Every pimp and drug dealer, if he knows little else, knows at least this: "I got my rights."
For liberals this means expanding government to protect the rights of atomistic individuals; for so-called conservatives, this means contracting it. They come to different conclusions, but they use the same basic premises. They are two sides of the same coin.
If you are a conservative who is confused about what it is to be a conservative (which is most conservatives today)―or a liberal who wonders why you believe what you believe, then you need to read Yuval Levin's new article in First Things magazine: "Taking the Long Way," one of the most cogent and insightful recent essays on what it is to be a conservative--and a liberal progressive.
A sample:
For many decades now, America’s political life has been divided between people who call themselves “conservatives” and people who call themselves “liberals” or “progressives.” This suggests that Americans are moved to conserve the good we have and to champion liberty and progress, which might make us better still. These are noble aspirations. But unfortunately, the left and right alike seem confused about what liberty and progress really mean and require. Our conservative party is confused about what it should conserve and our liberal or progressive party is confused about what it should advance. The two are not misguided in exactly the same way, but both tend toward radically deficient visions of the life of a liberal society.Read the rest here. It is behind a firewall, but you can buy the article online for $1.99. It will be the best two dollars you ever spent.
2 comments:
> which consists of worshiping the abstract rights of the choosing individual.
You say 'worshiping', I say 'honoring'. Toe-may-toe, toe-mah-toe.
> For liberals this means expanding government to protect the rights of atomistic individuals
Except when it doesn't, i.e., politically-correct speech codes, wealth confiscation...
> Every pimp and drug dealer, if he knows little else, knows at least this: "I got my rights."
Take it up with Thomas Jefferson: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
To be want to be known as a true conservative, does that mean I have to get a job scribing ancient texts in a monastery somewhere?
And yes, even pimps and drug dealers have rights, such as the right to be presumed innocent, the right to speak, the right to worship, the right not to self-incriminate, and so forth.
Honoring contracts is a conservative thing. The Constitution is a contract, binding on the federal government and the ratifying states. The basic idea is not to establish the eschatological goal of deifying rights. The basic idea is that nobody can be trusted with all of the power, and so spread it around and be sure to insist the people retain some for their own use.
And some people, like government, can't be trusted to observe the rights of others, either, which is why we have the rule of law.
I think of rights as a workaround for depraved human nature, not as a worship object. If Christ were to come here later this afternoon and take overt charge of Washington DC, I'd trust Him to do that. I don't trust Joe Biden.
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