In a leadup to Martin Luther King Jr. day, 2022, President Joe Biden gave a rousing speech in Georgia pushing his party’s so-called Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act, which combines the Freedom to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. But this was no mere campaign-style speech. Biden dove right into the thick of political philosophy, reaching straight back to the Founding of America. In doing so, Biden clearly and explicitly exposed the reactionary premises of the Democratic Party.
Before we delve into that let me briefly say a bit about this bill. First, despite the title, this bill is not about voting rights. Nowhere in the United States are voting rights an issue. No one is advocating for violating anyone’s right to vote. Democrats’ hysterical fear mongering demagoguery notwithstanding, the whole hoopla is really only about voting procedures and rules, and who -- Congress or state legislatures -- has responsibility over them. That's a vitally important Constitutional separation of powers issue. But while most states are revising, or have revised, their voting laws following last year’s emergency Covid-19 revisions to facilitate the 2020 presidential elections, the right to vote is not anywhere threatened. Specific features of these revised voting laws can be debatable. But an assault on voting rights? No one has ever pointed to one. See my recent post Jesse Jackson’s Big Lie: ‘American Democracy is Under Siege’.
Second, the real danger in this bill are the poison pills designed to undermine rights to freedom of speech, assembly, conscience, and privacy. One provision would establish taxpayer funding of federal elections—which means that the people who seek our votes, which if they win gives them the authority to pass laws that we are forced to live under, will be able to pick our pockets at gunpoint (tax us) to pay for their campaigns. Another provision would ban so-called “dark money,” which is private money donated to political action committees engaged in issue or candidate advocacy. The political and moral horrors of these provisions is covered in my post HR-1 is An Assault on Free Speech, Property Rights, Freedom of Conscience, and Privacy (HR-1 is the precursor to the current bill).
That said, Biden’s Georgia speech is much more consequential than any one act of congress because it is deeply philosophical in a way that goes straight to the heart of what America is. Here are some excerpts from Remarks by President Biden on Protecting the Right to Vote, with my annotates:
In our lives and the lives of our nation — the life of our nation, there are moments so stark that they divide all that came before from everything that followed. They stop time. They rip away the trivial from the essential. And they force us to confront hard truths about ourselves, about our institutions, and about our democracy.
This is true. And Biden and the Democratic Party are making this one of those stark moments -- but not in the way Biden means.
Today, we come to Atlanta — the cradle of civil rights — to make clear what must come after that dreadful day when a dagger was literally held at the throat of American democracy.
As we shall see, Biden’s “American democracy” is nothing like anything America stands for. After reciting horrible events in which “time stopped”—bombings of black churches, murders of children, Ku Klux Klan attacks—Biden states:
They stopped — time stopped, and they forced the country to confront the hard truths and to act — to act to keep the promise of America alive: the promise that holds that we’re all created equal but, more importantly, deserve to be treated equally. And from those moments of darkness and despair came light and hope.
Yes, indeed. The promise of America is anchored in the recognition of original equality and the right to be treated equally -- by the government and its laws. Does Biden really understand what that means?
Democrats, Republicans, and independents worked to pass the historic Civil Rights Act and the voting rights legislation. And each successive generation continued that ongoing work.
Again, true. The “historic Civil Rights Act and the voting rights legislation” followed Martin Luther King’s reminder of “the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence,” and his hope “that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,’” and finally grant negroes “the riches of freedom and the security of justice,” a “dream” of King’s that is “deeply rooted in the American dream.” Keep this in mind, as we move deeper into Biden’s speech.
But then the violent mob of January 6th, 2021, empowered and encouraged by a defeated former president, sought to win through violence what he had lost at the ballot box, to impose the will of the mob, to overturn a free and fair election, and, for the first time — the first time in American history, they — to stop the peaceful transfer of power.
That certainly was a mob attempting to impose its will. As we will see, Biden, the worshiper of Democracy, is the last person to complain about mob rule.
Biden goes on to trash the new Georgia voting law designed, he asserts, to “suppress the right to vote.” This is a law that makes it much easier to vote than 10 years ago, because it includes early voting, remote drop boxes, and “no-excuse” mail-in balloting--meaning mail-in ballots can be requested without any reason. Biden spouts the voter suppression lie despite myriad experts who have observed that, at worst, the new law will not have any effect on turnout and that the provisions of Georgia’s new law generally compare favorably with many other states. Thus, as Jonah Goldberg points out, “Biden will be the second president in a row to tell voters in Georgia there’s no point in voting because the system is rigged,” without justification. The first, of course, was Donald Trump, in the leadup to the Georgia Senate runoff elections a year ago, handing control of the Senate to the Democrats.
After further demagoging, Biden pivots to a call to selectively end the filibuster so as to allow a simple Senate majority to pass the voting bill:
Today I’m making it clear: To protect our democracy, I support changing the Senate rules, whichever way they need to be changed — (applause) — to prevent a minority of senators from blocking action on voting rights. (Applause.)
When it comes to protecting majority rule in America, the majority should rule in the United States Senate. [My emphasis]
And so Biden’s reactionary philosophic treason begins to come into focus. America has never been about “protecting majority rule.” America has always been about protecting individual self-rule—inalienable individual rights—from tyrannies of every kind, including electoral majorities.
Then comes the clincher—Biden’s philosophic treason in full bloom:
I make this announcement with careful deliberation, recognizing the fundamental right to vote is the right from which all other rights flow.
This is nothing short of a repudiation of America and its Enlightenment roots. The Declaration of Independence states clearly, in these “magnificent words” as per Doctor Martin Luther King Jr.,
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed . . . [my emphasis]
This is not mere rhetorical flourish. The idea of unalienable Rights and the government’s sole purpose to “to secure these rights” is deeply rooted in Enlightenment philosophy, led by John Locke and, ultimately, clarified and solidified by 20th Century philosopher Ayn Rand. The principle of individual rights is derived from man’s individual nature as a rational being, and precedes government. The truth is the exact opposite of Biden’s reactionary formulation: Man’s fundamental rights to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness are the rights from which all other rights flow—including the right to vote.
After railing against Trump and his supporters for attempting to commandeer “the kind of power you see in totalitarian states, not in democracies,” Biden announces that rights are privileges granted by government, a foundational power of totalitarian states. This is not a power of constitutional republics such as, in its Founding ideals—the very same ideals drawn on by King in support of his Civil rights Movement—the United States of America!
So what does it mean, in practice, when “the fundamental right to vote is the right from which all other rights flow?” It means majority rule. Mob rule. When rights flow from the right to vote, then all rights flow from government—and the flow goes both ways.
- It means the “rights” of majorities to vote minorities into slavery, which was a plank of the antebellum Democratic Party.
- It means the “rights” of majorities, or the majority’s elected representatives, to force unwilling citizens to fund political campaigns.
- It means the power to vote in governments to grant “rights” to material benefits, such as healthcare or education, that take away the rights of the citizens who are forced to provide and/or fund them—selectively, as in the regulatory welfare state, or across the board, as in a fully socialist country
- It means the “right” of voters to install sharia law, violating the right to freedom of religion.
- It means that Jim Crow laws were legitimate, democratically legitimate. Those laws were established by elected representatives--and, for a time upheld by the courts.
That’s exactly the evil that the Founders abolished. When the British government began systematically to take away the colonists’ “rights of Englishmen,” the Founders realized that there must be a firmer foundation for rights than the benevolence (or lack of) of a King or other ruling authority, including the rule of elected legislatures. They found that firm foundation for the preservation of their rights in the theory of natural rights, a product of The Enlightenment; the theory that man by his very nature, and his relationship to broader nature, requires the freedom to take the actions necessary for the furtherance of his life, secured by, in the words of John Locke, inalienable individual rights.
The Democratic Party, along with the Confederate intellectuals, rejected those principles by radically reinterpreting the Founding of America as a Democracy, not a constitutional republic. The Democrats haven’t changed their stripes. They claimed rights were grants of state authority, derived from the vote, rather than from the laws of nature, and their elected governments deprived blacks their rights—The fundamental right to vote is the right from which all other rights flow--or not flow, as elected representatives deemed to declare. Today, on Democratic Party reactionary premises, an entire country can be voted into socialist slavery. The Democratic Party has Democratic Socialists embedded within. Venezuela elected and re-elected socialists leaders Chavez and Madura, and rights were systematically stripped away--voted away--turning Venezuela into an unfree, impoverished basket case.
That’s what you get when you declare that rights come from the state--that the fundamental right to vote is the right from which all other rights flow. As we can clearly see in theory and in practice, a government from which rights flow is also a government from which rights can recede. Biden has it backwards. In fact, in a Democracy as conceived by Biden, the right to vote is the “right” that puts all other rights at risk.
Then came the final outrage of Biden’s philosophic treason. Biden framed the debate over his Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act in apocalyptic demagoguery—as a choice of democracy over autocracy, light over shadows, justice over injustice; as a choice for or against voter suppression, election subversion, and democracy. With a straight face, Biden dropped the hammer on opponents:
So, I ask every elected official in America: How do you want to be remembered?
At consequential moments in history, they present a choice: Do you want to be the si- — on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?
It was the Confederate intelligentsia that repudiated the ideal of inalienable individual rights, summarized as “natural rights theory,” and reconceived America as a Democracy under which all rights flow from government—to protect their slavocracy. Who, then, is siding with the president of the slaveholding Confederacy, Jefferson Davis? Biden’s belief that “the fundamental right to vote is the right from which all other rights flow,” a principle upon which his Justice Department is basing its lawsuit against the state of Georgia over that state’s new election law, dovetails seamlessly with the philosophy of the Confederate States of America and its Democratic Party allies.
To Joe Biden and the Democratic Party, election to political office in America is not an honorable job that entails doing the legal work of securing the fundamental rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness of its citizens. To today’s democratic socialist Democrats, like the antebellum Democrats and the Jim Crow Democrats and the welfare state Democrats, getting elected to political office is a license for totalitarian power—to do the work of deciding what rights are, who gets them, who doesn’t, and to enforce those “rights” through legal coercion. While pretending to be on the side of mid-twentieth century civil rights crusaders, Biden is actually on the opposite side philosophically. Whereas Martin Luther King Jr., for all of his mixed and inconsistent politics, was squarely on the side of the Founding principles. Joe Biden has chosen the opposite side. And since philosophy is the primary engine of history, who, then, sides with Jefferson Davis? Add to this the fact that, as political scholar Michael Barone reminds us, “George Wallace, Bull Connor, and Jefferson Davis were all partisan Democrats.”
The evidence is indisputable. Joe Biden is the Real Protégé of Jefferson Davis.
[This post was updated on 1/26/2022.]
Related Reading:
Voting Rights are Not the ‘Most Fundamental Right’—or Even a Fundamental Right.
America's Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It by C. Bradley Thompson
America; Democracy or Republic or Both--Why it Matters
Senator Mike Lee is Right: America ‘is not a Democracy’
Constitutional Republicanism: A Counter-Argument to Barbara Rank’s Ode to Democracy
Mesmerized by Elections, the NJ Star-Ledger Forgot that Tyranny is Tyranny
The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty—Timothy Sandefur
Equality and the American Dream by C. Bradley Thompson
Martin Luther King Jr. and the Fundamental Principle of America by Michael A. Laferrara, my article for The Objective Standard
Related Viewing:
What Are Rights and Where Do They Come From? by Harry Binswanger
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