Progressives Don't Grasp the Constitution

Jewish World Review ^ | April 12th, 2014 | George Will

[Jacquerie]

In a 2006 interview, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer said the Constitution is “basically about” one word — “democracy” — that appears in neither that document nor the Declaration of Independence. Democracy is America’s way of allocating political power. The Constitution, however, was adopted to confine that power in order to “secure the blessings of” that which simultaneously justifies and limits democratic government — natural liberty.

The fundamental division in U.S. politics is between those who take their bearings from the individual’s right to a capacious, indeed indefinite, realm of freedom, and those whose fundamental value is the right of the majority to have its way in making rules about which specified liberties shall be respected.

Now the nation no longer lacks what it has long needed, a slender book that lucidly explains the intensity of conservatism’s disagreements with progressivism.

The argument is between conservatives who say U.S. politics is basically about a condition, liberty, and progressives who say it is about a process, democracy. Progressives, who consider democracy the source of liberty, reverse the Founders’ premise, which was: Liberty preexists governments, which, the Declaration says, are legitimate when “instituted” to “secure” natural rights.

With the Declaration, Americans ceased claiming the rights of aggrieved Englishmen and began asserting rights that are universal because they are natural, meaning necessary for the flourishing of human nature. “In Europe,” wrote James Madison, “charters of liberty have been granted by power,” but America has “charters of power granted by liberty.”

Progressives consider, for example, the rights to property and free speech as, in Sandefur’s formulation, “spaces of privacy” that government chooses “to carve out and protect” to the extent that these rights serve democracy.

[Jacquerie]

Mark Levin is discussing this article. Nice analysis.

[Billthedrill]

It may be that the totalitarian streak was always in progressive political aspirations, that used to give such strident lip service to freedom and human rights. Once in power, it's all about power and nothing else. And that isn't just in the United States.

Things start to get a little scary when one wakes up to find oneself in a class that is accused of every sin imaginable and whose members have forfeited equal protection under the law merely for being in the class. "Social justice" that is nominally about redistribution of political rights between groups inevitably acts as a cover for the relentless oppression of one or more of them. That is why political rights should not reside in groups, or classes, but in individual citizens. Social activists have discarded that basic principle. Perhaps that's where the totalitarian streak comes from.