In my previous post I linked to a review, by Michael Anton, of a new book on the American Founding by Thomas G. West of Hillsdale College. I have a keen interest in the Founding, and in particular I am, like nearly everyone in the “neoreactionary” community, dogged by the question of just where things went off the rails in the West.
Central to that question is this one: is the decay we see all around us in the early 21st century a result of the principles the American system was built upon, or did it occur in spite of them?
Every social system sturdy enough to achieve maturity faces this question when it reaches, sooner or later, a crisis of doubt and exhaustion. When this happens, there will always arise two factions in bitter opposition. One believes that the problem lies in laxity and infidelity regarding founding principles; the other calls into question the principles themselves. One side will argue that radical change has been foolish and destructive, and will call for a doubling down on original principles; the other will say that those principles are (at best) obsolete, and that the only way out is to double down on change itself. The pattern has repeated itself throughout history in nearly every complex human system, whether political, social, or religious — and in these last years it has brought the United States to the brink of civil war.
In the United States of 2018, the debate is almost entirely between a Left faction that calls for radical and accelerating change, and a Right that seeks a return to strict Constitutionalism, States’ rights, meritocracy, border control, diminution of Federal power, demographic stability, and individual liberty — in general, what today’s academic jargon would call a “re-centering” of the philosophy of the Founders. Listen to any of the prominent voices on the Right — whether it’s the Claremont or Hoover Institutes, or National Review, or Thomas Sowell, or the late Charles Krauthammer, or media personalities like Mark Levin or Rush Limbaugh — and what you will hear is that the nation’s problem is that it has lost touch with the Enlightenment principles enshrined in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence; with the philosophy of Locke and Hume and Montesquieu and Jefferson and Franklin and Madison.
Out here in the remote fastnesses of neoreaction, however, the question goes deeper: Was the Founding itself a wrong turn? Were the axioms and premises behind the architecture of the United States sufficiently flawed as to doom the whole enterprise ab ovo?
For the dominant faction of the contemporary American Right, the answer is simply No, and that’s that. We have strayed, and all of the nation’s contemporary ills are the result.
For the radical Left, the answer is a resounding Yes; indeed the mere fact that the nation was designed by white men, some of whom were slave-owners, is enough to taint the whole thing beyond any hope of redemption. It all has to go, root and branch.
The question is also an open one, though, for those of us to the right of the Right. Clearly we have strayed from the Founding, a very long way indeed, with many injurious consequences. But was this inevitable? Is it irreversible? What is the way forward? (What, exactly, do we want, anyway?) Look at the Declaration of Independence, which has been, up until my time at least, the American equivalent of Scripture. It is a stirring document, but it is also an article of revolutionary propaganda, arguably containing many testimonial falsehoods. More to the point, though, its preamble, which has reverberated throughout the history of the American nation, declares as “self-evident” a set of propositions that a rational observer could not only call into question, but believe to be self-evidently false. Upon how solid a philosophical foundation, then, was the American nation actually erected? These questions give me little rest.
Our commenter Jacques is troubled by them as well. In a reply to my post, he wrote:
Unfortunately there is the same old unthinking assertion of “equality’. We’re told that everyone is “naturally’ equally “free and independent’. Well, if those concepts have any real content it’s just not true. The highly intelligent, for example, are naturally more free and independent in many key respects than people who are borderline retarded. And if it’s not about any ordinary notions of freedom and independence, it’s not clear what it means. Probably nothing but it sounds nice.
As evidence, I guess, we’re told that nature has not “delineated’ some humans as “natural rulers’ and others as “natural workers or slaves’. Really? It sure seems that way if you allow yourself to admit what you actually observe. I’d say Trump or Hitler or Napoleon seem far more naturally suited to ruling and leading than some other people I’ve met. Men generally seem to be natural leaders, and women seem to be generally naturally inclined to follow men. He then says we can confirm this by noting that “no man ever consents to slavery’. But, first, it seems that often men have consented to it; second, slavery is not the only kind of “work’ or subordination to another person. (If this point is meant to rebut the idea that there is a natural hierarchy, it’s a straw man or equivocation.) Lots of people seem quite happy to fall in line and obey some charismatic guru or boss or dictator or priest or psychiatrist or”¦ These arguments are paper-thin.
The upshot is supposed to be that “No man may therefore justly rule any other without that other’s consent’. But what does that even mean? How can I consent to be ruled by you? Once consent is given, and you’re in charge, presumably at that point I don’t get to be in charge anymore. If the consent has to be ongoing, that would seem to require that you’re not really ruling over me”“I always have a veto. But if it doesn’t have to be ongoing, what does it matter whether way back when it was initially given? If it’s legitimate for you to _now_ decide for me, even if I don’t agree or don’t like it, why couldn’t it have been legitimate for you to just take charge without my initial consent? It’s all just a big mess.
What do you think Malcolm? Doesn’t it seem like, on these key points, the reviewer and author are just re-asserting some very dubious liberal-modern claims? It really does seem like the usual empty “propositionalism’ despite their disavowals.
Jacques’ comment raises, directly or indirectly, these titanic questions:
1) In what coherent sense could Jefferson and the Founders actually have understood men to be “equal”?
2) What does equality mean in the context of liberty? (How can they not be mutually antagonistic?)
3) Does a truly just equality imply different forms or degrees of liberty for different people?
4) How is the concept of consent compatible with any coherent notion of sovereignty?
5) Is there any such thing as natural rights? Where do they come from? Are they even conceivable in the absence of God?
6) What can it possibly mean for rights to be “inalienable”?
7) Was the erosion of the principles of the Founding, and the nation’s decline into its present condition, implicit in those principles themselves? Or was it the result of a decline in the civic virtue of the people? If so, was that inevitable?
8) Whatever one might say about all of that, the founding of the American nation was a wholly unprecedented event in political history, and the men assembled at the end of the war against England had, to put it mildly, a very difficult job to do. They rose to the occasion with, I believe, a collective genius the like of which has not been seen before or since. They set out, in an era of hereditary monarchies — many of them senescent and failing — to attempt a radically new model based on liberty and individual dignity. Ought they not to have tried? Given what they had to work with — a widely heterogeneous assortment of states, economies, Christian sects, and transplanted British subcultures, spread across a vast and variegated landscape, needing to be welded together in the aftermath of a bitterly exhausting general war — could they have done any better? How?
9) What ought we to do now?
If you think I am now about to answer these questions, neatly and precisely, in numerical order, I’m sorry to disappoint you, though I will at least take some of them up in forthcoming posts. To the extent that they are answerable at all — and I think some of them are — doing so has been the work of many lifetimes of study and reflection, and has engendered endless controversy. (I’ve been thinking about them for a long time now, too.) My aim in this post was simply to unpack them and spread them on the table.
Please have a go at them. I will caution you, though, against the temptation to imagine that you already have them all figured out.
- American Fundamentals
- On The Founding: Questions From The Right Of The Right, Part 1
- Questions About The Founding, Part 2: A Reply From Michael Anton
- Questions About The Founding, Part 3: Jacques Replies to Michael Anton
- Questions About The Founding, Part 4
- Questions About The Founding, Part 5
- Bronze Age Pervert: Response To Michael Anton
- Does Belief in Natural Law Require Belief In God?
7 Comments
I will pick out a small piece. “…the American nation, declares as “self-evident” a set of propositions…” Wouldn’t this declaration fall into the same camp as the tactic used by those ‘progressives’ who shout down conservative speakers thereby refusing to allow their ideas to be heard because, as the shouters say, “it has already been decided”. Therefore you have nothing to say so shut up.
re: “Central to that question is this one: is the decay we see all around us in the early 21st century a result of the principles the American system was built upon, or did it occur in spite of them?” MP
Circa 1962 while in college had an American History course given by the only non-Liberal humanities professor I encountered in college. He was a specialist in the history of America from 1750 to 1850. I still remember his lecture on the great unknown Whiskey Rebellion’s Tom the Tinkerer (Look Up).
He was convinced that the USA was on borrowed time and had gone off the rails early in its history eventually becoming an Empire and thus doomed. The date of the mistake he said was marked some time between by the sophistry of Marbury v. Madison’s invention of Judicial Review and the replacement of the Republic by the ascension of Jacksonian Democracy. The founder’s plan was scuttled in that time period.
Dan Kurt
Malcolm, All,
It occurred to me (simply given the very short time I’m to be online today) to take a very quick look at the etymology of that word, equal, as the authors might have understood it:
Perhaps we ought consider that perhaps the preamble has the “faith” on uniformity?
https://www.etymonline.com/word/equality
I really like question #5. That is a good one. Can’t wait to see what you post on it.
For what it is worth, my answers are: Yes, GOD, a resounding NO.
Hi Malcolm,
I’m flattered. I don’t really know the answers either, of course. Our big problem with the conservatives is that they think they do. They think they know what ‘equality’ means, or what ‘natural rights’ are, where they come from… They think it’s all just obvious! And it’s very very hard to get them to think it over. So it’s good to do what you’re doing: just frame the questions and sit with them for a long time.
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” – John Adams
“And he [Jehoshaphat*] set judges in the land throughout all the fenced cities of Judah, city by city, And said to the judges, Take heed what ye do: for ye judge not for man, but for the LORD, who is with you in the judgment. Wherefore now let the fear of the LORD be upon you; take heed and do it: for there is no iniquity with the LORD our God, nor respect of persons, nor taking of gifts.” – KJV
The constitution and other founding documents are charters at law, not an attempted redesigning of God’s created order. No such assumption was ever made until the Left took over the narrative. Show me any documents, any quotes anywhere in which the founders state that they were attempting to change the the natural merit based structure of creation. The Constitution and other founding documents are about a legal framework and nothing more.
God is no respecter of persons. This is what is meant by equality. This is the idea that the framers meant to capture by way of admonishing our Judiciary and indeed all branches on the equal application of the law. It’s also important that these words appearance both in the Old Testament and in the 14th amendment to the US Constitution are about a legal framework. Nobody, not God, not Jefferson, not the amendment is talking about forced equality or equality of outcome outside of being judged for a crime or civil matter.
All men are created equal in the eyes of god with respect to treatment by you and your fellows in the courts of law and the making of legislation. Madison and Jefferson were very well aware of the biblical sources of this. Remember, if a law can be used, it can be used against you. Facing reality that the Constitution ship has sailed, it remains of vital importance to understand our past civilizational structures.
Creating dis-equality is a sin. The special treatment of minorities is a sin. The entire planet is based upon merit. This is plain and observable in nature and human systems, the Natural Law. Without knowing the Bible, our history, and Western Civilization’s roots one cannot express properly what the Natural Law tells him about this fake diversity and indeed, government assuming that it is some sort of almighty arbiter of heaven and earth.
God, so says the Holy Bible, and don’t take my word for it – read the book, is not happy when force is used to make everybody have ‘fair’ results, or ‘feel’ good about themselves. It actually harms the person that is told that they are ‘special’ or ‘just as good’ because it’s a LIE. They know it is a lie, you know it’s a lie, God knows it’s a lie, even your gold fish wearily eyeing that bigger fish in the tank knows it’s ludicrous.
What the universities, courts, and legislatures have proposed is indeed a usurpation of God’s authority and a violation of at least federal law under the constitution and most state constitution’s which are generally modeled after the Federal. The plain observable truth of creation makes all of this laughable if it weren’t overtly designed to harm. And they, the Leftist creators of this, are working under the guise of goodness and hiding behind the rules of men. But isn’t this how satan and his operatives work?
God’s created order ensures all tasks to a human hierarchical social interaction structure are available for the benefit of all. By making everybody a rocket scientist you not only make a mockery of God but of science, and the guy who would be very productive, gainful, and happy sweeping up at night is now what, a physicist? Absurd! The reasons, in your gut, you know that this is wrong is the Natural Law of God written on your heart. Listen to Him.
You can’t just be good. These laws of the Left to change creation are not salvific. You can’t legislate morality, or create an unnatural fairness that makes you loved of God. We’re not talking about voluntary charity here; we’re talking about force of law. No man can keep the entire Law. It is not unto salvation for sin. This SJW nonsense doesn’t help men at any intelligence or capability level, it harms all. Only the LORD can save the wicked being from burning and to right was has been set at ought. No man, Old Testament or New, or any future state nor past or future people group gets a free pass and is ushered into the presence of Holy God, without first submitting to the will of our LORD by His blood on the cross. This is the completion of the Law which Christ Jesus has fulfilled. Government is not god and Leftism is evil, it’s the opposite of God, a man created false economy, it’s an anti-Christ.
The law is a schoolmaster, it is for the unrighteous. A moral and religious people need no king but Christ.
The questions posed are hardly “titanic”.
The lowest of the low hanging fruit:
Question 2- Liberty is an outgrowth, or product, of equality.
Question 3- No
Question 4- Consent and sovereignty are compatible in that as a sovereign individual, each person can grant (give consent to) another person the permission or authority to perform acts on his/her behalf. If a person engages in any act which infringes upon the liberty or rights of another without that person’s consent, the person being acted upon is not sovereign, either because they are in violation of natural law (thus a criminal) or the person acting upon them is violating natural law.
Question 5- Part one, yes. Part two, God. Part three, no.
Question 6- each individual possesses the ‘rights’, as they are natural rights given to us by God and not granted by others.