“The notion that rights don’t come from laws and don’t come from the government, but come from the Creator — that’s what the Iranian government believes. It’s a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Sharia law,” said Democrat Senator Tim Kaine at recent Senate hearing, revealing how progressives truly feel about the Founding.
For at least two decades, it’s been apparent that modern progressives have increasingly abandoned the principles enshrined in our Founding documents and the nature of the system of government created by the Constitution. While they might periodically protest otherwise, seven years before he was elected President, Barack Obama was not exactly showering either with praise when he told WBEZ Public Radio in Chicago that “The Constitution is a charter of negative liberties, says what the states can’t do to you, says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf.” By 2019, progressives were declaring that the real Founding occurred in 1619 rather than 1776 and the entire country was created to protect the institution of slavery. In their view, everything from logging your hours and productivity at work to the design of our roads was fundamentally flawed because of this original sin. Accordingly, the arrival of the first slave was “the country’s very origin,” America grew “out of slavery—and the anti‐black racism it required,” and “nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional” is the result of slavery. As Matthew Desmond described the nature of America today, “In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation…Those searching for reasons the American economy is uniquely severe and unbridled have found answers in many places (religion, politics, culture). But recently, historians have pointed persuasively to the gnatty fields of Georgia and Alabama, to the cotton houses and slave auction blocks, as the birthplace of America’s low-road approach to capitalism.” They made these claims even as no one was free anywhere in the world when the Declaration was originally signed, no one had rights as we understand them today, and no government had ever been founded on the idea of equality. To put this in perspective, France didn’t become a true Republic until 1870. Germany and Austria didn’t become Republics until after World War I. Russia still isn’t a Republic. Even in more liberal England, a hereditary House of Lords maintained significant power over elected representatives in the House of Commons until 1909. Regardless, anti-American ideas had gone mainstream by this point. The 1619 Project, as the effort was called, was initiated and published by The New York Times, received the Pulitzer Prize, and was promptly turned into a curriculum for school children. More recently, as in last month, the Times gave a forum to a radical professor, Osita Nwanevu, who agreed with the notion that America was founded as an oligarchy with no interest whatsoever in equal representation or fundamental rights, that the issues in America today stem from this fundamental failure, and “When it comes to solving the concrete problems of inequality, worker power — the absence of worker power, the absence of worker voice — is one of the things that’s contributed to our current economic situation.”
At the time, progressives insisted these weren’t mainstream ideas. President Barack Obama made his statement seven years before he sought the Presidency and had presumably grown in his thinking since then. The 1619 Project and the more recent calls to dismantle and recreate American democracy as most people know it were not voiced by politicians and were not inherently political endeavors, they said. These, you see, were merely academics and others thinking outside the box or something, as the chattering class is prone to do, but for better or worse, this argument completely collapsed earlier this week when a sitting Senator and former Democrat Vice Presidential candidate compared the Founders notion of fundamental rights with the Ayatollah of Iran on video tape in a Senate hearing. In what can only be described as an unprecedented attack on the very nature of American freedom in the modern era, Connecticut Senator Tim Kaine declared, “The notion that rights don’t come from laws and don’t come from the government, but come from the Creator — that’s what the Iranian government believes. It’s a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Sharia law and targets Sunnis, Bahá’ís, Jews, Christians and other religious minorities. And they do it because they believe that they understand what natural rights are from their Creator. So the statement that our rights do not come from our laws or our governments is extremely troubling.” Even setting aside the insanity of comparing those who might well have done more for human freedom than anyone in the history of the known universe to the theocratic tyrants who rule Iran, it reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what made the Founder’s philosophy so groundbreaking and effective. If rights are nothing more than dispensations granted by a government of any form, whether democratic, republican, authoritarian, or whatever, they are subject to the whims of whoever is in power. Rather than being permanent, fixed, and fundamental, they are temporary, malleable, and contingent, to be given and taken, modified and refined. This is, in fact, the way rights were generally conceived prior to the Founders. While the British aristocracy had recognized the notion that the king was not an all-powerful figure and was necessarily restrained in certain actions either on behalf of the state or its citizens since at least the Magna Carta in 1215, any rights or limitations were generally seen as transactional, contingent on the politics of the day. As such, the Magna Carta itself was a peace treaty negotiated between King John and the leading nobles, not a fundamental statement of principle. Though it laid the foundation for the future, including key ideas such as “No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or disseized or outlawed or exiled or in any ruined…except by lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land,” or “To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny, or delay right or justice,” the settlement was negotiated and as such, frequently discarded altogether when it was politically expedient.
The Founders, of course, had personal experience of this in their own lifetimes. In principle, they were citizens of England and enjoyed their rights as such, but in practice, the colonies as a whole had no representation in Parliament and they were subject to the whims of that body and King George III, who was at least partially mad. Since they had no direct say, they had no influence on how they were taxed or governed. As Parliament began levying a series of more and more onerous taxes, including the Sugar Act (1764), the Stamp Act (1765), and the Townshend Acts (1767-1768), the colonists began rallying under the slogan “no taxation without representation” to express their anger and frustration at lacking a voice in their own government. These new taxes were in addition to prohibiting the colonists from issuing their own paper currency under the Currency Act of 1764 and mandating they pay to house and feed British soldiers under the Quartering Act of 1765. After the Boston Tea Party, the so-called Intolerable Acts of 1774 closed the Boston port against the will of the people and removed all of Massachusetts from local control including the administration of justice for British officials. When it came time to form their own government in the wake of the Revolutionary War, the Founders intentionally chose a different course. Instead of transactional rights negotiated between the government and the governed, they built upon the philosophy of James Locke and framed them as inalienable, coming from a non-denominational Creator, making them fixed and permanent compared to leaders who come and go, things that could not be taken away by anyone for any reason. Instead of a government constrained only by the will of Parliament and the King at the present moment, they introduced two key ideas. First, the government itself exists because of the will of the people and is bound by the consent of the people; thus the preamble opens with famous words, “We the People of the United States,” rather than “We the Government of the United States.” Second, the government is granted only certain enumerated powers, wherein they can only perform certain functions and each branch serves a certain role, making them separate in their spheres and equal compared to each other. While some like President Obama might consider this a “negative charter,” because at times, more words were devoted to what the government couldn’t do rather than what it must do, the reality is the opposite. The charter might have been negative from the perspective of the ruling classes, limiting their power and influence, but from the perspective of the citizenry, it guaranteed freedoms that had been previously acknowledged, but all-too frequently denied.
This is undoubtedly why generations of Civil Rights leaders, from Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King, Jr. embraced our Founding documents as the key to the freedoms of the oppressed. While they were all too aware the rights enshrined in the Constitution were not nearly as universal as advertised, having suffered under the yoke of slavery and segregation, their solution to both atrocities was to make America live up to its potential, rather than fundamentally remake America. As Douglass described it while in Glasgow, Scotland in 1860, “The American Constitution is a written instrument full and complete in itself. No Court in America, no Congress, no President, can add a single word thereto, or take a single word thereto. It is a great national enactment done by the people, and can only be altered, amended, or added to by the people…What will the people of America a hundred years hence care about the intentions of the scriveners who wrote the Constitution? These men are already gone from us, and in the course of nature were expected to go from us. They were for a generation, but the Constitution is for ages.” For his part, King framed it this way, “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 and well as white men, would be guaranteed the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Both men and countless others up until very recently understood Abraham Lincoln when he said of Thomas Jefferson, the primary writer of the Declaration of Independence, “All honor to Jefferson, to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men at all times, and so to embalm it there, that today, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.”
In contrast, Senator Kaine’s statement and those by many of his progressive allies reveal two rather disturbing things, at least in my opinion. First, the Founders are treated with increasing contempt if not outright hatred. If you seek to compare Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues in public – from the Senate they created no less – to one of the world’s leading tyrants, it’s impossible to believe you respect any of their principles, achievements, or works. Instead, it can only represent a deep seated skepticism at best or a loathing at worst. Ultimately, no one would rightly seek to preserve anything founded by the Ayatollah and therefore, we can assume they do not seek to preserve anything bequeathed to us by our Founders. Second, and perhaps more importantly, they are increasingly chafing at the very idea that the government in the United States has fundamental limitations, viewing these as constraints on their grand plans to remake the country. It is one thing to note that the Founders were people like everyone else and were essentially flawed. Jefferson, for example, was undoubtedly gifted and among the most influential people to have ever lived, but he was also deeply partisan and had a craving for power that led him to betray Alexander Hamilton’s trust, refuse to join a coalition government with John Adams, and discretely engage with muckraking journalists. Considering who they were as people is illuminating and humbling, but as the old saying goes, we can choose to trust the art, not the artist, believing that what he and his fellows created is superior to any individual. The reality is simple, even if they deny it: Though Senator Kaine and others may claim to champion democracy, they are not championing anything resembling what most people think is democracy. They are championing a version of it that is radically different, where they are in charge, free to do what they want, forever. Though Jefferson is not believed to have actually said it, there is a quote frequently attributed to him that began to appear in the 1950s which nicely encapsulates why the Founder’s vision is superior and why the progressive vision is so dangerous. “A government big enough to give you everything you want, is a government big enough to take away everything that you have.” While Senator Kaine didn’t specifically call for taking away any rights, why would he want to keep those that are no better than Iran and if you do not believe in the genius of inalienable rights to begin with, what must you think of the rest of our constitutional order? When you consider that Senator Kaine was less than 80 electoral votes from being a heartbeat away from the Presidency, it’s hard to believe this is no longer a fringe idea among Democrats.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 