Principled Perspectives: September 2024

Monday, September 16, 2024

On This Constitution Day, Remember the Declaration of Independence

237 years ago, on September 17, 1787, the Constitutional Convention ended and the Constitution of the United States of America was signed. This day is officially known as Constitution Day.

It was also an occasion for one columnist to declare that the US Constitution is "broken." The New Jersey Star-Ledger's Tom Moran wrote five years ago:

Kids in America are taught to venerate the Constitution, almost as if it were the word of God.

And that’s exactly what Thomas Jefferson feared. He believed it was flawed, that experience would teach each generation new lessons and that it should be redone every 19 years.

But Jefferson lost the argument. And so the Founders signed a Constitution 225 [235] years ago tomorrow that is an impregnable fortress, firmly set against the forces of change that Jefferson welcomed and almost impossible to amend.

Does that make sense? Haven’t we learned valuable lessons over the past few centuries about how democracies thrive, and how they stagnate? In a day when our federal government is so dysfunctional, shouldn't we at least consider fundamental changes?

University of Texas Professor Sanford Levinson is advocating a series of such fundamental changes to the US Constitution, which Moran discusses in his column. Levinson's proposals include instituting a direct popular vote for president and measures to greatly weaken the checks and balances that limit the power of any one branch of government. In essence, Levinson's purpose, according to Moran, is to expand the power of majority rule and break Washington's political "gridlock," which has made our federal government "dysfunctional."

Moran approvingly cites Thomas Jefferson who, as Moran strongly implies, would welcome these constitutional changes, or any changes suited to any generation.

Before we discuss ways to expand the power of electoral majority rule so as to enable the government to get more "done", we need to have a conversation to reiterate what the government's proper job is to do.

The American constitution's basic function is to limit the government's power to the protection of individual rights. This is spelled out in the Declaration of Independence, the philosophical blueprint for the constitution. Any discussion about the constitution has to begin with the Declaration--which, incidentally, was written by Thomas Jefferson:

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. . .

In its essentials, this 55 word statement of proper government says:

All men are born equal in moral agency to self-govern their own lives without interference from other men.
Each individual has rights to secure his freedom to exercise moral agency.
Rights belong inextricably to the individual by virtue of his nature as a human being.
Rights are held equally and at all times by all people.
Rights are guarantees to freedom of action; to the pursuit of happiness, not to happiness guaranteed by the labor or wealth of others.
Rights precede government.
Government is created exclusively to “secure”—i.e., protect—rights, not to grant them by legislative decree.
Government’s “just powers” being authorized by the people, through a popular vote.
“Just powers” being those powers, and only those powers, required for the government to fulfill the purpose for which it was created to begin with—to legally protect the people’s unalienable individual rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.

Of course, this is not the "Word of God," to be accepted uncritically. Each of these points requires extensive philosophical backup. None of these "truths" are automatically "self-evident." They must be learned and validated scientifically; i.e., morally and philosophically, as determined by the observable facts of reality concerning man and his requirements for survival and flourishing. But these are the essentials, as I see it.

The Founders did not intend to create a democracy, despite Moran's devious attempt to smuggle in that premise. They created a constitutionally limited republic protective of the liberty and rights of the individual, under which the constitution "carefully limits the power of the majority by drawing a legal boundary around it" (P. 113)—a boundary that stops the majority and elected officials' power where individual rights begin. The Founders understood that the government presupposes individual rights. So the constitutional discussion must begin with the questions: What are rights, and what is the proper function of government?

As the Declaration states, every individual is "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Since productive work is the only means of sustaining one's life and achieving happiness, it's obvious that the Founders understood--including in Jefferson's own words--that property rights are among those rights. The Declaration then states "That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men." Rights—which in fact are not endowments by either nature or God but moral principles derived from observations and facts about human nature—are sanctions to freedom of action in a social context, not a claim on the lives and property of others or a government guarantee of material well-being and happiness. Notice that the constitution does not authorize the government to redistribute private wealth. Forced redistribution of wealth or income would relegate some people to privilege and others to involuntary servitude, which would violate the principle of equality.

Moran is wrong. America hasn't stagnated. It has "progressed" from what was a largely free country a century ago to a burgeoning regulatory welfare state—a dangerous regressionary trend unsupported by constitutional authority. Why? Because the fundamental principles upon which the constitution rests have been largely abandoned, opening the door to the piecemeal progression toward unlimited majoritarian rule, a manifestation of totalitarianism. Consequently, our best short-term protection against further encroachments on individual rights--and it's a weak protection--is political gridlock. I can't think of anything more dangerous to America's future than to begin tampering with the basics of the constitution in today's cultural environment. Before we consider unshackling majority rule, we must rediscover our Founding principles, roll back the regulatory welfare state, and provide ironclad guarantees that no one's rights be alienated by majority vote; i.e., respect the original intent of the constitution.

The Founders did not intend to replace absolute monarchy with absolute majority rule unconstrained by the principle of individual rights. As Benjamin Martin (Mel Gibson) asked during a debate over the propriety of the Revolutionary War in the movie "The Patriot", "Why should I trade one tyrant 3000 miles away for 3000 tyrants one mile away? An elected legislature can trample a man's rights as easily as a king can."

The answer: We shouldn't. As Jefferson said, "the majority, oppressing an individual, is guilty of a crime, abuses its strength, and by acting on the law of the strongest breaks up the foundations of society." The Founders were not primarily concerned with giving the people the right to vote. They intended to liberate the people from predatory government, whether monarchistic, theocratic, socialist, or democratic.

There are those who would invert the original concept of Americanism—that the individual is sovereign and his life belongs to him—and replace it with the idea that the collective—i.e., the state—is sovereign over the individual. It is an attempted transition from republican constitutionalism to democracy; from individualism to collectivism. We cannot let the counter-revolutionary reactionaries succeed. The fight to defeat the reactionaries and restore and renew Americanism can start with this: As we celebrate Constitution Day, remember what I call the Constitution’s philosophic blueprint, or what has also been called the Conscience of the Constitution—the Declaration of Independence.

Monday, September 9, 2024

Harris's Unchanged anti-American Values

Kamala Harris held an August 2024 interview on CNN in which she sought to clarify her “flip-flops” on key issues. But what really stood out for me are two key deeper points: her values haven’t changed, which will define the policies she will actually advance regardless of her “tack to the middle” flip-flops on controversial issues. And her most reactionary—and dangerous—core value, which she hasn’t “flipped,” is her belief that voting is our most important right.

America was Founded on natural rights theory, which holds that man’s individual rights derive from his nature as a sovereign, self-owning, self-governing being. Starting with the most fundamental right, the individual’s right to life, all of the fundamental rights of man, including liberty and property, precede government, and cannot be taken or granted by any governing authority. In the words of America’s Founding legal document, the Declaration of Independence,

Note the hierarchy. Governments don’t create rights. They secure our rights, which are thus unalienable. Note that the right to vote comes into view, implicitly, only after the institution of government, as implied in “the consent of the governed.” James Madison explained the Founders’ revolutionary new orientation between the government and the people’s liberties, reaffirming the principles laid out in the Declaration:

In Europe, charters of liberty have been granted by power. America has set the example . . . of charters of power granted by liberty. This revolution in the practice of the world, may, with an honest praise, be pronounced the most triumphant epoch of its history . . .

[My emphasis]

The Democratic Party holds the opposite principle—that rights come from the government—charters of liberty granted by power—thus canceling America.

When England began violating the colonists’ rights with a coercive series of liberty-infringing Acts, the colonists realized that their “rights of Englishmen,” which were charters of liberty granted by the power of the government, were not as secure as they thought and that the British government could as easily rescind them as protect them. Thus, the colonists—who around this time began identifying as Americans, rather than Englishmen—turned to natural rights theory, especially as espoused by John Locke. In classic reactionary fashion, the Democratic Party rejects Locke and natural rights theory. It reverts back to the pre-Revolutionary totalitarian concept of rights as grants of governmental privilege, being only as secure as the next rights-violating legislation. Out go unalienable individual rights, and thus the fundamental principle of America.

This is not hyperbolic. The Democrats, as always, are very explicit about this. In the interview, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris said, explaining her concept of “freedom”:

“The freedom to live safe from gun violence in our schools, communities and places of worship,” Harris said Thursday. “The freedom to love who you love openly and with pride. The freedom to breathe clean air, and drink clean water and live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis. And the freedom that unlocks all the others: the freedom to vote.”

Thus, Harris reaffirmed her allegiance to the Democratic Party’s fundamentally anti-American orientation.

The emphasized principle conforms perfectly with Biden’s assertion that “The fundamental right to vote is the right from which all other rights flow.” Biden didn’t misspeak. The U.S. Justice Department based it’s lawsuit against Georgia’s election law on the same premise. Attorney General Merrick Garland declared that "The right of all eligible citizens to vote is the central pillar of our democracy, the right from which all other rights ultimately flow.”

Think about what this means. The Democratic Party was founded on this principle in 1828, led by the pro-slavery platform position that if the majority votes to enslave a minority, the minority gets enslaved. This means the right to life is dependent on election outcomes, and can be taken away, along with all other rights, if the voters, or the voters’ elected representatives, say so. Hence, the Democratic Party.

To this day, the Democrats have not changed their ideological stripes. They have always had, and still have, totalitarian designs on America. Only the details have changed. The Party that once stood for plantation slavery now stands for socialist slavery—which, as Confederate intellectual George Fitzhugh explains in his seminal defense of slavery, Sociology for the South: Or the Failure of Free Society, are fundamentally the same.

Harris is dead wrong. Freedom is not the right to vote. Freedom is the right to live one’s life by one’s own choices and values, regardless of anyone else’s vote or of the outcome of any election. Any government, including an elected government, that has the power to grant and rescind rights at will is a totalitarian state. The Founders sought to protect individual rights from tyrannical government, whether autocratic, aristocratic, or democratic—or as James Madison put it, from "the one, the few, or the many." Harris seeks to obliterate that ironclad protection. The Founders' miraculous achievement—"the most triumphant epoch in [the world's] history"—gets thrown under the bus. And it’s a premise that dates back to the founding of her party. So much for Harris’s vaunted value of “freedom.” Her values indeed have not changed. She was never, and is not now, a champion of freedom, properly understood. Without inalienable individual rights, no freedom—and no United States of America—would have been possible. Remember that in the United States of America, we’re not free because we vote. We vote because we are free.

It's as if Harris and the Democratic Party don't understand that their policies and values would destroy America as we know it, and what the Founders intended—or as if they do, and intend just that. I have long believed the latter. So, once again, my commitment to never vote Democrat is reinforced.