And they’re right: just like laws against murder, it infringes the liberty of bullies. And that’s precisely what justice is: the triumph of right over might.