I MUST be honest: any presidential-candidate speech that mentions “Aretha, Coltrane and Miles”, all wrapped up with laughter at the family home, has me at an elemental level.

And then, quite quickly, it doesn’t. Shuddering at the imperial platitudes in the second half of Kamala Harris’s keynote at the Democratic convention a few days ago, I was reminded of the bad taste that Barack Obama’s term in office left me with.

On a Friday, his White House would celebrate “American Creativity”, with Herbie, Smokey and Stevie. Then the following Tuesday, somewhere else in the building, he’d move his finger down a kill list of political assassinations by means of drones, in various locations across the Middle East.

So when candidate Harris plays out that healing, communal soul music to her audiences, to my ears there is a dissonant undertone. Especially when you consider her administration’s massive supply of American weaponry and resource that’s enabling the IDF’s bloodbath in Gaza.

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I have in mind that other presidential candidate, Cornel West, speaking at Edinburgh University’s Gifford Lectures only a few months ago.

West asserted that the particular excellence of the black music tradition was about “hurters turning into healers”. That part of Kamala’s “vibe” doesn’t quite fit with Palestinian voices being denied a platform at the Democratic convention.

It also casts something of a shadow on what has otherwise been regarded as a great achievement of the Harris campaign. That is, their seizure of the term “freedom” from the Republicans. As Harris phrased it in her Thursday night speech, this is freedom for women to control their bodies, freedom to “live safe from gun violence”, freedom to “love who you love openly and with pride”, freedom to “breathe clean air, drink clean water and live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis”.

And above all these, the “freedom to vote” (ie, resisting its suppression and gerrymandering). These messages are powered by Beyonce’s pounding 2016 anthem Freedom, from campaign ad to conference hall.

I’ve tracked down a few sources for this audacious rhetorical steal. First among them is the Democratic pollster and advisor Anat Shenker-Osorio. In recent years, she’s been urging American progressives to recognise the power of the term.

“Democracy is too much of an abstraction for people to actually get excited about. Whereas freedom is corporeal,” said Anat, in a recent episode of The Wilderness podcast.

“When you ask people for the salient example of having freedom taken away, they will tell you it’s being confined, chained, unable to move. It’s a thing that you can feel inside of your body. Whereas, what is democracy? Draw me a picture of that. It’s just too nebulous.”

Shenker-Osorio further notes that polling shows all social groups associate “America” with “freedom” – far and away the leading option. Freedom is “a word that allows you to connect issues together, rather than having to have a separate story about each thing” – which is exactly what Harris did the other night.

“And it’s a direct contestation of what MAGA is doing, which is trying to take away our freedoms on every level and in every dimension.”

That last line may seem more pushy than the usual triangulations and “centre-ground” targeting of American politics. You’d be right. Anat has the ugliest word for it: mobisuasion (yes, a mix of mobilisation and persuasion).

As the political writer Anand Giridharadas explains it: “mobisuasion is the theory that Democrats should not seek to persuade by diluting their offerings to reach out to the middle, the moderates, the centrists, whatever. Rather, they should seek to ‘animate the base to persuade the middle’.”

Continues Giridharadas: “You mobilise your own people, your core supporters, offering them things that genuinely excite them. And you trust that their excitement will be infectious, creating a contagion that eventually touches their more conservative relatives, neighbours and friends.”

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In Thursday’s address, Harris translated this strategy into wisdom from her mother: “Never let anyone tell you who you are. You show them who you are.”

Giridharadas notes this implies that rhetorical and cultural risks must be taken by political strategists. They have to be unabashed about the search for emotional connection.

The Harris camp “seeks to compete with fascists for the emotional life of people … You must take an organiser’s approach to helping people process a bewildering age, the dislocations of change. As well as the resentments that come with progress, and the pain of capitalist predation.

“The new style recognises emotional labour as vital to political work. That is why Harris and governor Tim Walz are constantly talking about ‘joy’. That is why the campaign has embraced the notion of the centrality of vibes, not just policy.”

I’m sure an obvious comparison has been looming in your mind, dear reader. How does this US thinking about the saliency of “freedom” apply itself to Scottish conditions?

I’m also sure you know what’s coming next. “They may take our lives, but they will never take our freedom!”

Imaginative Democratic advisers like may tell The Washington Post that “freedom sort of lives inside of the body, where democracy is a more abstract idea”.

But in Scotland, Braveheart provides the major context for the term. And the movie has often been condemned for reducing the desire for sovereignty to being merely about bodies – whether battling or mooning, being raped, dismembered or chucked out of windows.

The indy-minded “progressives” in Scotland have laboured long and hard against any simplistic association of independence with “freedom”. We weren’t colonised or made “unfree” by Westminster, or Britain (let alone England). Indeed, Scots have our own historical role in enslavement and colonialism to keep in mind.

Thinkers like Tom Nairn, Neal Ascherson and Gerry Hassan are always at pains to remind us that independence is, in truth, largely the “freedom” to establish our terms for interdependence – Scotland’s meshing with the wider world and its demands/opportunities.

However, there are ways that Scots might be able to reclaim the F-word. I like the way that the Brazilian-American philosopher Roberto Unger talks about “deep freedom”, which pops up out of the way freedom relates to equality.

Shallow freedom is merely liberal – eg, free markets/free speech. Shallow equality is the state regulating, taxing or otherwise ameliorating this liberalism. Together, they comprise the business-as-usual of modern times. And look where that’s left us.

Deep equality, for Unger, is the poverty and levelling-down of communism. This leaves us with “deep freedom”. Why is it deep? Because it’s not just about the liberal power to determine your self – but also to determine the shape of the institutions and organisations that support you in your strivings.

For Unger, this implies a necessary and healthy spirit of experimentation in our society and economy. Deep freedom can mean the gumption to try out new forms of collective action – in co-operatives, forms of co-living, uses of energy, provision of food and health, creation of cultural scenes.

These experiments might answer – and amplify – the empathic curiosity and mutual ambition that simmers at one end of our human nature (the non-fascist end, to be blunt). Perhaps they could be another route into the “joy” that Harris/Walz invoke?

The Scottish pursuit of deep freedom. What would that look like? What would that springtime bring? What soundtrack do you hear for that?