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From the esoteric and the imperian to the specfic and the political. And then on to aliens! James, Rob and Steve Hayward chat with Patrick Deneen, author of Regime Change: Towards a Postliberal Future. They discuss the deliterious effects of liberty without restraints, the bipartisan quest for progress and consider a reassessment of some of our cherished philosophical forebears. Next fan favorite Andy McCarthy stops by to give his first take on the indictment of Donald Trump.
San Francisco and UFOs are on the docket as well.
Song of the week:
- Sound is Trump responding to the indictments on Truth Social
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“It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it.” — Blood Meridian quote
Digital History
The Spirit of Liberty
Digital History ID 1199
Date:1944
Annotation: Learned Hand is often considered the greatest American judge to never sit on the Supreme Court. For more than 50 years, he served as a federal judge, most of the time on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York. Three times presidents considered nominating Hand for the Supreme Court. But each time they picked someone else.
Hand gained public acclaim for a speech on “The Spirit of Liberty” given during World War II. Hand delivered this address in 1944 in New York’s Central Park, where 1.5 million people gathered for an event billed as “I Am an American Day.” Hand aimed his remarks at 150,000 newly naturalized citizens.
Hand told his listeners that immigrants came to America in search of liberty. He informed them that the essence of liberty was not to be found in constitutions, laws, or courthouses but “in the hearts of men and women.” What then, he asked, is the spirit of liberty? “The spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not too sure it is right.” What Hand meant is that Americans needed to avoid dogmatism and remain open-minded.
Hand was an early opponent of Hitler and a critic of anti-semitism and as a judge, Hand defended freedom of expression and civil liberties. But he also committed to judicial restraint and believed that the courts should avoid second-guessing the decisions of legislatures. During the Cold War, he was known as a voice of moderation who spoke out publicly against McCarthyism, the obsessive pursuit of communists in government.
With his busy eyebrows, his penetrating eyes, and his stern countenance, Hand fit the popular ideal of a judge. He was often called the Supreme Court’s tenth Justice. But he was skeptical about the law’s ability to resolve conflicts efficiently and to protect peoples’ liberties. In a famous phrase, he said that his years on the bench convinced him that “I should dread a law suit beyond almost anything else short of sickness and death.”
Document: We have gathered here to affirm a faith, a faith in a common purpose, a common conviction, a common devotion. Some of us have chosen America as the land of our adoption; the rest have come from those who did the same. For this reason we have some right to consider ourselves a picked group, a group of those who had the courage to break from the past and brave the dangers and the loneliness of a strange land. What was the object that nerved us, or those who went before us, to this choice? We sought liberty; freedom from oppression, freedom from want, freedom to be ourselves. This we then sought; this we now believe that we are by way of winning. What do we mean when we say that first of all we seek liberty? I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it. And what is this liberty which must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few; as we have learned to our sorrow.
What then is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the mind of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded; the spirit of liberty is the spirit of Him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned but never quite forgotten; that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side by side with the greatest.
And now in that spirit, that spirit of an America which has never been, and which may never be; nay, which never will be except as the conscience and courage of Americans create it; yet in the spirit of that America which lies hidden in some form in the aspirations of us all; in the spirit of that America for which our young men are at this moment fighting and dying; in that spirit of liberty and of America I ask you to rise and with me pledge our faith in the glorious destiny of our beloved country.
https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=3&psid=1199
Oh, if our country were still beloved.
As indicated by these and earlier quotes, there was a clear consensus among the Founders that to have a lasting free society, there needed to be a way by which virtue was promoted in humans (who are not inherently good, not “angels”). Perhaps the chief difference between them and Deneen was about how this should happen.
In the 2012 lecture by Os Guinness, after talking about how
+ freedom requires virtue, and
+ virtue requires faith
Guinness points out (~31:24) that the really big innovation of the American founding was the third leg of the triangle.
“The third leg of the triangle, “faith of any sort requires freedom”, and that, of course, is actually the unique part of the American experiment. Many people think “separation of powers”, things like that. England had that. Montesquieu praised the English separation of powers a century earlier. And, of course, long before that the Swiss had their own version of separation of powers. That is not unique. But the first amendment is, and the disestablishment of religion in an official way, and the making of each faith voluntary – that was radical and broke with 1500 years of European tradition and lies at the very heart of the secret of the United States.”
In a nutshell, though recognizing the essential need for virtue, the Founders intentionally rejected the coercive “exercise of political power” to establish faith and virtue.
By contrast, Deneen seems infatuated with a dream of returning to when governments used the coercive “exercise of political power” to establish religion and values. Yet, I haven’t heard his plan to avoid the inevitable (potentially violent) power struggles over who decides what religion and values to powerfully impose.
We need a theocracy with lots of centralized power run by “experts”. lol
FYI: The first 57 minutes of the most recent episode of the Acton Unwind podcast (available on Ricochet) is devoted to a panel discussion of the writings of Patrick Deneen, with emphasis on his most recent book Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future. The show notes include a link to a published review of the book.
While this latest book is an opportunity for Deneen to finally say something about what he thinks should come next (and perhaps how we could get there?), the book seems even weaker than its predecessor. Book reviews have generally not been very positive.
Take a listen:
Acton Unwind
Patrick Deneen and Our Otherworldly Postliberal “Future”
Blessings to you all on this 4th of July!
“Virginia’s Declaration of Rights was drawn upon by Thomas Jefferson for the opening paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence. It was widely copied by the other colonies and became the basis of the Bill of Rights. Written by George Mason, it was adopted by the Virginia Constitutional Convention on June 12, 1776.”
*”the Bill of Rights”, i.e. the first amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
In celebration of today, here are a couple excerpts showing their recognition of the mutually reinforcing relationships of liberty, virtue, and voluntary faith (which Os Guinness called the Golden Triangle of Freedom).
Article 15 (on how liberty is supported by personal virtue):
“That no free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue and by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.”
Article 16 (on how faith is supported by liberty, and on how the way we are to treat others derives from the free exercise of that voluntary faith):
“That religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience; and that it is the mutual duty of all to practise Christian forbearance, love, and charity toward each other.”
All quotations are from this page on The Virginia Declaration of Rights