A Primer On Liberty
Markos Moulitsas is, according to his Twitter bio, the founder of Daily Kos and the author of American Taliban: How Sex, Sin, and Power Bind Jihadists to the Radical Right. On Super Tuesday, he tweeted something very sad:
Santorum scoffs at notion that gov't creates rights. In other words, he doesn't believe in the US Constitution
I can think of few better examples of how serious a problem we have as a country than what this tweet represents. When people responded by pointing him to, you know, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, he doubled down:
Dear Cons, show me where in the Constitution is god mentioned. In fact, it states "we the people" as the source of the rights (Preamble)
When you look at the religious liberty battle facing the country right now, you have one side speaking in terms of government intrusion into a natural right. The other side talks about the "right to free birth control" or a "war on women."
The deeper problem, of course, is that one side is talking about negative liberty and the other side doesn't even understand the vocabulary.
I don't want to get too pessimistic here, but this is what decades of horrible public and private education have wrought: a populace that doesn't understand liberty, how rights are derived, and the very basis of civil society.
What to do about it?
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Jun '10
Re: A Primer On Liberty
Without God, the individual human being has no more intrinsic value than a horse (or an unwanted fetus after 1973.) Why does a horse need a constitution? They don't. The devilish mistake that most of the Founders made was that they saw blacks as horses--not that they didn't see whites as having a dignity conferred on them by God. Horses receive training. Children of God receive love and respect. No God, no US Constitution. Without God, minds are not prepared to give civil rights to horses.
Jun '11
Re: A Primer On Liberty
Teach our children well. I think we must recognize these values are so central to living in a free society that every family must take the time expose our children to the classical liberal political philosophy that shaped our nation.
Oct '10
Re: A Primer On Liberty
Even without God, that is, even for atheists, our rights as Americans do not come from the government. Government is instituted among men to protect rights, unalienable rights, that come from somewhere other than man. Whether you believe in God or believe in no God, the fact remains that this country was founded upon the principle that government only exists to protect rights we're born with, not to grant us rights as government sees fit. Doesn't matter from whom, how, or whence our rights come. What matters is what power government has vis-a-vis those rights, and its only power is the power to secure, to protect, not to grant, those rights. (stream of consciousness here, will re-read and edit later when time permits)
Dec '10
Re: A Primer On Liberty
The only solution is to study philosophy again. A decent starter on the subject of liberty can be found in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
This is the crux of every argument we have with the left.
Nov '11
Re: A Primer On Liberty
We ought to face the fact that Moulitsos puts his finger on a problem in our founding document. This little difficulty is why Lincoln, in the Gettysburg Address, referred back to the Declaration, not the Constitution (4 score and 7 gets you back to 1776), and why we here on Ricochet are more likely to quote the Declaration than the Constitution when talking about rights. If there is a source of rights in the Constitution that is higher than the document itself, it is the people who made and ratified it, but not a higher power.
May '10
Re: A Primer On Liberty
Apart from an act of God and/or a national wave of evangelization and conversion back to faith and moral sanity, I think our only hope (assuming Romney is our nominee) lies in his holding back the hordes of destruction long enough for a more serious conservative to succeed him—one who (like Wilberforce) makes a priority of "the reform of manners" and the renewal of education to include true history and civics.
Jun '10
Re: A Primer On Liberty
If there's no there there, it doesn't work. It has to be more than an idea. Ideas change with the weather.
Oct '10
Re: A Primer On Liberty
Why on earth would you expect a leftist to believe anything else, regardless of what the Declaration of Independence or Constitution say? The foundation of their ideology is government control and to be in government, i.e. to be in control. Recognizing the Scottish natural rights philosophical foundation of the United States of America is inimcal to that enterprise. Most of them aren't stupid, realize that, and think and act accordingly.
Feb '11
Re: A Primer On Liberty
I don’t think the matter is quite so simple.
Government can and does create some rights, by a ‘Declaration’. My right to vote is an obvious example.
Other rights I have independently of whether the government says so. Maybe these rights are Life, Liberty, and Property (the question of which rights are like this is different from whether there are any such rights.) Typically, we want to call these ‘natural’ rights, and to locate their origin in God qua Creator.
But in addition to these, it is at least possible for a right to be neither natural nor declared by a human being. That is, the right could be declared by God. (For instance, if there are any rights implicit in the divine law against idolatry, these would be divinely declared rights.)
Historically, discourse about rights begins with declared rights, with rights that certain peoples have by virtue of other historical events. Natural rights discourse comes later, and lays claim to being logically prior to declared rights.
Feb '11
Re: A Primer On Liberty
I think it is good to reject a historicist viewpoint, which would deny natural rights at all. Sometimes, when we do this, people misunderstand what we’re saying.
But when we insist on that word ‘Creator’, are we insisting that it wouldn’t be enough to say: I have this right by virtue of being a human being — a rational animal? Are we saying that, in addition, it needs to be said that I have this right by virtue of being a creature of God? That I’m not sure of.
Mar '12
Re: A Primer On Liberty
It is not only "poor" education that contributes to our abject ignorance of liberty, rights, and the bases for civil society. There is an intentional effort on the part of leftist faculties and college administrations to remove the study of Western Civilization and even American History from their curricula. At the "prestigious" liberal arts college my son attended, a history major can graduate without having been required to take one American History course. There are few courses offered in which they will study Burke or Paine or the Federalist Papers. Far more common are courses in the history of environmental activism, gender and violence in the Middle Ages, America's "informal imperialism" of Latin America, etc. They control what is read and debated, and therefore graduate men and women with little understanding of our founding, federalism, or our inalienable rights. We lost the battle at the academy long ago. The results of that defeat, manifested in comments such as those of Mr. Moulitsas, become more apparent every day.
What to do? I support organizations such as The Alexander Hamilton Institute, www.theahi.org, which is doing its best to promote the study and appreciation of American History and Western Civilization.
Nov '10
Re: A Primer On Liberty
Religion is a human universal but for some (those who crave power over others) their god is government. Think Robespierre and his ideological descendants. Their brains are hard wired so I don’t think there is anything to be done, except to defeat them politically. No conversion is possible and compromise is not likely because their definition of compromise is they win and we lose.
Oct '10
Re: A Primer On Liberty
I hope I'm not taking the conversation off track by saying that I've always had a problem with the phrase 'negative liberty.' The Left likes to use it (invented it?) so that's one reason why I don't like it. But it obscures what liberty is. It's not just about being left alone. It's about having the freedom to live the virtuous life. It's inherently a positive thing.
Feb '11
Re: A Primer On Liberty
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Concepts_of_Liberty
Isaiah Berlin. I wouldn’t call him a member of the Left.
Here is the essay in PDF:
Edited on March 8, 2012 at 4:54pmhttp://www.wiso.uni-hamburg.de/fileadmin/wiso_vwl/johannes/Ankuendigungen/Berlin_twoconceptsofliberty.pdf
Jun '10
Re: A Primer On Liberty
Count me a pessimist. Two steps are required.
First, parents must teach their children. Doing it in conjunction with religious belief makes the task much easier. I wish I could say that parents are doing this on a broad scale. Civics nerds like us Ricocheteers are likely to, but I those who do are in the clear minority. [And then add into that a 42% illegitimacy rate, 15 million Americans cohabiting, and on and on]. This one is in trouble.
Second, as Katie says, we need make a "priority of 'the reform of manners' and the renewal of education to include true history and civics." We must be vigorous, but we face immense entrenched interests (from teacher's unions, to universities, to activist judges) who will oppose us.
Apr '11
Re: A Primer On Liberty
In the end the issues facing our society are bigger than who is or isn't president. When attitudes (and it is an attitude more than a thought) like Moulitas' become prevalent, our problem cannot be fixed simply by one or even two or three, election cycles.
Sep '11
Re: A Primer On Liberty
Kos isn't as smart as he thinks he is. What he's asking for is a re-hash of the 1864 presidential election--where the Democrats (those few who had not openly joined the rebellion) emphasized precisely his argument about the Constitution, and the Republicans emphasized the Declaration of Independence.
The Democratic Party position: If the Constitution is the sum, the essence, the paramount charter of government, then don't southern slaveholders have a 4th amendment property interest in their slaves? Isn't it unconstitutional for federal troops to invade the homes of American citizens and take their property--without due process, without judicial oversight, and without any kind of compensation?
The Republican Party position: each man is endowed by his Creator with certain inalienable rights--among them, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Emphasis: liberty. So there is no such thing as a property right in another man, and this is so abundantly clear that no court can even allow a petition for 4th amendment protection. Freeing slaves is not a government "taking."
So Markos wants to have that debate?
Oh, let's, please. Pretty, pretty please.
Jun '11
Re: A Primer On Liberty
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the formation of the Constitution. The Constitution does not grant CITIZENS rights, it's purpose was only to set up a form of government for the federation, in which the citizens and states ceded (through consent) some of their power to the federal government.
Having this discussion makes me think that the Federalists may have had a good point in being against adding a Bill of Rights. I think their fear that enumerating rights in the document would make some confused that those were the only rights retained by the people have come true (or in Moulitsas mind, created by the government). The Constitution is a grant of power and rights, specifically limited and enumerated, to the government and does not grant a single right to the people. We already had those rights and we retain them and more.
Jun '10
Re: A Primer On Liberty
A great hero of mine, the great Catholic historian Christopher Dawson, dedicated his work to the study of the intersection of religion and culture. Here are a couple of his thoughts that I believe are true. Were Dawson here today (he died in 1970), I fear he would bow his head in tears:
To Katie's point:
Sep '11
Re: A Primer On Liberty
If Markos Moulitsas, the ideological leader of the Left, insists that we ignore the Declaration of Independence and view the Constitution as the only source of our rights, he is arguing that the federal government was wrong in invading southern homes and farms, seizing property (what many would call "black human beings with the inalienable right to liberty") without due process and without just compensation.
Kos has no way around it--it was blatantly unconstitutional.
So if Kos's view of the constitution is correct--doesn't the federal government owe those slaveholders (and their descendants, of course) reparations?
My mother-in-law (whose grandfather was taken prisoner at Appomattox Court House with Robert E. Lee), wife, and daughters would all like to have their reparations checks in time for next Christmas, please.