Thursday, April 17, 2014

Progressivism is antithetical to freedom

I'm currently taking the Hillsdale College online Constitution 101 course.  We're currently on Week Eight.  Each lesson consists of a video lecture, reading assignments, a study guide, discussion board and a quiz.

So far, we've dealt with the philosophical underpinnings of the Constitution (the readings included Artistotle and John Locke), such as the implications for liberty when the human being moved from a state of nature into societal organization, the arguments put forth in the Federalist, the anticipation of problems such as factionalism and majority tyranny, the role of territorial expansion in Constitutional considerations, and the slavery question.

The last two lessons have focused on the Progressive challenge to the principles the Framers embraced. Herbert Croly, Louis Brandeis, John Dewey, and certainly the two overtly Progressive US presidents of the early 20th century - Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson - all believed in historical contingency, the notion that nation-states' guiding legal documents arise from particular circumstances occurring at the time they are crafted.  This concept runs directly counter to the Framers' notion that human nature is fixed and that any morally viable form of government must be based on an understanding of that.

Jefferson, in crafting the Declaration, and Madison, in crafting the Constitution, could have taken the expedient route, letting their thinking be guided by the question, "What is needed for this particular situation, a sliver of thirteen entities along the coast of a largely unsettled continent?"  Instead, they chose to enshrine an immutable truth - that the human being is a sovereign creature answerable only to his or her Creator, and anyone with whom he or she has freely entered into contractual obligations - into their document.

Alexander Hamilton was not keen at all on tacking a Bill of Rights onto the basic document.  His argument was that since it exudes the spirit of limited government, any specification of areas in which government is restrained might foster the notion that there are areas in which it is free to devise grand schemes that have implications for basic liberty.

Hamilton's mirror opposite came along a little over a century later in the person of Theodore Roosevelt. He took the circumscribed nature of the Constitution's language to mean that whatever government is not specifically prohibited from doing is perfectly fine to undertake. It's an exact inversion of the Framers' intent, which was for government's basic assumption to be that it can't do anything that the Constitution doesn't provide for.

It was a delight to run across George Will's WaPo column this morning and see that he's rather passionate about this point as well:

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 thesource of liberty, reverse the Founders’ premise, which was: Liberty preexists governments, which, the Declaration says, are legitimate when “instituted” to “secure” natural rights.
Progressives consider, for example, the rights to property and free speech as, in [constitutional scholar Timothy] Sandefur’s formulation, “spaces of privacy” that government chooses “to carve out and protect” to the extent that these rights serve democracy. Conservatives believe that liberty, understood as a general absence of interference, and individual rights, which cannot be exhaustively listed, are natural and that governmental restrictions on them must be as few as possible and rigorously justified. Merely invoking the right of a majority to have its way is an insufficient justification.
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.”

I've run into the Progressive view in  several Facebook snits of late.  It's the argument that human material advancement presents us with unprecedented circumstances that the Constitution is unequipped to address.

What Mr. Madison would undoubtedly say in response is that, through the amendment mechanism we can so address them, but we still must be guided by the one truth that never changes:  Freedom is the only essential condition for human well-being.  The Constitution was the first founding document of a nation-state to recognize just what a human being is and what he or she needs to thrive.

Yes, you can amend the Constitution, but if you do so without this truth front and center in your deliberations, you're destroying America.

10 comments:

  1. It's just a plant.

    See more about it and the bastardization of freedom in America by some of your conservative heroes here at http://www.snagfilms.com/films/title/high_the_true_tale_of_american_marijuana?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=3.0%20Weekly%20Template%20All%20Users&&utm_content=newsletter

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  2. Marijuana policy, as I've said repeatedly in this space, hardly rises to the status of great question regarding the human condition. One trivializes oneself by putting forth on the basis that it is.

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  3. So what does it have to do with the progressive movement's assault on the Constitution?

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  4. It has more to do with one sentence in your well-wrought essay: "Freedom is the only essential condition for human well-being."

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  5. There is a lot more than progressivism that is antithetical to freedom. But freedom must be in the mind of the beholder. Oh no, that's relativism. Are we free to be progressive and/or relative?

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  6. In week one of the course, we studied what Aristotle, Cicero and Locke had to say about the relationship between freedom and society. Once the human beings moved from a state of nature, in which it was impossible to defend one's God-given (natural) rights, to organizing themselves into societies, they gave up a particular freedom, the right to try to so forcibly defend their other rights, and conferred that authority onto the structure governing the society.

    Thus, the question of the tension between order and liberty has been present ever since. We obviously can't just permit any type of behavior short of pillage and murder. Just what kinds of curtailments are necessary to establish and maintain order is continuously worked out, in representative democracies, in legislative bodies.

    In our own time, we are seeing some state legislatures depart from what had previously been a rather monolithic view of marijuana. LITD finds this an encouraging move. It's the states-as-laboratories model the Framers generally found so appealing. We shall see how Colorado and Washington fare vis-a-vis states that continue to hold a harsher view of weed.

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  7. Oh the weed and the damage done.

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  8. Florida governor Rick Scott is a Tea Party hero, isn't he? He also is not the only one misusing executive power and, so far, he hasn't been found constitutionally kosher:

    (In) Scott’s first year as governor, he issued an executive order for testing employees and job applicants in departments under his control, roughly 77 percent of the state workforce. Scott said he took tests himself, in the private sector, and that millions of Florida taxpayers work for companies that have such employment mandates.

    Legally, what Scott could do in companies he ran as a big business executive is not the point. Ye Olde Bill o’ Rights deals with what the government can make you do, not what a private employer can require.

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  9. You may find the repeal of marijuana prohibition as silly as putting it forth as a great question regarding the human condition but it will continue to be a major issue with voters. Your ilk has a lot going for it as we approach the mid-term elections but it is mostly going because the Obama administration is so "gone" (over the top?). I seriously doubt whether y'all are going to have any sort of long run out of this election. The tide of history is not with you. Of course, for your ilk, that means the world and everything in it is out of whack, making it sooooo verrrry late in the day......

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