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,
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]
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.
Related Reading:
Joe Biden—the Real Protégé of Jefferson Davis
Voting Rights are Not the ‘Most Fundamental Right’—or Even a Fundamental Right.
QUORA: Why does the Pledge of Allegiance say the USA is Republican not Democratic?
The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty—Timothy Sandefur
Why I Will Never Vote for a Democrat
America's Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It by C. Bradley Thompson
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