If conservatives had supported civil rights in the 1960s, African-Americans would be a conservative people today.
Confession: “a statement of guilt or obligation in a matter pertaining to oneself.” (Source: Webster’s Third New International Dictionary)
Time Magazine columnist Christopher John Farley has said an unwritten rule prohibits black dirty laundry from being aired before the white public. Maybe, Farley learned the rule at Harvard.
Allow me to break the rule.
Over the years, I have been involved with the law, not as a criminal or thug gangster glamorized by rap and hip-hop. My involvement has been more mainstream — law school applicant, law school student, law firm associate, legislative assistant for a liberal member of Congress, law professor, lawyer. And during those years, I have encountered matters that raise questions about character, about duty, about honor. These questions need not be cast as “conservative” but they should engage conservatives. I consider them “confessions” because, with hindsight, I should have responded in a different way. But with age comes wisdom.
These confessions are not intended to shock and awe or entertain. Rather, they look into how things are, how race has been lived within the last twenty years in the law. And they provoke thought. Do we expand or close the relationship gap between blacks and whites on a daily basis? What is the goal of race relations — black liberation, black identity, or some other goal? Do the rules apply to Black Americans or is “Blackness” all the difference? Are dishonorable actions OK in the name of loyalty to the race?
Confession No. 1
An African-American law professor said he would never fail a black student. The audacity stunned me. But suppose the student deserved to fail, I asked. My friend replied he refused to be an instrument of racist oppression. How can you say any black student deserved to fail my course in light of structural racism, he asked me.
I did not challenge his nonsense. I regret not doing so.
And so every black law student in my friend’s class has an unwritten pass.
Confession No. 2
I invited a good white friend to attend a black bar association meeting. To his credit, my friend wanted to attend and learn about the group. There was no “Blacks Only” policy to my knowledge. When we arrived at the event, heads turned. Someone whispered to me, “what is he doing here?” I tried to make my friend feel at ease but the black attorneys present would not be mollified. No one asked my friend to leave but he was not made to feel welcome.
I did not speak at subsequent meetings and express my displeasure with my friend’s treatment. I should have.
Confession No. 3
While attending an American Association of Law Schools (AALS) luncheon, I ran into my good friend again. By now, both he and his wife had become law professors back east. I invited them to sit with me at a table where I happened to be. I loved their company and was eager to catch up on life. Unfortunately, the table happened to be a Black Table where all the other participants were black. The free-flowing conversation ceased when my white friends sat down. I offered introductions but it became clear that my good friends (who were better friends than others at the table) were persona non grata.
With hindsight, I should have staged a walkout against the prejudiced others. I did not and I regret not doing so.
Confession No. 4
I am not from the islands.
At otherwise normal moments, someone has assumed I am from the islands. For example, at the AALS lunch noted in Confession No. 3, a black law professor turned to me and asked, “what island are you from?” Hmmn. I had not slipped into a Harry Belafonte “Come Mr. Tally Man. Tally me banana” routine. I didn’t wear dreadlocks. I checked my accent again for signs of a Kingston dialect. Just kidding. The gentleman had absolutely no reason to assume I came from the islands. I wrote him off as strange.
But it had happened before! When skiing in Bath, Maine one year, my girlfriend and I were the only African-Americans around for miles. The tour operator, in making conversation, asked if I came from Jamaica. Jamaica! I laughed and answered that I came from southern Virginia. She seemed puzzled and disappointed.
When I once spoke to a group of all-risk black boys, they asked if I was from England. They laughed and considered it quite funny that a black law professor would talk in standard English. I didn’t say it at the time but I just felt sorry for their life prospects if they could not distinguish between standard English and someone from England. Very sad.
In a long phone conversation with a black judge I had known for years, the judge came out and asked me what island was I from. The first time it happened I laughed. The second time it happened, I thought the questioner quirky. But when it happened a third time, I knew something was wrong. Our expectations are so low for black men that the average guy who speaks standard English is presumed to be from the islands or England.
Let the record be clear — I am from Chester, Virginia. I am not from the islands!
Confession No. 5
At the University of Virginia, I learned honor. A gentleman did not lie. A gentleman did cheat. A gentleman did not steal. I strive to teach these principles to my children.
At Harvard Law School (HLS), I witnessed dishonor. “Susan” attended law school because her greatgrandfather wanted a criminal lawyer in the family (and for good reason but that’s another story). She should have been a writer. Writing was her passion. With no passion or bliss for the practice of law, Susan found law school to be one long grind towards failure. She failed Contracts, a hard thing to do at HLS. In a merciful world, Susan would have dropped out of law school, stood up to her grandfather and lived her own life in literature.
But Susan chose the path of dishonor.
She re-took her Contracts exam which happened to be a take-home test. When she discovered that she did not have a clue, she called her best friend. Her best friend walked her through the exam. And Susan remained in law school.
I did not report Susan and her best friend, both African-Americans, to the administration but I should have. Now, my black law professor friend would argue that the need for more black lawyers is so great that the rules should be bent every now and then. I reject that position. Everyone should be held to the same standards.
Confession No. 6
We think of passing for white as an 1800s or early 1900s thing. Surely, students of African descent would not desire to pass in a post “Black is Beautiful” era.
You would be surprised.
During my first year at HLS, I noticed that about 25% of the blacks didn’t look African-American in a traditional sense. Many might have claimed to be Hispanic, Japanese-American, or Spanish and no one would have been the wiser.
A special scorn though fell upon admitted students who checked “African-American” on their applications but lived white lives. “Alma” was the daughter of a white Nazi father and a mixed race mother. Alma came from Canada. Within the first month, Black Law Students Association (BLSA) leaders began noticing that Alma had not picked up any notices from BLSA. Alma had no black friends. She did not attend any BLSA meetings.
This state of affairs would not do for the loyalty police.
I witnessed students stuffing Alma’s box with BLSA notices in an attempt to out her. Others posted BLSA notices on the hallway walls with her name highlighted or circled on the flyer. And folks would talk about Alma like there was no tomorrow. The conflict intensified when it was discovered that her distant cousin, a militant student from the San Francisco housing projects, also attended HLS.
I observed the pressures brought to bear on Alma to conform. I did not speak out.
Why should conservatives care about these confessions?
Once upon a time, black teachers held black students to exacting standards. Discipline and decorum were expected. Ideas viewed as conservative were commonplace in black classrooms and churches.
For example, I do not use profanity. Why? As a first grader, I watched an episode of Gunsmoke one day. One of the characters used the term, “son of a gun.” Well, I thought “son of a gun” was the neatest thing you could say. “Son of a gun.” When I showed up for class for the next day, I said “son of a gun” as blissfully as a stock trader might have remarked upon a favorable trade. I did not see the life-altering moment ahead of me. “What did you say?” asked my first-grade teacher, Lucille Walker. Ms. Walker knew me and my family well. She had taught my father and my grandmother. She attended my family church up the road and had tea with my grandmother on occasion.
Ms. Walked ordered me to walk up to the front of my classroom and to repeat what I had said. “Son of a gun,” I meekly answered. Calmly, Ms. Walker removed a 12-inch ruler from her desk and rapped my knuckles six times in full view of the class. “I never want to hear you use words like that again,” she said. And to this day, I have not used profanity again.
In the second grade, Mr. Taylor lectured my classmates on the importance of speaking proper English. I remember that she had a particular hostility for use of the word “ain’t.” As a forty-five-year-old man, I can see how she was preparing us for desegregation and attending formerly all-white schools. But at the time, I internalized the lesson — educated people spoke proper English. Race did not enter into the picture.
These are conservative values and attitudes, attitudes free from the nonsense of relativism.
Why did conservatism lose its moral authority?
The answer might surprise you.
When conservatives fought the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Housing act of 1968, conservatism lost its moral authority in Black America. Conservatism became stigmatized. African-Americans were not a liberal people in their folkways but liberals stood on the right side of history. And so black teachers like Ms. Walker, Ms. Taylor and countless others downplayed and dissociated themselves from conservative thoughts.
At first blush, the stigma of conservative thought made sense. Conservatives opposed commonsense civil rights. Liberals stood on the side of expanding opportunity. And radicals in Black America got more air time than everyday folks. Being a Malcolm X or a Black Panther brought status and prestige at the end of the 1960s. “Negro Conservatives” like George Schuyler and black college presidents appeared to be on the losing side of the cultural war.
The stigma of conservative thought created a moral vacuum. Blame the Man rhetoric and cries of “structural racism” filled the void. Conservatism within the black community gave way to identity politics and critical race studies. Loyalty to the race would mean more than loyalty to one’s self. In this environment, a private refusal to fail black students makes sense because standards are less important than structural racism. Separatism from whites followed from an inflation of group identity. And speaking proper English would be scorned as speaking the White Man’s English. Some inner-city black males like Cedric Jennings of Ballou High School in D.C. would never be exposed to standard English until college.
When conservatives chose to oppose civil rights, they stigmatized conservative thought for decades within the black community. If conservatives had supported civil rights in the 1960s, African-Americans would be a conservative people today.
What can be done?
The lost moral authority of conservative thought in Black America is an intellectual tragedy. Respect for authority, for one’s elders, and for proper English had been a part of Black life for generations. When conservative thought died, the dysfunction ahead for African-Americans became inevitable. It is too late for conservatives to reclaim the moral high ground. There are legions of Blame the Man scholars who will wave the bloody shirt of slain civil rights workers. The answer might be a neoconservative movement. Beginning with a clean slate, neoconservatism could begin from a position of moral authority and yet anchor a new philosophy in the reality of the black condition today. There is much conservatism to be rediscovered in the black tradition. Why not reject the Hunt for Black Identity in favor of high standards and proper English? Why not?
You are missing the point. Conservatives did not support the “civil rights movement” because there was nothing conservative about it. There is a reason that all the great conservative intellectuals (Eliot, Weaver, Kirk, etc.) opposed it. It entailed big-government socialism.
Yes, the very notion of “rights” is a product of the liberal Enlightenment and revolutionary thought. There is not a single thing conservative about the radical, left-wing “civil rights movement.” Any sort of “rights” talk will always be left-wing.
Conservatives were not universally against Civil Rights legislation – quite the opposite. The deep south at the time was nearly universally represented by the Democrats, and that is where the strongest opposition to the Civil Rights legislation came from. In retrospect though, could you blame anyone for opposing that legislation given the affects that it’s abuse has caused? Legislation that was supposed to be about equal rights has turned into a demand for special rights – such as proportional school and workplace placement regardless of qualification, affirmative action, etc – and a white-guilt mentality that has kept black people in poverty and dependence ever since. And the perpetrators of that abuse of the law and the consequences it has entailed have been, and are, liberals – not conservatives.
The idea that American blacks would be politically conservative if conservatives would have supported the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s is absurd. The unique and often sad history of blacks in America offers one reason why they make poor subjects for conservatism. How can blacks internalize a nation’s history with love when they have been so far outside the nation’s history? How can a black American hold dear national heroes like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Robert E. Lee or Stonewall Jackson? The answer to both questions is that they can’t. But conservatives, who must love the historic nation, warts and all, must internalize and defend their historic nation.
A second reason that argues against any sort of black conservatism in this country is that blacks are the American ethnic group most at odds with conservatism, both social and economic. Blacks have terrible family formation and fatherless homes dominate most black urban neighborhoods. Black illegitimacy is about 70 percent, black sexual promiscuity is high, black crime rates are staggering, black abortion rates are the highest of any ethnic group in the nation, black academic achievement is miniscule. As for black economic achievement, yes, millions of blacks have made it into the middle class yet a majority of blacks seem mired in poverty or near-poverty. As America lurches into the Information Age, so many blacks are left behind that it could almost be said that, as a group, they are a superfluous people. Brought here as agricultural workers in large quantities in the later 1600s, the changes in the American economy over the past century have been a difficult sojourn for blacks to navigate. Machinery thrust them out of agriculture by the mid-1900s, industrial jobs that encouraged the great migration to northern cities are no longer there in great quantities, and now, with the onset of the Information Age requiring strong academic standards, blacks are being left further behind with tens of millions locked into squalid urban centers like Detroit, Newark, Camden, Philadelphia, Cleveland and dozens of similar cities. Millions of blacks must find the economic changes of the past three generations bewildering. Finally, it would seem that black Americans do best in government jobs, not a bastion of conservatism to say the least.
Conservatism is bigger than the GOP. During the “civil rights” debate, there were more conservatives in the Democratic Party than in the Republican. (At this time, the Republican Party was quite liberal.) But regardless, the conservatives in both parties opposed the radical, left-wing “civil rights movement.” All the key conservative intellectuals too vehemently opposed the “civil rights movement,” and rightly so. It is left-wing nonsense. The very notion of “rights” comes from the liberal Enlightenment and revolutionaries. “Rights talk” is inherently left-wing.
Martin Luther King was a Bible-believing ordained minister. He took his message to the streets and stood against hatred and oppression. He believed the Declaration and the Constitution, and appealed to the Bible for his authority. I would call him conservative.
When I read the Constitution and the Declaration, I see grand themes of liberty for all people. Racism was a feature of society that waited for courageous men to stand up and defeat it by embracing what our founding documents advocated. This is also conservative.
It is quintessentially conservative to believe that “all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.”
As far as rights being a leftist concept, I partly agree if by this it is meant that rights would include compensatory features. Anything that costs another citizen cannot be considered a right.
People who believe others are responsible for them are not conservatives. If today’s black community cannot recognize the worthlessness of the democrat agenda for black America, it is there own doing.
I see a stark similarity between the democrats and the slave owner standing on the porch of his plantation begging his workers not to leave at the end of the Civil War. ” You’ll never make it without me., The rest of the world hates you, we treat you like family. Stay with me and you will be safe.” All the while, black America is routinely sold (Jesse Jackson) down the river with their vote. Conservatives cannot stop this stupidity, it has to come from within. Black America needs leaders like Bill Cosby who speak the truth. The truth will set you free is an old phrase, but never more relevant. People know in their guts what is right and what is wrong, that is what makes us different than animals, a moral choice in situations. The individual must choose to end the victim mentality that has served Black America for the last 40 years so unjustly.
MLK was an avowed socialist and had attended meetings of the American Communist Party.
Here’s a great article on how much of a left-wing radical MLK was:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/epstein9.html
Cato: I don’t believe the “rights talk” is “inherently left-wing. I don’t care whether conservatives all opposed the civil rights movement–I doubt they walked in lock-step back then when I was too young to know, but I KNOW they don’t now. And assuming you are correct, so what, even broken clock is correct twice a day. I hope ALL conservatives would support the civil rights movement today if it was just now occurring. It was the right thing to do, even though at some point in the past it should have been stopped as having served its purpose. Have the black folk been hoodwinked and manipulated and taken for granted ever since by their liberal white folk masters, along with their accomplises, the black civi-rights leaders? Hell yeah! But I can’t say that I blame many of the black folk. They have long memories, and they know who was for them and who was against them. It will take time to win black votes back to the conservative cause, especially since liberals are so good at playing the (lying) race card. Comments like Cato’s are certainly counter-productive to the cause. Saying all conservatives opposed the civil rights movement (if you mean from the beginning, when it was desperately needed, as opposed to now that it has outlived its usefulness) indicates to me that you are ignorant of history, or an un-reconstructed southern white racist. [This coming from a Richmonder, by the grace of God.]
Dear Mr. Twyman:
I have to admit my own short-coming here in that I'm having trouble following this one.
A group of people didn't support the legislation of the 60's. However, the legislation was passed.
So, in spite of the legislation being passed, opening a whole new world of opportunity to the black community, the community retreated to Jesse Jackson/rap/hip hop/Pimp My Ride instead of retaining their values because of that group of people.
I'd have thought that the retreat from family values would rather have occurred because the Jesse Jacksons of the world and the new "financial assistance handouts influenced a people not ready to handle their new freedoms.
I certainly do agree with you that the black conservatives lost their positive influence within their communities. And now we have the New Black Panthers adopting as one of their ten policy platform issues, reparations.
I guess I should have mentioned that King was a flawed man.
Just to clarify, I should have said that the factors I named (ordained minister appealing to the Bible for his authority, believed the Constitution, stood against hatred) are conservative. I did not mean to suggest that he himself was an ideological conservative.
Nevertheless, I still find much to admire about the man.
As a liberal, I agree wholeheartedly with John and Cato that “rights” talk has nothing to do with conservatism. There is no good reason that conservatives should have supported civil rights, and the notion that they should have done so is, at best, a thoroughly cynical view, since by doing so conservatives might have gotten some support from blacks. If conservatives are going to be able to claim moral authority, they must do so without abandoning their principles, and “rights,” civil or otherwise, have no place among those principles.
Well, I see the “Real Conservatives” have found another vehicle to educate us on the need to understand that if God really wanted us to all get along, he would have made everyone beige!
We deal with a lot of these same inane positions in the comment section of “Off to the Races: The Perplexing Politics of Political Correctness”.
No one should take these people (Cato, John, etc.) seriously. They’ve found a conclusion that they want to support that opposes race-mixing, and work backwards from that to build their case. It’s the same kind of shoddy scholarship we routinely find on the Left. If you disagree with them they immediately try to silence the criticism by revoking your “conservative credentials”.
As I said before, if they really believe this stuff, they should post an essay with their name and email address attached to it. But that would mean letting people know who they really are, which violates the principles of the Kith & Kin Klub (KKK for short).
And I used to think the Left had a monopoly on pseudo-intellectual sophistry disguised as genuine analysis.
Phil Jackson obviously has an inferiority complex, probably because he comes from an inferior blood line. I actually pity him. Poor guy.
Cato —
I was waiting for the racial slur as a substitute for anything else to say! You don’t disappoint!
All you need to do is give a person the opportunity, and they will show you their true character every time.
Phil Jackson,
Please name me one, just one, color blind society in the history of mankind. Just one. Shouldn’t be hard. Societies are always hierarchal in one way or another. That is the natural order. Race, class, aristocracy, meritocracy, etc. (Race is often not an issue because most societies are very dominated by one race/ethnic group. Japan is 98% or 99% Japanese, for example. That is how societies always spontaneously organize themselves.) So to attempt to level the society and erase all distinctions will always require near limitless government intervention. It is trying to do something that can not be done because it is contrary to human nature. Just like the Marxist couldn’t level economic distinctions because they were trying to fundamentally change human nature. So to will attempts to level other distinctions. The PC thought police have ridden Whites with guilt. Only the most courageous or rash will verbally transgress Liberal egalitarian right think, but almost no one lives their life that way. Whites and blacks go to different churches, they live in different areas, and white parents will commute more than an hour to work and buy a house they can’t afford so their kids can go to school with other white kids. The blacks in the essay above were just as unwilling to look past race, so it works both ways. Oh, but they can all look down their noses at those unwilling to mouth egalitarian platitudes. Give me a break.
Contrary to the thesis of this essay, the fact that “conservatives” have so caved in on Civil Right is exhibit number one demonstrating the craven nature of modern “conservatism.” Conservatives are supposed to respect the natural order and be skeptical of schemes to radically remake society contrary to human nature. Conservatives are supposed to respect States Rights against the Federal leviathan. And conservatives are supposed to believe in original intent. Where in the Constitution do the Feds get the authority to meddle in the States on matters of race? Don’t say the 14th amendment because the “incorporation doctrine” is a liberal fantasy. As the Southern Senators stated in their response to Brown, the same congress that passed the 14th amendment segregated the DC school system, so you can not possibly argue that it was the intent of the 14th to desegregate schools. (Of course the 14th is invalid because it was passed under duress, but that is for another day.)
How you can not recognize that egalitarianism on race is entirely liberal boggles my mind. Instead of race consider gender. Who is trying to erase distinctions between genders? Who says that gender distinctions are inherent and natural and therefore differences that arise in a society based on gender are part of a “natural order?” What about sexual orientation? Who says that distinction such as marriage based on sexual orientation should be erased? Who says that societal prohibitions against homosexual conduct are natural, healthy and protective? Get a clue buddy.
Mr. Tywman,
Since you are a lawyer, is there anything wrong with my legal analysis from an originalist perspective? I’m not interested in critiques from a “living, breathing” Constitution standpoint.
Mountain Man,
“When I read the Constitution and the Declaration, I see grand themes of liberty for all people. Racism was a feature of society that waited for courageous men to stand up and defeat it by embracing what our founding documents advocated. This is also conservative.”
Please name me one significant Founding Father who was an egalitarian in the modern sense. Some opposed slavery, but not one supported political and social equality of freed blacks. You are seeing in the Declaration and Constitution what you want to see, not what is there.
All,
I am not trying to be contrary for the fun of it. Y’all need to wake up. You may think liberal Enlightenment egalitarianism on matters of race is a great thing. So be it. But do not delude yourself that egalitarianism is conservative. It manifestly is not. And don’t act all dumbfounded when the women’s lib and gay rights agenda wins the day. You will have no firm ground upon which to oppose it since you have already conceded to the liberals that egalitarianism is a good thing. If it is good on race, why not gender and sexual orientation?
Dear Mr. or Ms. Gestell:
“…rights” talk has nothing to do with conservatism?
I believe it has been the Neo-Coms and Heterophobes who have passed the laws telling me: where I can smoke (unless it’s weed), what I can drive, how it should be equipped, the kind of fuel it uses, where I can pray, where I can salute, what I can build on my own property, who can live on my propertly, etc., etc., etc.
“…conservatives should have supported civil rights…so conservatives might have gotten some support from blacks.” Are you suggesting conservatives should have joined you Neo-Coms in paying them to stay in the gettos?
Regarding “moral authority”, upon what does a secularist base his moral compass? Oh, I forgot: Rule #1 It’s all relative, and #2 Anything goes involving sex, drugs and rock & roll.
Recommended reading: “Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality” by Dr. Thomas Sowell.
p.s.: Dr. Jackson seems to have been correct in his #15 response to Cato.
I find it a bit strange that someone would ask how blacks could be expected to “hold dear” such upstanding “American heroes” as Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, two men who broke their oaths to their country, who were leaders of an army of a traitorous nation that was fighting for the right to keep blacks in a state of slavery. Gee, I can’t imagine why blacks couldn’t revere those two.
Mr. Goode,
Traitorous nation? The South seceded lawfully as was their right. It was the North who acted as traitors to the country, a federal republic, as originally founded by unconstitutionally invading their new neighbors to the South. Was George Washington a “traitor” to England when the colonies sought in a similar fashion to dissolve their political bonds with England?
Your formulation is clearly in support of the Hobbesian nation state that arose after the French Revolution. Remember that conservatives opposed the French Revolution. For example Burke.
Man’s natural bonds should be to the more local first and then to the more distant. Are you a citizen of the World or a citizen of the US? Are you a citizen of the Western Hemisphere or the US? Are you a citizen of the America’s or the US? Similarly, your primary bonds of affection and loyalty should be stronger to your State than to the more distant nation.
The Unionist formulation that it was “traitorous” to side with your State against the nation betrays both ignorance of how this country was founded and a totally modern, big government, Nationalistic, Hobbesian and profoundly unconservative conception of the state.
So Lee and Jackson should have sided with the Union, meaning very likely shooting at their kin, neighbors, friends, fellow church members etc. in the name of loyalty and patriotism to some far off entity. In fact, had they side with the Union against their State it would have been the height of disloyalty. Can you not see how your formulation asks people to put their loyalty to “Union” above loyalty to family, friends, etc? That is rank Nationalism and state worship. It is not patriotism in the true sense of the word.
Mr. Brainard,
“Egalitarian in the modern sense” is no compliment. Thank goodness the founding fathers were not egalitarian in the modern sense. But really, conservatives are not interested in egalitarianism as such because it smacks of government intervention. Conservatives are interested in the inherent dignity of all men, because this is a manifestation of liberty and an acknowledgment of the Creator’s intention.
You seem to want to apply modern sensibilities through a leftist prism as you evaluate the founders. They were products of their times, living in a very different social environment than do we today.They weren’t evil men, they weren’t oppressors. They were liberators. In their genuis they saw the true nature of all men and wrote a Declaration that affirmed it and a Constitution that implemented it.
It took society a while to begin living up to this. Because we are fallible humans, we still fall short of the promise of the Creator. But it was the founders who set in motion the chain of events which brings us to the point of assessing what we truly believe when confronted with the axiom that “all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.”
Is that not a clear statement to you, sir? Do you understand that having a vision for the future involves a journey? Is this not a grand theme of liberty for all people? I hardly think I am reading something into it that isn’t there. C’mon.
“Please name me one, just one, color blind society in the history of mankind. Just one. Shouldn’t be hard.”
This is why no one takes the Left seriously, or in this case, the Extreme Right, which arrives at virtually the same point in the political spectrum.
The proposition that it is good to work toward objective “A” (say, secure borders) is automatically rejected as a viable goal if there has never been a society in existence before that has completely, totally, and absolutely controlled its borders. Objective “A” is therefore rejected.
There is no real effort to understand why objective “A” may be desirable, just a conclusion that if it was never done before, it can’t or shouldn’t be done now.
I’ve spent a lot of time exposing this silly, superficial view of the world in the “Racial Purity Quiz” comments section. That’s where I’m focusing my comments. I just dropped in here to say hello to Mr. Cato, and make sure everyone knew that he was a superior human being — and has the DNA tests to prove it. It seemed rather important to him that you all know that.
Cato said:
The very notion of “rights” comes from the liberal Enlightenment and revolutionaries. “Rights talk” is inherently left-wing.
I’ve seen Cato make this claim on other blogs like Right Reason, but he is wrong. I think he’s read too much (outdated) Strauss. Scholars have been tracing the origins of modern uses of rights, when people broke with the objective sense of natural law to the subjective sense of natural right, to earlier and earlier dates that precede the Enlightenment. Michael Villey traces the modern uses to William of Occam’s nominalist philosophy of the high Medieval period. Richard Tuck goes even earlier, to French theologian Jean Gerson. But the most conclusive argument is by Brian Tierney, who conclusively traces the first transformation back to commentary on Gratias’s Decretum – the Catholic Church’s first systemization of Cannon Law.