The Left is not against the unshared good life of some but against the good life as such. Frustrated elites and their disdain for the middle class. The skipped revolution: the masses refuse their redeemers. Who does not trust the common man? When words fail: the propaganda of deeds. If you are overheard in life, you can exit with a big bang.
1. Critics of the West and of the way of life that the industrial age has made possible abound. Outstanding examples are the Socialists and the Greens, the former's gardening and composting section. Such groupings are not against the good life attained by what they insist can be a minority only. Nor is their real priority to redistribute from the top to the "starving masses." Neither is the core of the platform to accomplish the pursuit of their version of justice. That would be taking from the "rich" and giving to the "poor" — allocating a bit for themselves to finance the efforts of those that administer the scheme. What this element is really committed to combat is not supposed injustice, which is inherent in any inequality, but the "good life" as such. (Anyhow, life is a pollutant.)
2. Intellectuals tend to prefer to talk in terms of the extreme poverty of the "paupers" or the filthy richness of a few. Commiseration and damning outrage are attached concepts. The 19th-century imagery inherited from Marx implies that, the lifestyle, preferences, influence and problems of the disdained middle classes are overlooked. Now we need to consider that most of us are, in terms of expectations, income and worldview "middle class." This is so even if our jobs might not fit all the traditional categories of membership, as these have been defined for eons. Judged by his manual work, a carpenter is working class, or if you wish, lower class. However, if you consider his purchasing power, investments, the car he can drive, and perhaps even his formal education and that such a person might be an entrepreneur, the carpenter becomes "middle class."
Marx, the often unadmitted favorite of those who claim the right to lead us, predicted that the paupers, he called them "proletarians," would become the dominant class of society. In fact, it was the middle class that has the largest share of society — regardless of how we segment it.
The hostility felt by the intellectuals for this "new class" is caused by two factors. For one, the middle class has ceased to be revolutionary. Unless of course, when revolution is advocated out of boredom by over-indulged offsprings. Their religion-like driving conviction of these likes to subordinate the facts on the ground in favor of a preferred theory of heaven. Not accidentally, it is a heaven in which they are to be the archangels.
Furthermore, the middle class, which is becoming in advanced economic orders identical with society, does more than just invalidate a theory. The one is meant that assumes that an ever-growing number of people will be poor while poverty in the individual case will become greater. Getting richer, the new class declines to make the revolution expected of it. Additionally, these new masses live without paying much attention to the views, values and recommendations of leftist ayatollahs.
In reacting, it is typical that the latter declare components of mass culture to represent the symbols of decadence. Illustrative is the condemnation of "Coke" and "Macs" as expressions of the culture-deprived yahooness of rednecks. No wonder, since the crowd likes them more than quiche and Veuve Cliqot.
3. Observing the nexus of the people and its intellectuals, it would seem that the mass does not feel that the problems it perceives are those that the professional intellectual leaders care to articulate. Consequently, the majority is reluctant to ask to be rescued by anyone, and that means especially the folks that so humbly feel qualified to save the people from itself. This reluctance to feel in need of help and the refusal of the unsolicited succor by those who assume themselves to be ethically superior, expresses a fundamental conflict between the "common man" and his would-be redeemers. Its core is that, the heaven designed and hoped for by the left-leaning intellectuals is unattractive enough to leave the mass of the population cold.
4. Increasingly, the standard-setting class of earlier times feels not so much opposed — which would be a form of recognition – but simply ignored. General-welfare-fed mass culture, pertaining to lifestyle, politics or pure culture, bypasses the once norm-determining elites whose fractions are used to contest among themselves in the political arena power unchallenged by outsiders. The evolving situation creates concern and resentment against the majority.
Long ago, the Enlightenment celebrated the common sense of the average person. Popular democracy, the assumption that the people is capable of governing itself, depended upon this assumption. Bill Buckley's famous quip that he would prefer to be governed by a hundred randomly selected persons from the Boston phone book rather than by Harvard‘s faculty, harks back to the same premise.
There is a response discernible to being ignored and their recommendations defied by the elites whose followers are deserting them. Its core is that democracy is good as long as it results in decisions that have the approval of the chosen. Already in the Sixties the idea was propagated in the universities, that majority rule cannot only be dictatorial (with that possibility any common garden-variety democrat can agree) but that it is inherently oppressive.
The warnings against the dangers of policies dictated by an unguided majority have already invaded editorials and the fatwas of learned pundits. The suggestions that direct democracy should be resorted to on seminal issues (EU membership and some aspects of immigration policy are examples) is dismissed by the devotees of guided democracy. By asking certain delicate questions, the wrong answer would be forthcoming. Ergo, along with "populism" — populism is when the leaders cannot convince the led and these ask taboo questions and give inappropriate answers – the direct popular vote, too, needs to be fought. In the interest of real democracy, of course.
A telling symptomatic illustration might be that majorities are held back from celebrating their Christmas in the commercial and folkloric way they are used to going about it. The analogy would be to suppress muezzins because Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Shintoists, animists and atheists might be offended by the chant.
5. A new component expressing the alienation of the elites emerges. That goes beyond the claimed right to supervise democracy through their shamans who determine what can be decided and by whom. This further sphere of the mandate to lead involves the assumed right to engage in a "propaganda of deeds." If the unripe, unwise and uncouth mob does not heed verbal admonitions, it is to be driven back on the right path by actions.
The extreme case of this we find in Islamic terrorism — call it politely behavior-altering violence. It is analogous to the shepherd using his whip when cries and the barking of dogs fail. You might feel that the wretched suicide bombers and the troglodytes who send them do not quite fit the thesis of elite frustration. It does because, out there is a little known fact regarding these people.
Suicide bombers and those who pull their strings are not the underprivileged whose life has no meaning because they have no prospects. This crowd is recruited from the not-poor, not-uneducated and not-underprivileged. Who the members really are is described by their aspiration to be heard and by their actual inability to exert influence. Frustration fueled by arrogance makes them confident that they have a right to shape the world. This world is a "bad" one which is proven by its refusal to take them seriously. The resulting strategy is a response to being unable to convince the yawning contemporary to fall in line and to follow. If need be, to overcome inattention, murder appears to be a suitable means. In doing so the conceit of the otherwise misunderstood allows them to nominate the faceless crowd for martyrdom and to take candidates that failed to volunteer, right into the lap of Allah. Those who are unable to call the tune and whose words are lost without an echo in the desert while alive, then opt to exit with a last big bang.
Thank You George for the following and the other parts of your article.
“This reluctance to feel in need of help and the refusal of the unsolicited succor by those who assume themselves to be ethically superior, expresses a fundamental conflict between the “common man” and his would-be redeemers”
My grandfather was that entrepreneur/carpenter you spoke of and his decendents lived an increasingly happy life of working and raising thier standard of living. At 13 years old he voted with his feet and said goodbye to what would become a 70 year experiment with totalatarianism. I don’t recall his politics, but his actions tell me that he would agree with you. When I read “The Wisdom of Crowds”, by James Surowiecki, I, at first, thought “How can this be?”. Your words confirm the essence of the idea.
It’s always amusing to find conservatives playing the majority card. I’m old enough to remember how Bill Buckley and other National Review writers used to rant against democracy. Buckley did this in such books as “Up From Liberalism.” Conservatives defined themselves in part as people who did not believe that majorities had any moral authority. The European conservatives who so influenced the thinking of post-WWII conservative intellectuals in the US were unabashed cultural and political elitists, and their American epigones understood them quite well.
The key to this older standpoint was the belief that the ‘masses’ would always support the Left, would salivate at the thought of living in a democratic welfare state, etc. because that’s just the kind of inferior people they were.
Fast-forward to a new age, that of conservative populism. Now conservatives make common cause with the masses because they see that the masses can be turned against liberalism on cultural grounds. The next step, of course, is for ordinary Americans to wake up one morning and reject Social Security, Medicare, all federal regulatory agencies, and repeal the various civil rights acts. Then the conservative attachment to democracy will be complete.
Gestell,
Where, exactly, did the author argue that the majority was moral?
“…because they see that the masses can be turned against liberalism on cultural grounds.” Examples, please. I have only seen two conservative appeals: 1) appeal to non-constitutionality; and 2) appeal to their failure to produce positive results.
The old stereotype that conservatives are racists is trotted out once again. Do you leftists ever get tired telling the same old lie over and over?
George
Please, always, know that you have at least one reader. I often think of adding a comment to your post, but surrender to a nerve problem in my left arm.
MM
Thank you for countering the pinko. Just one note on those that like to define others; Having just finished Trotsky’s Revolution Betrayed, I found it interesting that he did that same thing to Stalin and referred to him as a conservative. He also liked to speak of his support for democracy and “the working people”.
Reply to Mountain Man,
I think you’re one of those new style conservatives who pays no attention to history, even the history of your own ideological movement. I’ll refer summarily for clarification of the conservative discovery that the masses could be a source of resistance to liberalism to George H. Nash’s discussion in “The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945″ ISI Press, 2006, especially Chapters 3, 7 and 8. Other chapters in this source document the elitism of most of the prominent conservative intellectuals in the immediate post-WWII period.
Second, I can’t really believe you are unaware of the barrage conservatives direct at liberalism, blaming it for every social, personal, cultural, political, and economic evil of the past half century or more. If you doubt me, log onto Townhall.com and read the posts on almost any conservative columnist’s daily contribution. Or sit down and read James Kalb’s “The Tyranny of Liberalism” ISI Press. Kalb traces all social evils to liberalism. Today’s conservatives are not content to claim that liberal policies don’t work, but routinely go on to argue that liberal principles are essentially immoral. If you can’t see that this is what today’s conservatives do, you must not get out very much.
Third, I note that you do not in fact answer my argumentative claim about the weakness of conservative principles with regard to racism. I await your documentation of actual arguments by conservatives against racism that are grounded in demonstrably conservative principles. No fair cherry-picking conservatives who learned to say nice things about blacks after being shamed by liberals.
>I await your documentation of actual arguments by conservatives against racism that are grounded in demonstrably conservative principles.
Gosh, I wonder if I, a person who frequently posts at the Intellectual Conservative, can be considered authentic enough to actually “document” that conservative principles are not racist (but lunatic fringe elements of an ideology certainly can be). The difference is, conservatives condemn the racists who seek their support, while liberals give them a pass or explain away their actions.
http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2006/09/11/in-their-own-words-the-undisguised-racism-of-the-far-far-far-right/
http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2006/09/08/the-%e2%80%9ctrue-conservative%e2%80%9d-racial-purity-quiz/
http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2006/09/02/off-to-the-races-the-perplexing-politics-of-political-correctness/
Show me where I was “shamed” into making these comments if you would please.
If you need more evidence, just look through the comment sections of various posts where liberals come in and slur Jews as “Nazis”, make fun of “homos like Joe McCarthy” (see the comment section to http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2009/11/19/the-fort-hood-massacre-why-the-democrats-wont-call-it-terrorism/#comments), and spew similar bilge — all of which is roundly condemned by conservatives like myself and Mountain Man who won’t tolerate this kind of naked bigotry.
None of us needed to be “shamed” into doing this. And yet, not a single non-conservative or self-identified moderate participating in these discussions has seen to raise similar objections. If anything, they decry the lack of civility in us condemning these bigots as bigots.
Gestell,
May I remind you of what you said? “…the masses can be turned against liberalism on cultural grounds.” Interpretation: “You are not like us, therefore we reject your claims.” That is what I took from your remarks, which any conservative would flatly reject.
You then proceed on a litany of what real conservatives believe as if I had excluded them by my two categories. Category 2 covers it all nicely: “appeal to their failure to produce positive results.”
As far as conservatives and racism, it is Democrats that are the original racists, and Republicans the real advocates of equal rights. Anyone as aware of history as you claim you are ought to know this.
Liberals do deserve blame for the problems in our country. Wealth squandered, lives destroyed, babies aborted, hate increasing, people losing their homes and jobs; it all belongs square at the feet of those who claim to care more.
First, to Mountain Man: You suppose, wrongly, that the ideological contents of the Democratic and Republican parties are timeless essences. Hardly. The Republicans who pushed for civil rights legislation (and had put a plank to this effect into their platforms since 1948) were not today’s conservatives. The Republicans had a liberal wing, a moderate center, and a small right-wing back in those days. The pro-civil rights Republicans were the folks now called RINOs. One of the few conservatives in Congress, Barry Goldwater, voted against the 1964 legislation because, in his view, it violated “states’ rights.” Anyone who has any political knowledge of those times knows that “states’ rights” was the pro-segregationist theory supported by Southern Democrats (who were conservatives) and the conservative intellectual elite of that time. “National Review” and “Human Events” joined the Southerners in opposing school desegregation and any efforts to end segregation by national legislation. If you doubt this, take a look at George Nash’s standard history of conservatism “The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, ISI Press, 2006 edition, Ch. 3, and Chs 7-8. The Democrats at that time had a moderate/liberal wing and a powerful conservative Southern wing. The Democrats would eventually move left, but had not done so in the mid 1960s. So I say to you, Mountain Man, ignorance of history is no excuse.
Now for Mr. Jackson. I read the material to which you directed me. First, as a liberal I’ll say up front that any leftist who would use “homo” in their political attacks are despicable. Second, in spite of the incoherence of some of your critics, they were certainly correct in reminding you of the racism of some of the major conservative intellectuals of the 20th century. Your own position can’t remain apart from this racism, because, as you yourself make clear, as a conservative, you do not believe in the liberal concept of equality. You are, quite properly as a conservative, opposed to most of the moral ideas of liberal modernity. As such, you really aren’t in much of a position to present yourself as anti-racist when you have deprived yourself of any philosophical vocabulary in which to articulate such opposition. Again, for both you and Mountain Man, what are the conservative principles that allow you to support whatever you think you support as far as opposing racism? I say you have deconstructed your own position in your post, and I see nothing to suggest that you are aware of this.
1. 1854: The first major anti-slavery party, Republicans.
2. 1862: Politicians are the first to abolish slavery in Washington, D.C. They are Republicans.
3. 1863: Politicians issue the Emancipation Proclamation, in order to set all slaves free. They are Republicans.
4. 1865: Attorney John Rock (a registered doctor), becomes the first black member of the Supreme Court bar. He is a Republican.
5. 1870: Pastor Rhodes Revels becomes America’s first black Senator. He is a Republican.
6. 1872: Louisiana gives America her first nonwhite Governor. He is a Republican.
7. 1872: Te first seven African Americans are in the U.S. Congress. They are all Republicans.
8. 1884: John Lynch, a Congressman, becomes the first black to preside over a national convention. He is a Republican.
9. The 1890s: During his stint as New York City Police Commissioner, Teddy Roosevelt is the first leader to open doors to women – and the first to welcome Jews in the department.
10. 1901: President Roosevelt upsets Democrats when he invites the first African-American to dine in the White House. He is a Republican.
11. 1906: President Roosevelt becomes the first American to win the Nobel Peace Prize. He is a Republican.
12. 1916: Jeanette Rankin becomes America’s first congresswoman. She is a Republican.
13. 1916: Also – according to Gov. Thomas Judge — Rankin becomes the first “woman in the world to be elected to a parliamentary body.” She is a Republican.
14. 1921: Pro-life politicians are the first to establish and back the controversial Dyer Anti-Lynching Laws. They are Republicans.
15. 1925: Florence Khan becomes the first Jewess to serve in Congress. She is a Republican.
16. 1938. Former President Herbert Hoover becomes the first statesmen to rebuke Adolph Hitler in person. He is a Republican.
17. 1943. Hoover is the first major statesmen to back the controversial Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe, which finally convinces President Roosevelt, the Democrat, to create a War Refugee Board, in order to rescue Jews. He is a Republican.
18: 1955: President Eisenhower becomes the first President to appoint an African-American (E. Frederic Morrow) to an executive position on the White House staff. He is a Republican.
19. 1957: Eisenhower becomes the first President to order troops to protect black students at Central High, Arkansas. He is a Republican.
20. 1957: Eisenhower’s Civil Rights Bill makes him the first President to strongly back black voting rights and protections in the post-war period. He is a Republican.
21. 1959: Hiram L. Fong becomes the first Asian-American Senator. He is a Republican.
22. 1964: Margaret Chase Smith (not Hillary Clinton) is the first woman to run as a U.S. Presidential candidate for a major party. She is a Republican. (Note: Smith is also the first female to be elected in the U.S. House and Senate too.)
23. 1964: Hiram L. Fong becomes the first Asian presidential candidate. He is a Republican.
24. 1964: Barry Goldwater is the first person of Jewish ancestry to run as a U.S. presidential candidate for a major party. He is a Republican.
25. 1964: The Grand Old Party is the first (and only) party to strongly back the Civil Rights Act (83%). Thank God for the Republicans.
26. 1971: Herbert Choy becomes the first Asian-American to serve on the federal bench. He is a Republican.
27. 1971: Romana Acosta Banuelos becomes the first Hispanic-American Treasurer of the U.S. She is a Republican.
28. 1971: Senator Strom Thurmond, a former member of the racist Democratic Party, renounces his past, and becomes the first southern Senator to hire an African-American, in a senatorial office. He is a Republican.
29. 1973: Henry Kissinger becomes the first Jewish U.S. Secretary of State. He is a Republican.
30. 1988: Reagan becomes the first President to sign legislation which acknowledges that – under FDR, the Democrat – Japanese internment camps were based upon “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” He also offers a formal apology and compensation to survivors. He is a Republican.
31. 1988: Lauro F. Cavazos, the former Secretary of Education, becomes the first Hispanic-American to serve as a U.S. Cabinet Member. He is a Republican.
32. 1989: Julia Chang Bloch becomes the first Asian U.S. ambassador. She is a Republican.
33. 1990: Antonia Coello Novello becomes the first woman and the first Hispanic-American to become a Surgeon General of the U.S. She is a Republican.
34. 2001: Elaine Chao becomes the first Asian-American Cabinet Minister. She is a Republican.
35. 2001: Colin Powell becomes the first African-American Secretary of State. He is a Republican.
36. 2001: The late Lieutenant Colonel Roosevelt becomes the first and only President to receive the Medal of Honor, America’s highest military award. He was a Republican.
37. 2005: Alberto Gonzales becomes the first Hispanic American Attorney General of the U.S. He is a Republican.
38. 2005: Condoleezza Rice becomes the first African-American female Secretary of State. She is a Republican.
39. The original conservatives were the Founders. They wrote the most liberating words found on the planet, excepting the Bible: “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…”
40: It was the church, populated by bible-beating extemists, that provided the impetus to liberate men from slavery.
>Your own position can’t remain apart from this racism, because, as you yourself make clear, as a conservative, you do not believe in the liberal concept of equality.
*** The “liberal concept of equality” is a canard. It has as much to do with promoting genuine equality as the so-called health care debacle in Congress has to do with providing improved health care. Liberals use value laden words to disguise their true motives. With health care, it really about power-shifting. With “equality”, liberals want equality of outcome, conservatives want equality of opportunity. Just because you choose to define equality in a skewed way doesn’t make it the proper definition of “equality”. Mine is based on the Constitution, not Marx.
>in spite of the incoherence of some of your critics, they were certainly correct in reminding you of the racism of some of the major conservative intellectuals of the 20th century.
*** If I have to claim these idiots as the only ones who identify what “conservatism is, then you have to accept Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao as the definers of all things liberal — not to mention the race-based Progressives of the early 20th century who thought that blacks were inferior to whites, and proposed eugenic-based policies to limit their reproduction.
What you have done is arbitrarily point to some people who called themselves Conservative, excised some of the things they said, and projected that onto the sum and substance of all that is “Conservative”. I haven’t tagged you with classism, forced extermination/sterilizations, pogroms and other odious features of 20th century liberal/progressive policies.
This is an intellectually shoddy way to debate an issue. But, I’m happy to accept your definition of Conservatism as long as you accept mine. At least today we’ve rejected this bilge, where your side still embraces it.
>You are, quite properly as a conservative, opposed to most of the moral ideas of liberal modernity.
*** Liberal ideas are not “moral”. They are morally-relative”. That’s the difference.
>As such, you really aren’t in much of a position to present yourself as anti-racist when you have deprived yourself of any philosophical vocabulary in which to articulate such opposition.
*** I’m in a much better position than you, because as a conservative who believes that values, not skin color, matter, who believes in equality of opportunity but not forced equality of outcome, and who actually opposes the kooks who claim to be conservative instead of giving them a pass like the Liberals do I have articulated a coherent, conservative based world view shared by many of the people who contribute to and comment to this website, The American Thinker, and others.
By contrast, the best you can point to is Moveon.org, The Huffington Post, and the daily Kos to articulate the practical policies of contemporary liberal/progressive policies, the ones that wish Limbaugh died, accuse Sarah Palin of fabricating her daughter’s pregnancy, who routinely vilify and slander anyone who disagrees with liberal dogma, who gives the “Negro”-bating Harry Reid a pass, etc.
Liberals are the true racists by injecting the color of a person’s skin into every conversation.
Contrast your and others’ reaction to Harry Reid and Bill “get me some more coffee, boy” Clinton with what a conservative says about bigots who try to associate themselves with our cause. As I wrote three years ago —
These so-called “Real Conservatives” aren’t interested in the hallowed past when they quote Plato and Aristotle. Do they also support infanticide, believe that women are inferior beings who lack the rights men do, seek to impose governmental restrictions on the right to bear children, want to abolish all private property, and advocate bringing back the practice of slavery — not just racial segregation? Maybe they do, but they’re not promoting these same “principled” ideas publicly, even though these ideas flow from the same classical source.
They are simply looking for a good-sounding excuse to justify their segregationist bigotry. How many people reading this essay have ever had a DNA test performed on them to validate the genetic purity of their bloodline? And who in the 21st century gives even a moment’s thought to the “one drop rule” that allows you to rationalize away any impure blood you might find in your own family’s history?
Is this the “Conservatism” we all aspire to?
The truth is, these whack jobs want to hijack conservatism, and they mask their true motives in a reverence for “tradition.” But they have been completely exposed by their own words. I didn’t have to invent any silly-ass statements and apply it to them. All that was necessary was to let them speak, and watch how a reverence for Plato transformed into a White Pride rally to deal with “cancerous abstractions such as ‘equal rights.’”
Real Conservatives, if we even need to use this term, are not the same kind of self-serving bigots you find on the extreme Left. I’m happy to let our dirty laundry air for the world to see just how perverse these people truly are. It only shows the world that we are not them.
So each of us has a choice. We can either stand up and tell these people, and anyone else who’s listening, that we have no more interest in their brand of “Real Conservatism” than we do in any of the racist theories on the Left; or we can just allow pseudo-intellectuals with superior blood lines to tell us all what to believe because T.S. Eliot and God told them to.
The Left lost its moral compass to the bigotry of its extremists. Now it’s our turn to join that club, or expose these people for who and what they really are. If we allow Conservatism to be defined by the worst examples of humanity, we’ll end up where Liberalism is today.
Maybe, then maybe, I can get back to making fun of Liberal lunacy. But until we look under our own rug and apply the same standards to those who purport to speak on our behalf, we have no right to criticize anyone else if we, fundamentally, are no different from them.
When bigots and a-holes try to claim the mantle of conservatism, we fight back and show the world that we want no part of this filth.
When liberals spew their hatred and racist bilge, you ignore and/or excuse it, or just blame George Bush.
>what are the conservative principles that allow you to support whatever you think you support as far as opposing racism?
They center around the twin notions that (a) shared values — not skin color — define a person, and (b) the notion that our God-given rights as expressed in the Declaration of Independence sought equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome.
As to values, look at http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2006/09/02/off-to-the-races-the-perplexing-politics-of-political-correctness/
As to equality of opportunity, look at the relationship of the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution — including the Bill of Rights — as it pertained to the issue of slavery. Slavery was a political compromise that could not stand because it violated the fundamental principles of the DOI, upon which our government was based. I’ve excerpted passages about this from a much longer piece I wrote on the subject:
The shorthand way of describing the American Civil War was to “free the slaves.” That was indeed an outcome of the war, and for many Northern citizens it was a strongly motivating factor in prosecuting the war. But despite John Brown’s raids and the growing moral outcry over this despicable practice, it wasn’t the issue of slavery that prompted the war. It was the issue of States Rights in relation to the authority of the Federal government. War broke out because of actions of State governments that refused to recognize the legitimate authority of the national government. Therefore, the Civil War was fought over a legally-oriented, Constitutionally-based issue; not a moral or philosophical question as embodied in the Declaration of Independence.
Why is this important?
The U.S. Constitution provides the direct, legal/political framework for all laws made within the United States. Even though it was fought with the use of competing armies, the Civil War was actually a legal/political battle, not a moral one. Clausewitz defines war as simply “politics by other means.” And it was through politics (war) that the practice of slavery in America was ended, just as politics had legalized it in the U.S. Constitution (the Three-Fifths Compromise), and an amendment to that same Constitution eliminated slavery as a legal concept (the 13th Amendment).
Because the real battle over slavery took place in a legal/political arena, the culture of the nation was changed. Today, the debate is no longer over how to count slaves for the purpose of representation in Congress, but whether one piece of legislation or another has gone too far, or not far enough, in support of the principle of equal justice and civil liberties.
Without a universally recognized and accepted moral foundation to end slavery, neither John Brown’s raids nor all the vocal opposition to slavery in the world would have made a difference in shaping the post-Civil War era. Rather than expressing an enduring principle of morality, it would have been little more than a war-time tactic that could have easily been pulled back or modified dramatically in Reconstruction America. With no intrinsic right to liberty, a right recognized as coming directly from God, freeing the slaves would have been just another bargaining chip to do with as politicians pleased.
But it was not the Declaration of Independence that gave Lincoln the power to prosecute the war, or issue his Emancipation Proclamation. It was the U.S. Constitution, which drew its moral justification from the Declaration of Independence. Because of this the moral seeds of slavery’s own destruction were sewn at the very creation of the U.S. Constitution when southern landowners acknowledged the limited humanity of their slaves through the Three-Fifths compromise. The same human being who had no Constitutional rights was counted as three-fifths of a person for taxation and representation purposes. It took almost a hundred years for those seeds to blossom, but that intervening time was used to clarify the moral bankruptcy of slavery until nothing but naked, venal self-interest remained to justify the practice of owning another human being.
—continued —
Conservatives recognize the moral foundation provided by the DOI that describes God-given right. These rights are for “men”, not “white men”.
Conservatives recognize that when the laws of man (the Constitution) are in conflict with these God given rights, then the God-given rights for all humanity are valued over the venal actions of a few.
Conservatives support the concept of true equality — the equality of opportunity based on our God-given talents and rights. When the government seeks to limit or circumscribe these rights, it must be opposed.
No Conservative today would seek any laws favoring one race over another, despite the presumed “good intentions” of this reverse descrimination. They want the government to remove the obstacles to everyone’s success, not select the winners based on the color of their skin.
In short, Conservatives want the meaning and intent of the DOI to guide the laws of our country. The DOI allows for no benign racism, just as it is in conflict with odious racism.
These are our values. Liberals do not share them, because they are obsessed with race as a significant, or even the determining factor, in making laws.
Liberals are the racists. Not us.