Principled Perspectives: May 2024

Friday, May 31, 2024

America: Democratic Republic or Constitutionally Limited Republic?

The Founders were clear on what form of government they intended to create—a republic. They were also clear on what kind of republic—a revolutionary kind never before seen. The basic principles are laid out in the Declaration of Independence—a republican form of government that protects individual rights equally at all times, requires the consent of the governed, and limits the elected officials to that function, thus protecting rights from the tyranny of the majority.

Yet America’s Founding is widely misunderstood today, thanks largely to the Democratic Party’s centuries long, largely successful reactionary campaign to recast America as a Democracy. Thus it was of interest to me to come across Theodore R. Johnson’s Washington Post article American democracy is fine. It’s the republic that’s in trouble. He’s right, and points in the right directioin. But he still gets some things wrong.

I posted these comments, slightly edited for clarity:

America is not a “democratic republic.” It is a constitutionally limited republic, in which, contrary to Biden and the Democratic party, the inalienable rights of the individual to personal self-governance trumps the vote. When Biden said “the fundamental right to vote is the right from which all other rights flow,” he got it exactly backward. Our fundamental rights do not depend on other people’s vote—they are protected from it. Of course, Biden’s reactionary view is the totalitarian heart of his party that dates back to its pro-slavery “states rights” origins, which held that the enslavement of a segment of Americans could be determined by vote.

America is not based on rule by “the peoples’ will”; i.e., majority rule. That’s a totalitarian concept and leads not to a free, peaceful civil society but to Robespierre and Napoleon. America is a nation that protects individual rights from “the tyranny of the many”—democracy. The people’s will as expressed in electoral outcomes, usually a majority, matters, but only within limits established by the Constitution.

The Electoral College does not “trump the popular vote”: It is based on it, at the state level. It is a balance of power mechanism that protects the relevance of state legislatures vs. the federal government. A national tally is only one way of counting the popular vote, and in a diverse nation it is absurd. Furthermore, an individual’s vote “counts” proportionally more when broken down into 51 distinct contests, rather than thrown into one giant pot of 160 million or so. I prefer the Electoral College, for these and other reasons.

Hamilton was right. “The voice of the people” as expressed in elections needs to be checked, not blindly followed. That’s the purpose of a republic whose elected representatives are themselves checked in their power by an individual rights-protecting constitution.

Saturday, May 25, 2024

This Memorial Day, Remember that the Military Protects Our Borders, Not Our Freedom

American soldiers killed in action certainly deserve our gratitude and honor. But not for the usually recited reason.

Memorial Day once again featured the mantra that soldiers died defending our freedom and individual rights. One popular song even includes the phrase, “At least I know I’m free, and I won't forget the ones who died who gave that right to me.” Yet today our rights are under attack on multiple fronts. We are just emerging from a wave of pandemic-related lockdowns imposed by politicians. The news is full of horror stories of business owners being fined and shut down, they and their employees’ livelihoods stripped away, price controls imposed under the guise of “anti-gouging," even their customers arrested, for defying orders by political leaders wielding “emergency powers”.Where’s the military?

In the last 100 years, hundreds of thousands of American soldiers died on the battlefield. In that same 100 years, our general freedom, especially economic freedom, has steadily eroded due to the growth of the regulatory welfare state. Today we have an administration dictatorially shifting the burden of paying off student loans from the borrower to the rest of us taxpayers, ignoring the rule of law, the courts, and the Constitutional separation of powers, and coercing us into buying electric cars, to name just a couple of freedom restrictions. While our First Amendment freedoms have fared somewhat better, they today face withering attacks on multiple fronts, as are the governmental checks and balances put in place by the Founders to protect us from tyranny due to concentration of government power. Bodily sovereignty is under attack, through vaccine mandates and abortion rights threatened.

With our freedom and rights threatened or infringed in ever-wider ways, where was the military? Where is the military?

The fact is, contrary to the common well-meaning but wrong-headed Memorial Day propaganda, the military’s job is to protect our borders, not our freedom. Every country has a military. Not every country is free. Why? The fight to establish, maintain, and defend freedom is a philosophical, not a military, fight. It is fought with words and ideas, not guns and tanks. It is fought within, not outside, our borders. It is fought among the civilian, not military, population. The fight for freedom requires, not military combat, but mind-to-mind combat. The Founding generation’s defeat of the British Army, heroic as that was, did not secure our rights. Our rights were secured afterward, on the battlefield of political philosophy and constitutional law. That battlefield—the one of ideas, not arms—is where our Founders took the first and most crucial steps toward fulfilling the promise of the Declaration of Independence, the creation of a government “to secure these rights, drawing their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

The enemies of freedom exist not only in foreign dictatorships, but among us right here in America. The military has done a fine job of protecting us from foreign enemies. We, the people of the United States, have done poorly in our job of protecting our rights. By the design of some, the neglect and complacency of others, and ignorance of many, we have granted our government more and more power to restrict our individual rights. We must abandon our false sense of security that we can rely on the military to preserve and restore our liberty. The U.S. military has given us a virtually impenetrable forcefield to live behind. But it did not give us those rights. And it won’t protect those rights. It is entirely up to us, as individual citizens, to secure and restore our freedom and make our rights inalienable.

The military protects our borders from external threats, giving us the protective wall we need to fight the moral and intellectual battle to preserve and protect our liberty rights from internal threats. We're far from an authoritarian state, and we're still very free. But the threats are real. Let's not let it go. That's the best way to honor those who died protecting our country.

Saturday, May 11, 2024

Gaza, not Hamas, Attacked Israel

QUORA: ‘Does anyone really believe Hamas attacked Israel?

I posted this answer:

I don’t. That’s too simplistic. The truth is much broader than that.

Analysis of the Gaza conflict grossly misses the point. I think that to say Hamas attacked Israel way understates the full truth and understanding needed to fully grasp the magnitude of what actually happened on October 7. Hamas was not merely some criminal enterprise operating in an underworld of a nation governed more or less under the rule of law, like the Mexican Drug Cartels.

The fact is, Hamas was the GOVERNMENT of Gaza. Therefore, it was Gaza, not merely Hamas the terrorist group, that attacked Israel, just as it was the Empire of Japan that attacked the USA in 1941. And just as Japan got what it deserved because of its Imperial Government’s attack on Pearl Harbor, so it is that Gaza is getting what IT deserves in attacking Israel. All of the suffering and destruction and death Gaza residents are enduring is what THEIR OWN GOVERNMENT, not Israel, brought down on them.

It's morally black and white. And it’s not merely about terrorism or anti-Semitism. Israel was the victim of an unimaginably vicious, unprovoked aggression directed at civilian targets (which was arguably morally worse even than Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. Japan at least chose a military target). Israel is now defending itself. Who has the moral high ground? By any rational moral judgment, the defender, Israel—100%.

Israel shouldn't be called on to “cease fire” (i.e. surrender). The world should demand that Hamas unconditionally surrender, just as Japan did. And the world should commit to tracking down and forcing Hama members to answer for their war crimes, along with Hama’s state sponsors, just as the Nazis and Japanese war mongers did. The Gazan War would end immediately, just as WWII did.

[Supplemental, posted 5/15/24]

Some of the comments indicate the need for some clarification of my position. Apparently, I left the impression on some that anything Israel does in response to Oct. 7 is justified. That’s certainly not the case.

Israel is not seeking, and should never seek, revenge. For Israel to become like Hamas would surrender its moral high ground. Israel is fighting a war of self defense, not revenge. It does not target civilians. Its goal is military. When Japan attacked America, President FDR set the goal of his defensive military strategy—Japan’s (and the other Axis Powers’) unconditional surrender. It took Truman’s atomic bombs to reach that goal regarding Japan. Israel has set a goal to destroy Hamas. Just as America’s goal was not to kill civilians but to force Japan’s surrender, so it is Israel’s goal to eliminate the Gazan Hamas threat. As long as Israel sticks to that goal, and its military operations are in service to that legitimate goal, all consequences, including civilian deaths, are not the moral responsibility of Israel, but of Gaza’s Hamas dictatorship.

One commenter states that “Every conflict has to have a limit and a line not crossed?” Why? For what it’s worth, that is the “standard analysis.” But it’s not mine. There is no line that Israel must adhere to that stands in the way of achieving its strategic goal of eliminating the threat to its people, which is any government’s first responsibility. Israel is the victim! Any line prior to securing the safety of its people amounts to the victory of the aggressor, a moral abomination. I do not believe in Just War Theory. The only line that should not be crossed is for any country to attack another unprovoked, a line which Gaza crossed.