Civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. not only preached racial harmony but also endorsed America’s founding principles—the universal application of the Declaration’s guarantees of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. His quarrel was not with the American idea but with its unequal application to African Americans. He envisioned America as a land of equal opportunity for all, not one of government-enforced equal outcomes or perpetual victimhood in which the “aggrieved” continually battle with the “oppressors.” “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence,” King proclaimed, “they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men—yes, black men as well as white men—would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
ASSAULTING THE CONSTITUTIONAL ORDER
Republicans believe in maximizing our liberties and prosperity through pro-growth policies that expand the economic pie by unshackling people from stifling taxes and regulations and unleashing their entrepreneurial spirit. Democrats see the economic pie as finite and the economy as a zero-sum game where one man’s gain is another’s loss. They believe enlightened central planners are wiser and more beneficent than the invisible hand of the market, and they support redistributionist schemes to equalize incomes. Just as they exploit racial and gender politics, they employ class warfare to augment their political power. It would be bad enough if they merely sought to pick economic winners and losers, but they also vilify the successful and inspire others to resent them. Some Democrats have conveniently reinterpreted America’s founding principles as demands for equal economic outcomes rather than equal opportunity—in other words, as a call for socialism.
The framers warned of another inherent threat to freedom. “Our Constitution,” wrote John Adams, “was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Constitutions are worth no more than the paper they are written on if the people and their elected representatives don’t honor them. The twentieth century is replete with examples of murderous, totalitarian regimes whose organizing documents purported to guarantee liberties to their citizens. While our nation still largely adheres to its constitutional framework, our commitment has measurably softened, as various branches of government have abandoned their fealty to the letter and spirit of the Constitution and usurped other branches’ powers or lawlessly delegated their own.
When courts usurp the legislative function and make laws rather than interpret them, when Congress delegates its legislative functions to an unaccountable administrative state, and when presidents issue lawless executive orders, they are abusing their respective constitutional authority. When the other branches fail to rein them in with constitutionally prescribed countermeasures, our government becomes less democratic, responsive, and accountable, and our liberties erode. As America’s body politic has grown complacent about the integrity of the Constitution, its prescribed checks and balances, and its federalist system, our freedoms have become imperiled. At the root of this indifference is a festering corruption of our values in which the rule of law is subordinated to the pursuit of raw political power and the political ends of those seeking or wielding that power.
The perpetrators of these assaults on our system maintain that they are honoring the spirit of a “living Constitution” and are interpreting its language progressively to accommodate modernity. They deny distorting its meaning and intent to achieve their policy goals. They rationalize their interpretations in emanations and penumbras that only they can divine, such as their declaration of a constitutional right to privacy as a justification for abortion in the infamous case of Roe v. Wade.11
An earlier, egregious example of judicial rewriting of the Constitution was the New Deal case of Wickard v. Filburn,12 in which the Supreme Court sanctioned the federal government’s regulation of purely intrastate activities under the Interstate Commerce Clause. Having established limits on wheat production to control wheat prices, the federal government imposed a penalty on Ohio farmer Roscoe Filburn for exceeding those limits. Filburn disputed the government’s constitutional authority to impose the limitation because he not only didn’t engage in interstate commerce, but he didn’t engage in commerce at all, since he didn’t sell his wheat. Unimpressed, the power-gobbling Court upheld the government’s right to regulate Filburn’s strictly local farming operations, arguing that even if the activity was local and not commercial, it could have a substantial economic effect on interstate commerce. The Court rationalized that because Filburn’s wheat production reduced the amount of wheat he would buy for animal feed on the open market, it was within the federal government’s regulatory scope under the Commerce Clause.
The Court knew that the framers never intended such an expansive reading of the clause but justified the federal overreach by presuming that a greater good would come from its decision. The Commerce Clause and Roe v. Wade are just a few of the myriad examples of liberal activist jurisprudence inflating the power of government and diminishing our liberties.
A NATION BORN IN HELL?
Conservatives are not indifferent to America’s past sins, but we are proud of America’s history and its freedom tradition, which has been a remarkable force for good in the world. The left portrays America’s history as a morality tale of evil, slavery-loving whites dispossessing Native Americans of the land. In short, America is drenched in evil and born in hell. It must forever atone. We saw this in leftists’ reactions to President Trump’s Fourth of July “Salute to America.” Liberal media networks ABC, CBS, and NBC refused to air the event13 while progressives roundly denounced the military’s participation, revealing their fundamental loathing for traditional patriotic displays. Indeed, the left staged its own counterprogramming: activists burned an American flag in front of the White House, and the New York Times produced a video debunking the “myth” that the United States is “the greatest nation on Earth.”14
The condemnation today of white Europeans for stealing the land from Native Americans is grossly oversimplified—factually and morally. Michael Medved observes that “the 400 year history of American contact with Indians includes many examples of white cruelty and viciousness.” But it was a two-way street. “The Native Americans frequently (indeed, regularly) dealt with the European newcomers with monstrous brutality and, indeed, savagery.… But none of the warfare (including an Indian attack in 1675 that succeeded in butchering a full one-fourth of the white population of Connecticut, and claimed additional thousands of casualties throughout New England) on either side amounted to genocide. Colonial and, later, the American government, never endorsed or practiced a policy of Indian extermination; rather, the official leaders of white society tried to restrain some of their settlers and militias and paramilitary groups from unnecessary conflict and brutality.”15
“One of the things we take for granted today is that it is wrong to take other people’s land by force,” writes Thomas Sowell. “Neither American Indians nor the European invaders believed that. Both took other people’s land by force—as did Asians, Africans and others. The Indians no doubt regretted losing so many battles. But that is wholly different from saying that they thought battles were the wrong way to settle ownership of land.”16 European colonization of the land occurred over four hundred years and was multifaceted. Without question, inexcusable acts of theft and murder occurred, but the typical pattern involved Europeans negotiating with Indian nations for land and the sharing of territory for a period—until war broke out, usually resulting in the Indians losing and being removed. While we mustn’t be callous to these hardships, it is unfair to single out Europeans for special opprobrium when what occurred in colonial America was much like what has happened all throughout world history among rival peoples and nations—including among rival nations of Native Americans.17
Nor is the issue of slavery in America as simple as the
America-hating revisionists would have you believe. Sowell notes that slavery was a worldwide institution for thousands of years. It wasn’t a controversial issue, even among intellectuals or political leaders, before the eighteenth century, when it became controversial only in Western civilization. All races of people were both practitioners and victims of slavery.
American history professor Allen Guelzo observes that the Constitution was never pro-slavery. While the Constitution contained concessions to the states on slavery, “nothing in it acknowledged ‘men to be property.’ ” In fact, James Madison said it would be intolerable “to admit to the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men.” Thus, writes Guelzo, “the fundamental basis on which the entire notion of slavery rested was barred at the Constitution’s door, even while its practical existence slipped through.”18 One member of the Massachusetts Ratifying Convention recognized that the Constitution was written to guarantee that slavery would eventually be abolished even if it was politically impossible to do so then. “It would not do to abolish slavery… in a moment,” said Thomas Dawes. But even if “slavery is not smitten with an apoplexy, yet it has received a mortal wound and will die of a consumption.”19
“To read the Constitution as pro-slavery… requires a suspension of disbelief that only playwrights and morticians could admire,” Guelzo concludes. “Yes, the Constitution reduced slaves to the hated three-fifths; but that was to keep slaveholders from claiming them for five-fifths in determining representation, which would have increased the power of slaveholding states. Yes, the Constitution permitted the slave trade to continue; but it also permitted Congress to shut it off, which it did in 1808.… Smearing the Constitution by characterizing it as a contract for the perpetuation of slavery is worse than trying to see as half empty a glass that’s half full; it is to see as bone dry a glass that’s nearly full, or even to see no glass at all.”20
Sowell observes that many American leaders, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Patrick Henry, came to oppose slavery, but maintains that it was much easier to morally oppose slavery in principle than to decide what to do with millions of slaves who were from another continent and had no experience living as free citizens in the United States, where they constituted 20 percent of the population. While the private correspondence of Washington, Jefferson, and many others reveals deep moral misgivings about slavery, Sowell notes that the practical question of what to do about the slavery question had them baffled and would continue to trouble the nation for more than a half a century.21
The question, of course, was settled by the American Civil War, in which more than 600,000 men were killed to free almost four million. Sowell cautions against the conceit that there was an easy answer to the problem—“or that those who grappled with the dilemma in the 18th century were some special villains when most leaders around the world saw nothing wrong with slavery.”22 Sowell says it’s hypocritical to castigate America as uniquely evil on slavery without so much as mentioning the historical prevalence of slavery worldwide and the millions of people throughout the world still enslaved today—more, in fact, “than were seized from Africa during the four centuries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.”23
Despite provisions in the Constitution virtually guaranteeing that the slavery issue would ultimately come to a head and despite the Americans who fought a brutal civil war to end it, the left teaches that America is far from atoning for its original sin. They regard America as an imperialistic and tainted nation dominated by a white patriarchy that enjoys the privileges and benefits of its race while oppressing women, minorities, and homosexuals. They demand that we view everything through the prism of oppressive historical race and gender hierarchies. To them, the idea of the melting pot is passé and even repellent because it distracts our focus from the historical injustices minorities have suffered and the redress to which they are entitled.
IDENTITY POLITICS AS A TICKET TO POWER
Democrats talk a good game of unity and bipartisanship, but their every action aims to divide us into balkanized, competing groups, suspicious and jealous of one another and in constant conflict. They realize their political power depends on convincing identity groups that Republicans are oppressing them and that their only hope is to trust Democrats to protect them. Liberals once abhorred segregation and vigorously advocated integration. Martin Luther King Jr. famously taught that people should be judged not by the color of their skin but the content of their character. Today’s left, however, speaks of racial harmony from one side of their mouth, but from the other comes a shrill message of identity politics, which holds that we must fixate on a person’s color rather than his character, heart, or personal behavior.
Democrats exploit identity politics not to benefit minorities, women, or the poor, but as a calculated strategy to sustain their power on the currency of minority victimhood. No matter what the issue, they resort to charges of racism, sexism, homophobia, or class warfare when their other arguments fail. They accuse conservatives of supporting border enforcement because they are racists, promoting welfare reform because they despise minorities and the poor, supporting voter ID laws to suppress the minority vote, opposing radical environmental policies to conserve their own wealth, promoting America’s national sovereignty and exceptionalism to preserve their “white privilege,” defending their Second Amendment rights because they are indifferent to gun deaths, being strict constructionists of the Constitution to preserve our patriarchal system, opposing abortion to undermine women’s autonomy and health, opposing state-sanctioned same-sex marriage because they are homophobes, supporting a strong military to impose America’s malevolent will on the world, promoting entitlement reform on the backs of seniors and others in need, and opposing the involuntary unionization of workers because they are enemies of the working man. On all these issues there is only one acceptable position and dissenters are aberrant. To enforce these conclusions, the leftist thought police act as cultural hall monitors. Dissent brings consequences, especially for those within the “jurisdiction” of the thought cops, such as university students at the mercy of their professors and public figures and politicians subject to the liberal media’s wrath.
Leftist race-baiting works. African Americans overwhelmingly vote Democrat, and their near-unanimous support was critical to electing the last three Democratic presidents—Carter, Clinton, and Obama.24 A recent study showed that in competitive congressional elections in 2018, 90 percent of black voters supported Democratic House candidates compared to 53 percent of voters overall. It also found that 91 percent of black women and 86 percent of black men believe that President Trump and Republicans are dividing Americans with toxic rhetoric. How could they not believe that when Democrats and the entire mainstream media hammer this false theme daily with their own toxic rhetoric? They have little else to attract voters.25
By contrast, the Republicans’ agenda is inherently more unifying because it sees people as individuals, not group members, equal in human dignity as made in God’s image and endowed with inalienable rights and equal opportunity under the law. Conservatives believe that these ideas, enshrined in our founding documents, have made America the greatest, freest, and most prosperous nation in history and therefore must be preserved.
THE LEFT’S ACHILLES’ HEEL
Progressives project themselves as morally superior guardians of the victim groups conservatives allegedly oppress. This is why they exempt themselves from accountability for their own racist statements, such as former senator Joe Biden’s casual description of Barack Obama as “the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean that’s a storybook, man.”26 Similarly, former senator Harry Reid exclaimed that Obama could win the presidency because he was “light-skinned” and didn’t speak with a “negro dialect.”27 According to the left’s rule book, one’s morality is not determined by his behavior but his political views and group identity. As members of the morally enlightene
d tribe of progressivism, liberals can be forgiven for an occasional heresy from the established orthodoxy when it’s politically expedient to do so.
The left long ago asserted themselves as the sole arbiter of cultural morality, with a monopoly on compassion and “social justice.” They adeptly pulled this off in the 1960s, according to author Shelby Steele, when America “finally accepted that slavery and segregation were profound moral failings.” This acceptance, Steele argues, “imposed a new moral imperative: America would have to show itself redeemed of these immoralities in order to stand as a legitimate democracy.” The left, always quick on the political uptake, seized the moment and anointed themselves the leaders of America’s search for redemption—“from shame to decency.”28
Guilty by Reason of Insanity Page 2
