Posted on 06/03/2002 11:40:51 PM PDT by Pyro7480
In my humble opinion, he's taking a number of conservative standpoints to their logical extreme end. Some of the statements he makes uses language that would more typical of extreme Leftists than Rightists. It just goes to show that often, our political spectrum is more circular than linear. I think I'm going have to ponder over this piece more before I make my final judgment on it.
that's not necessarily unfair or unprincipled.
It just goes to show that often, our political spectrum is more circular than linear.
i've been saying this for years. i am reminded of closing lines in little gidding by t.s. eliott (... but we shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be, to arrive at the place we started from, and to know that place for the first time ... [or words to that effect]).
you're the first other person i've heard say as much.
when i became immersed in the internet (viz., FreeRepublic), i allowed my subscription to national review lapse. so it's been some years that i've read dinesh d'souza and jonah goldberg (other than the occasional article); unless they've taken a course not predictable by their writings three or four years past, i'm a little surprised by the author's inclusion of them on his list of those who've been naughty.
however, the article is extremely thought provoking and well written. superb. thank you.
For me, he goes wrong right there. Man-made laws are morally binding only in so far as they are expressions of the intrinsic Moral Law established from the foundation of the world. That is why the "self-evident truths" of the Declaration are morally binding, because they are an accurate expression of the Creator's will.
Not quite true, but since it took 4000 years to produce US style republican democracy, and people who believed this "puzzling assertion" were the ones that did it, what is your point?
The founders did not all agree on matters of theology, but they agreed that God's will was knowable, not only by scripture, but by the light of right reason. To say that previous generations did not agree demonstrates nothing; previous generations did not achieve what they achieved.
Furthermore, the Declaration claims that all men are created equal, a simple empirical falsehood.
All men are created equal before the law. This is not an empirical statement, it is a statement of principle, which will be the guiding principle of the new government. I agree that you and I are not "equal", but I declare that you and I are and must be equal before the law.
Further undermining contemporary attempts to extract a national proposition from the phrase, at the time when it was said, "all men are created equal" clearly meant all middle-class white males to the people who said it, if we are to judge by their actions.
The principle was bigger than the men who articulated it. They could see it as it applied to themselves. They did not all yet see what it would mean as the idea took on a life of its own.
But ideas do take on a life of their own, and this one has transformed the world.
The Constitution, with its various compromises and its playing off of various ideals against each other, quite wisely limits the degree to which it embraces these ideals.
The Constitution wisely limits the power one human can have over another, whatever their ideals. This, in fact, is a direct expression of these ideals.
In a much poorer nation, the same enactments would not both by obeyed: you would have either a brutal oligarchy preserving its property by force, or a socialistic mob socializing property.
This is a false choice. Economic prosperity requires rule of law, it requires that persons be "equal before the law", and it requires that property rights be respected and protected.
Poverty, oligarchies, and socialistic mobs result from the failure to recognize these principles. Latin American countries, for example, rich in natural resources, suffer from the inability to establish "equality before the law", and thus careen between socialism and oligarchy, most often both at the same time.
Therefore America is not just founded on its Constitution, but on the existential social facts of 1789 and since.
Quite the contrary, the social facts have been transformed by its adherence to principle. Monarchy is gone. Slavery is gone. Communism and fascism have been smashed, although probably not for the last time. These principles are turning the Islamic world on its head.
They would reduce this rich, complex, historical, actual nation to an ideological skeleton.
Some skeleton.
Sufficient ethnic homogeneity, if only so that the body politic is not torn apart by conflict.
This country never had the option of being some kind of paradise of ethnic purity, and does not today. This country has always been bound by shared ideals. Our shared values come out of anglo-saxon culture, perhaps, mixed as he points out with greco-roman, christian, and jewish ideas, but it is the idea that made the US what it is. Our war for independence was a fratricidal war, because "monarchy" is also part of the anglo-saxon culture. The war against slavery was also fratricidal because the slavers were also anglo-saxon, and accepted the ideal of liberty for themselves, but denied it to their work force.
America is not an ethnicity, it is a philosophy which must be inculcated one generation to the next or it vanishes.
It shouldn't be. Locke is on to something here.
It just goes to show that often, our political spectrum is more circular than linear.
There's no "often," my friend. The political scale IS circular, and the extremes overlap. The only difference in the extremes is the language used. That's it.
Equality before the law is not egalitarianism. I agree that egalitarianism is a slippery concept that has provided cover for some really bad government, in our country and even worse abroad. Millions of people have been shot, or enslaved, in the pursuit of egalitarianism.
But thats not what we're talking about here.
"Equal before the law" is not egalitarian.
Airport security is another issue. We are at war. There is nothing wrong with searching the citizens of enemy nations, which is to say, enemy aliens. The idea that old vietnamese ladies must be body searched is not rooted in conservatism.
It would be reasonable to say that all citizens must be searched, if our attackers were native-born Americans, based on the "equal before the law" notion, but of course they are not. They are from an identifiable part of the world. And they are not citizens.
There are two problems. One is that we are at war. "War" is what exists when normal civil and criminal law are no longer adequate to handle the current situation. But it is necessary to have a legal "finding" by our elected leaders that we are at war. They have, rather ambiguously, done that, but a more explicit declaration would, in my view, simplify the legal and constitutional quandaries that we find ourselves in.
Another problem is that approximately half of our country is not "conservative", in the sense we are discussing here. And this is where much of the irrationality in our system enters. It is obvious that profiling can be an abuse of power, but it is nevertheless a legitimate and necessary tool of law enforcement.
The original article is flawed, in that it attributes opinions to conservatives that they do not hold.
I am answering these out of order, as I read them out of order.
You and I are in agreement. Republicans, in their role as half of the governing coalition, sometimes find themselves on the wrong sides of these issues. Conservatives seldom do.
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