Principled Perspectives: January 2024

Wednesday, January 31, 2024

On “War with Iran” After 3 U.S. Soldiers Killed

The recent un-provoked killing of three U.S. soldiers in Jordan by Iraqi-based Iranian terrorist proxies led to an exchange on Facebook. Without mentioning names, I republish part of the exchange [sic]. The owner of the Facebook page posted:

I don’t understand how anyone can vote for Biden in this upcoming election. I understand that our choices for President will…most likely…not be good ones. But…Iran has attacked US installations over 160 times recently. The most recent attack on one in Jordan killed three of our servicemen and injured many others. And the administration doesn’t want to escalate anything with Iran! Iran has been at war with the US for decades and the escalation is obvious. WTH is this president waiting for to protect our troops.

I commented:

The delusion at the White House is astounding. We keep hearing fears of "a wider war," an "escalation of tensions," and such buzzwords. That's the talk of appeasement, and it's leading us in the direction of World War III. I don't think it will get that far. But that's the road our current policies are pointing to.

Another correspondent chimed in:

A war with Iran is not the way to hold them accountable….. another war??? Seriously no. Not the answer and I hope congress sees that as well

The owner replied:

Then what? Continue to let them bomb and kill our soldiers with no recourse?

The commenter reiterated:

there must be other ways to hold them accountable…… to which you and I rest assured know nothing about. But war with them is not the answer here

I replied:

Our policies since WW II of fighting long, dragged-out, no-win wars, capped by Bush’s failed “nation-building” fiascos in Afghanistan and Iraq, have so corrupted our thinking about war that we are reduced to what you are essentially saying—the pathetic belief that the most powerful and moral country in the history of the planet cannot defend itself against a pipsqueak terrorist theocracy that incessantly wages war against us.

You are partly right. Another NO-WIN war is not the answer. Appeasement led to WW II, and an uncompromising Allied policy of unconditional surrender or utter destruction led to lasting peace and prosperity. The crushing of Italy, Germany, and Japan resulted in those nations becoming our allies, friends, and trading partners. They learned their lessons. I’m not a military expert. But I do know that Iran is no Italy, Germany, or Japan. The U.S. can cripple Iran’s economy in hours or days, and neutralize its military, with air power alone. It can be supplemented with massive economic sanctions, enforced by naval blockades and the like. No need for “forward strategy for freedom” or “democracy” campaigns. No need for troops on the ground. Whatever we do, we should make it clear that we will continue to do what’s necessary until the current murderers and criminals ruling Iran are replaced with better political leaders and policies.

It must be said: The idea that “war with them is not the answer” is a dangerous evasion that leads to a PRO-WAR POLICY OF CONTINUING APPEASEMENT. We ARE at war with Iran—and have been since 1979. They know it. It’s time for us to acknowledge it as well, and act accordingly. Imagine a peaceful, civilized Iran that deals with the West through the shared prosperity of commerce rather than war-through-terrorism.

Wednesday, January 17, 2024

Biden Reaffirms the Democratic Party’s Reactionary Agenda in Kickoff to his 2024 Reelection Campaign

President Biden kicked off his 2024 reelection campaign with a rousing speech at Valley Forge. And it was a good speech.

As expected, Biden focussed on Trump as a threat to “American Democracy.” “Democracy itself,” Biden railed, “will be on the ballot in 2024.” As usual, I focussed on the much more important philosophical content of his speech. And as expected, Biden reaffirmed his and his party’s reactionary recasting of America’s Founding and fundamental ideals. And he did it by, despicably, channeling George Washington.

In 1776-77, George Washington and his rag-tag Continental Army were facing, Biden correctly observed, “the most powerful empire in existence in the world at the time” while lacking “blankets and food, clothes and shoes.” And what were they enduring unimaginable suffering to fight for?

Their mission, George Washington declared, was nothing less than a sacred cause. That was the phrase he used. A sacred cause. Freedom, Liberty. Democracy. American democracy.

America’s “sacred cause,” according to Biden’s historical revisionism, was Democracy. Yes, he mentions freedom and liberty. But left unqualified, those terms are meaningless. Was he referring to individual liberty, or collective “liberty?” Keep that question in mind.

Leaving no doubt about his theme, Biden continued. “Valley Forge,” Biden said, is

“the very site that I think every American should visit, because it tells the story of the pain and the suffering and the true patriotism it took to make America.” Pain . . . suffering . . . patriotism—for and to what? Biden leaves no doubt:

Today, we gather in a new year, some 246 years later, just one day before January 6, a day forever seared in our memory because it was on that day that we nearly lost America, lost it all.

Today, we’re here to answer the most important of questions. Is democracy still America’s sacred cause? I mean it.

This is not rhetorical, academic or hypothetical. Whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause is the most urgent question of our time.

And it’s what the 2024 election is all about.

The choice is clear.

My emphasis.

Freedom and liberty, according to Biden, is the right to vote. Nothing else. Is this really what Washington, and Americans, risked all to fight for? This is as despicable a smear of America’s revolutionaries as one can imagine. What’s missing from Biden’s conception of “America’s sacred cause?”

After a long and mostly true diatribe against Trump and his MAGA supporters, Biden returns to his philosophical thrust:

They made their choice.

Now, the rest of us, Democrats, independents, mainstream Republicans, we have to make our choice.

There’s that word again . . . choice. What’s Biden’s choice? Hint: it’s no better than Trump’s.

I know mine, and I believe I know America’s.

We’ll defend the truth, not give in to the big lie.

We’ll embrace the Constitution of the Declaration, not abandon it. [sic]

We’ll honor the sacred cause of democracy, not walk away from it.

Today, I make this sacred pledge to you: The defense, protection and preservation of American democracy will remain, as it has been, the central cause of my presidency.

America, as we begin this election year, we must be clear: Democracy is on the ballot. Your freedom is on the ballot.

Note Biden explicitly ties “your freedom” to the ballot box. Sound familiar? Biden is reaffirming his stated belief that “the fundamental right to vote is the right from which all other rights flow.” From which all of our other rights flow. Let that sink in.

Yes, we’ll be voting on many issues: on the freedom to vote, and have your vote counted. On the freedom of choice.

The freedom to have a fair shot.

The freedom from fear.

And we’ll debate and disagree.

Without democracy, no progress is impossible. Think about it.

The alternative to democracy is dictatorship. The rule of one, not the rule of we, the people.

That’s what the soldiers of Valley Forge understood.

Did they?

James Madison, the “Father of the Constitution,” listed the three forms of tyranny that the Constitution was meant to protect against. In Federalist #47, Madison explained:

The accumulation of all powers legislative, executive and judiciary in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many, and whether hereditary, self appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.

My emphasis. The one (monarchy), the few (aristocracy), or the many (Democracy, or “the rule of we,” in Biden’s words) are the three forms of tyranny Madison, and the Founders, feared. Note Madison’s precision. Tyranny is tyranny, even if elected. Madison understood the totalitarian possibilities of democracy. The Founders didn’t vew democracy as “America’s sacred cause.” They saw democracy as something to be protected against.

Thus, while Trump may represent the tyranny of “the one,” Biden chooses the tyranny of the many.

Biden goes on to define his concept of Democracy

Democracy means having the freedom to speak your mind, to be who you are, to be who you want to be.

But those freedoms are not yours by unalienable right. They are permissions at the mercy of the ballot box—which means, the mercy of the state. “The fundamental right to vote is the right from which all other rights flow.” Remember that the elected Biden administration tried to make an end run around the First Amendment by bullying social media into “moderating” their content to the government’s liking. Remember the Twitter Files.

Democracy is about being able to bring about peaceful change.

Democracy. Democracy is how we open the doors of opportunity wider and wider with each successive generation, not notwithstanding our mistakes.

But if democracy falls, we’ll lose that freedom, we’ll lose the power of we, the people, to shape our destiny.

“We, the people,” Biden explains, distorting the American understanding of that term, is where our freedom resides—with the collective, i.e. the state, not with the individual. If we, the people, decide that you don’t have freedom to speak your mind, then you don’t. It’s “we, the people,” that shapes “our” destiny. Where does that leave the freedom of we, as individuals, to shape our personal destinies?

The following statement rings hollow in the shadow of Biden’s “democracy [as the] America’s sacred cause”:

And look at what these [foreign] autocrats are doing to limit freedom in their countries.

They’re limiting freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom to assemble, women’s rights, LGBQ rights, people are going to jail. So much more.

Note that Biden condemns those freedom limitations by autocrats. They’re not elected, after all. He doesn’t condemn those limitations as such. No surprise. Biden,being elected, feels no compunction to limit our freedoms at will, like by bullying social media, forcing us to pay off others’ student loans, imposing vaccine mandates, outlawing “dark money,” and other rights-violating initiatives. Biden nails shut the coffin of Americanism near the end of his speech:

That’s why he doesn’t understand the most fundamental truth about this country.

Unlike other nations on Earth, America is not built on ethnicity, religion, geography.

We’re the only nation in the history of the world built on an idea, not hyperbole, built on an idea.

We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men and women are created equal.

It’s an idea, declared in the Declaration, created in a way that we’ve viewed everybody as equal and should be treated equal throughout their lives.

The Founders never viewed everyone as equal, except in a very specific and delimited respect. Note where Biden stops in his quote from the Declaration of Independence. Here is what the relevant part of the Declaration says in full:

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 . . .

Why does Biden stop short of mentioning the “unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness?” The Founders understood that rights are natural endowments of every individual human being—that is, derived from man’s nature and his relation to broader nature—that these rights precede government.

Biden talks about America’s sacred cause, but never mentions America’s actual sacred cause. Nowhere does Biden mention inalienable individual rights. In fact, the word individual isn’t even mentioned.

America is not a Democracy. It is a Constitutionally limited Republic in which people can abide by the majority because their inalienable individual rights are shielded from the majority’s power. No, President Biden, America is not a country in which “the fundamental right to vote is the right from which all other rights flow.” You’ve got it exactly backwards. The fundamental inalienable individual rights to life, liberty, and property are the rights from which the right to vote flows.

Misreading another American concept, Biden concludes:

In the cold winter of 1777, George Washington and his American troops to Valley Forge waged a battle on behalf of a revolutionary idea, that everyday people like where I come from, and the vast majority of you, not a king or a dictator, that everyday people can govern themselves without a king or a dictator.

“Self-government” fundamentally means the individual’s right to self-govern his own life. That is where the Declaration’s equality comes in—equality of rights to individual freedom of action in shaping his own life. It is from this moral concept of equality of individual self-government that the broader concept of political self-government in the democratic sense comes from. It is a limited democratic process, a process that forbids the majority from voting away the rights to “freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom to assemble, women’s rights, LGBQ rights.” Remember that the Democratic Party was founded as the party that believed that a majority could vote a minority into slavery

There you have it. Biden and Trump are fraternal twins. Both favor tyranny, with Biden’s the most dangerous form because of people’s vague understanding of genuine Americanism. The Democratic Party, founded in 1828 on a pro-slavery platform, has always rejected the American concept of Constitutionally limited rights-protecting government. Now, in 2024, the Democratic president has reaffirmed his party’s reactionary, anti-American philosophic heart.

Friday, January 12, 2024

Remembering Martin Luther King Jr. For His Moral Ideals Rather Than His Politics

In commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Peniel E. Joseph, the founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at Tufts University, said in a 2014 article:

King emerges as a talented individual whose rhetorical genius at the March on Washington helped elevate an entire nation through his moral power and sheer force of will.

The March on Washington was when King delivered his famous 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech. Joseph goes on:

Yet missing from many of the annual King celebrations is the portrait of a political revolutionary who, over time, evolved into a radical warrior for peace, justice and the eradication of poverty. During his last three years, King the “Dreamer” turned into one of the most eloquent, powerful and scathing critics of American society. King lent his moral force and power to anti-poverty crusades that questioned the economic system of capitalism and called for an end to the Vietnam War. . . . King’s powerful rage against economic exploitation and war is often overlooked when we think of him as only a race-healer.

The "moral power" of King's famous "Dream" speech in Washington was actually the moral power of the Founding Fathers resurrected. In that speech, King reminded Americans of the ideals laid down in the Declaration of Independence—the philosophic blueprint for the constitution and the new nation—and called on Americans to fully live up to those ideals. “In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check,” King said.

When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the "unalienable Rights" of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds."

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream 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."

Yet, King's Dream was to be corrupted by an inner contradiction. In his later years, King questioned the legitimacy of capitalism and turned to what he termed "democratic socialism," a hybrid of two evil systems (democracy and socialism) that repudiates the very ideals he espoused in his speech. In a supreme irony, King unwittingly aligned with the political ideology of America's first encounter with Democratic Socialism, the Confederate Slavocracy.* Therein lies one of the great American paradoxes—the clash between King the moral force and King the political revolutionary.

When the Founders drafted the Declaration of Independence, they laid down the radical principles that would give birth to capitalism. These 55 brilliant words—the opening lines of the second paragraph of the Declaration—sum up the essence of capitalism:

When King reaffirmed those ideals—that all men are created equal, possessing inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness protected equally and at all times under a government of objective law rather than of men—he was really, though apparently unwittingly, affirming the foundational principles of capitalism.

Capitalism is the system based on individual rights, rights-protecting government and the only kind of equality consistent with justice—equality of individual rights before the law. Because of these principles, Capitalism is the only social system that banishes exploitation and war, because individual rights banishes aggressive or initiatory force from human relationships—particularly aggressive force by government against the people. Under capitalism, exploitation is replaced with voluntary trade to mutual benefit among individuals, a win-win in which individuals trade value-for-value and get better together. Capitalism liberates every individual to think and act on his own judgement and work to lift himself from poverty, and protects those who take up that life-affirming challenge from would-be exploiters who don’t. And under capitalism, war is replaced with peaceful coexistence among nations based on that principle of trade.

So why would King uphold the moral principles of capitalism in his most famous speech while repudiating it in his politics? It's obvious that King didn't understand capitalism or fully grasp the moral implications of the Declaration of Independence that he so eloquently honored.

He undoubtedly viewed the America of the 1960s as capitalist, when in fact what America had was a mixed economy; a mixture of economic freedom and government controls—that is to say, an economy corrupted by heavy political interference, which included the virulently anti-capitalist Jim Crow segrgation laws. America in the 1960s was just emerging from a time when large segments of blacks were legally oppressed and hence unable to enjoy “the riches of freedom and the security of justice” that is capitalism. Blacks, King failed to understand, were not victims of capitalism but of statism.

King’s legacy includes an end to state-sponsored segregation and oppression—a monumental achievement. But his democratic socialist political policies also “succeeded,” strengthening and entrenching the mixed economy in America, which he mistakenly perceived as capitalism—the result being, in turn, to reduce economic opportunities for many poor but ambitious people, including African-Americans.

To his credit, King explicitly opposed full-blown socialism, which he believed leads to communism, a system that he correctly understood "forgets that life is individual." But he wrongly believed that "Capitalism forgets that life is social," leading him to his hybrid democratic socialism. He failed to see that capitalism, by leaving individuals free to pursue their own values in the absence of physical coercion, provides the only proper moral foundation for both individual flourishing and robust benevolent social interaction. That moral foundation, rational egoism, is implicit in the Declaration of Independence, which defends the inalienable rights of every individual to pursue his own happiness.

Thus is the paradox of Martin Luther King.

Commentators like Joseph urge us to elevate his politics to at least the level of his ideals. That, of course, would be an impossible contradiction. But ideas are where the real power lies. Since ideas are the driving force of human events, Martin Luther King, despite his politics, remains one of my heroes. Standing in a line that includes John Locke, the Founding Fathers, Abraham Lincoln, and Ayn Rand, among others, King reaffirmed America's Founding ideals at a crucial point in American history. That, to me, is his real legacy contribution to America. For that, I am grateful to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

HAPPY MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. DAY!!

* [See Randy E. Barnett, Our Republican Constitution, Chapter 4 “How Slavery Led to a More Republican Constitution.” See George Fitzhugh, "Centralization and Socialism." See especially C. Bradley Thompson, America's Revolutionary Mind, Epilogue, Page 359-386: Thompson documents the "common intellectual heritage" of 19th Century pro-slavery intellectuals and 20th-21st Century Progressives.]