The Democrats appear poised to win control of one or both houses of Congress. So it’s a good time to revisit the Democrats' reactionary designs on our electoral process, especially now that their party is increasingly captured by the radically counter-Enlightenment, Marxist-oriented anti-American Democratic Socialists of America, whose agenda includes totalitarian Democracy fundamentalism.
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.
After falsely claiming voting rights across America as under threat from laws like Georgia’s new voting law as, Biden’s philosophic treason comes into full view:
The filibuster has been weaponized and abused.
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.
I make this announcement with careful deliberation, recognizing the fundamental right to vote is the right from which all other rights flow. [My emphasis]
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. America has never been about majority rule. 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, embraced by America’s Founding Fathers, 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 inalienable rights to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness are the rights from which all other rights—including the right to vote—flow.
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 the 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.
It means endorsing the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization overturning Roe v. Wade because it made a women’s right to abortion a matter of democratic vote rather than inalienable.
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 benevolent whims (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 socialist 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, or 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 Slave Power centered in 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 the extent they can get away with it—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.
In case you think this is hyperbole, consider that Biden’s view is precisely affirmed by his own Justice Department under Attorney General Merrick Garland, and by his Vice President, Kamala Harris, during her presidential candidacy. Since philosophy is the primary engine of history, who, then, is the real Protégé of 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.”
There is plenty more that is bad about the Democrats’ attempt to enact their election reforms. I covered the bad elements in my post HR-1 is An Assault on Free Speech, Property Rights, Freedom of Conscience, and Privacy. Some version of the Democrats’ “Voting Rights” bill has been kicking around Congress for years. For now, it remains stalled. Let’s hope it never becomes law, and fight to kill it.
* (This bill remains stalled in Congress.)
Related Reading:
HR-1 is An Assault on Free Speech, Property Rights, Freedom of Conscience, and Privacy
The Democrats’ Anti-Free Speech Bill HR-1—the ‘For the People Act’—is Still a Threat
Harris's Unchanged anti-American Values
Voting Rights are Not the ‘Most Fundamental Right’—or Even a Fundamental Right.
The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence and the Right to Liberty—Timothy Sandefur
America; Democracy or Republic or Both--Why it Matters
Understanding the Role of the Senate Filibuster
Jesse Jackson’s Big Lie: ‘American Democracy is Under Siege’
A New Textbook of Americanism: The Politics of Ayn Rand edited by Jonathan Hoenig
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