Confession.
I have never read LOTR. Don’t even want to.
“Long but well worth the read. History will place Justice Thomas among the greatest minds of our time.”
Rush talked about this article today. Very inciteful. If you heard Rush today you understand. If you did not, and have a way to hear or read it, do so.
Clarence Thomas may have the best grasp of what the founders intended in the Constitution of anyone living in the past century or two. He may be our salvation from the ravages of the left on the US Constitution.
I’m on Google Plus and a friend of a friend of a friend turned out to be a libtard from NPR and The Nation who posted this article about Clarence Thomas. I had her turned around in rhetorical circles until she blocked me (your comment failed to post - please try again later). I forget her name - some C list libtard celebrity. Bwahahaha.
The author of the article couldn’t help letting his leftist bias show from time to time; however, the article was generally a good canvass of Justice Thomas and the article’s point that history will treat J. Thomas most favorably is probably on point.
What a great man Clarence Thomas is!!! PTL for him being on the USSC!!!
bookmark
A+ read. A thousand thanks for posting it.
I found this article while browsing blogs and was mightly impressed! It really gets scary when you realize how little our up-coming generations actually know about "democracy" and about our Constitutionally-protected individual liberties. Add to that the growing infatuation with the "nanny state" mentality and you have a real recipe for disaster.
***********************************************************
From The Wall Street Journal's on-line "Opinion Journal"
http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/rbartley/?id=110003537
THINKING IT OVER
Two Kinds of Liberty
Democracy alone doesn't guarantee freedom.
BY THOMAS F. WOODLOCK
Monday, May 26, 2003 12:01 a.m.
(Editor's note: This column appeared in The Wall Street Journal, May 11, 1945.)
The other day this writer pointed out that it was necessary for our people to make a fundamental distinction in its relation to liberty. Now he will attempt to make clear its nature and importance. He has for a long time been fumbling clumsily with its formulation. Fortunately, he finds in Hamilton Vreeland's book, recently discussed in this column (The Twilight of Individuality), a statement in brief and lucid terms and will borrow it wholesale.
Frequently in recent years this writer has referred to what he has called our seeming obsession with democratic forms and our apparent confidence that they furnished a guarantee of individual liberty and has insisted that they could be made instruments of despotic tyranny--which is perfectly true, but poorly stated. Also he has viewed the confusion in our public mind as one of "form" and "substance"--which is also in a sense true, but also imperfectly expressed. The merit in Mr. Vreeland's statement of the distinction is that it is placed exactly where it belongs and that is in the concept of "liberty."
There are two kinds of liberty. One is political, and is the right of the citizen to participate in government as a voter and--if he can get the necessary votes--as an official. The other kind of liberty is individual, i.e., personal, and this depends upon a limitation of government authority over his action. Its essence is the possession by him of certain "rights" against government which government is bound to respect. It is the confusion of the two kinds that is apparently rife in our public opinion, and especially in what we call "Liberal" or "Progressive" circles.
The Greek "democracy" stopped at political liberty. The citizen (only a part of the population were "citizens") could vote and run for office, but the "government" (the State) was absolute; there were no limitations upon its powers. So too with the Roman state when the Senate and the Consuls ruled. We know what happened to both. The notion of individual liberty came into the world with Christianity and our "democracy" was built upon it and built in the most explicit and formal way. Its essence is the limitation of State power over the citizen and the possession by the citizen of "rights" which may not be violated by the State.
There is, thus, the most fundamental difference between the two concepts of "democracy" and of government itself; yet there is fundamental similarity in their "forms." Both rest upon citizen suffrage as the base of all authority, and both express the public will under majority rule. Our "form" recognizes the ultimate omnipotence of that will for under our Constitution itself there is no limitation on its powers of amendment. If the "people" so willed it, it could in strict legal form sweep away legislature and judiciary and establish an absolute monarchy.
Thus, at the last, personal liberty depends not upon outward forms but upon the general conscience of the people itself, its concept of the person, his nature and his relation with his fellows. For the Greek and the Roman, the State was the "end" and the citizens the "means"; for the Founders of our civil order, the person was the "end" and the State the "means"; the State exists for the person and not the person for the sake of the State.
Now the plain fact is that there has long been going on amongst us a change in the conscience of certain groups of opinion and especially in "Liberal," "progressive," "left-wing" circles in the direction of emphasizing the importance of "society" as against that of the person. The "Instrumentalist" philosophy has gone practically the whole distance in this direction, and its logic implies absolutism of the "democratic" state. All the left-wing drift is in the same direction, that is of sinking the person in the State. It is a drift toward the old Greek and Roman concept of "liberty"--political liberty--and away from the American concept of individual liberty that is afoot on the "Left," a drift of which public opinion is as yet largely unconscious because the "democratic" form structure is not so far in question, and has sustained no important visible changes.
It is not in forms that this change has occurred but in the use to which the forms have been put and the validation by the judicial "form" of that use that is the point. The "police power" in the most important arm of the State and the Constitution does not give the Federal government this power nor was it intended that it should. Yet we have seen in he last decade, as Mr. Vreeland has pointed out, a series of judicial interpretations of the Constitution's (so-called) interstate commerce clause which have placed in the government's hands police powers of a sweeping character, the dimensions of which are still quite unsuspected by the general public. Moreover, the logic supporting these interpretations has implications still less suspected, much less generally understood, implications of further extensions of this power to a point where there would remain for the citizen but little of the "rights" that our Government was founded to protect.
It is high time that our people generally should recognize what is happening for what it is and ask themselves whether it is what they want. Their first job should be to get clearly into their heads the distinction between political liberty and personal liberty and how the same "democratic" structure can be made to produce either.
Mr. Woodlock, born in Ireland in 1866, was editor of The Wall Street Journal, 1902-05, and "Thinking It Over" columnist from 1930 until his death in 1945.
How about it? Are you scared yet?