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.
While I agree with the article on many points, I would make the case differently.
To me, the distinction is between Animating Documents and Legal Founding Documents. The Declaration is a national animating document. Commonsense was a cultural animating document. The former was adopted by the Continental Congress as a communication to the World but not as a government forming document. The latter was only a popular cultural tract.
In contract, the Constitution was a governing adopted document. Adopted by the Constitutional Convention and subsiquently by the States and their peoples.
Animating Documents can still contain principles that animate me today. But that doesn't give them the force of law or make the Constitution suddenly subject to "propositions" found in other documents created or popular our founding.
The Rationalistic-Left uses such tactics to subvert the Constitution and the Republic. From such comes the "seperation of church and state" because Jefferson cited that in a letter. From such comes the Privacy pernumbra wherein Abortion became a "right".
Metaphysical political schemes will kill our Republic.
That's silly, the Constitution is a contract, the "propositions" are like mission statements- totally secondary.