RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Deep-state holdovers embedded like barnacles in the federal bureaucracy are hell-bent on destroying President Trump.” So said Sean Hannity recently, and Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal took him to task for it. Stephens accused Hannity of right-wing paranoia. He quoted Richard Hofstadter’s 1963 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” and asked whether Hofstadter’s description applies to the right wing mindset of today:

“America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesman who are at the very centers of American power.”

By the time Hofstadter wrote these words, progressives had already gone a long way toward transforming the political system of the United States. As the Framers of the U.S. Constitution understood it, a primary purpose of government is to secure the property rights of individuals, which they believed are the foundation of all other rights. (Try to imagine freedom of the press without privately owned newspapers, or freedom of religion – in a country that is expelling religion from the public square – without privately owned church buildings on privately owned land.) This purpose manifested itself most broadly in the structure of the Constitution, which was intended to limit the power of democratic majorities, correctly regarded by the Framers as the greatest threat to private property and, thus, to individual liberty.

But in the early 20^th century, the progressives set out to make America more democratic – through the 17^th Amendment, for example, which substituted popular election of U.S. senators for their selection by the respective state legislatures. Their purpose in democratizing America was not to empower the people, but, rather, to “democratically” abolish the Constitutional barriers that had kept property rights secure for a century, thus freeing governments at all levels to intervene in the economic affairs of the nation, legislating wages, working conditions, hours of employment, and countless other matters.

The progressives marked an important milestone in 1937 when, intimidated by FDR’s court-packing scheme, the Supreme Court stopped protecting economic rights from legislative infringement. The groundwork had now been laid for transforming the United States from a republic centered on protecting the rights of individuals into a democracy in which individual liberty would increasingly be subordinated to the “will of the people.” We can only wish that more Americans in the first half of the twentieth century had shared the “paranoia” that Hofstadter so denigrated.

The transformation begun by the progressives accelerated in the 1960s, when the radical Left abandoned their efforts to instigate a proletarian revolution and turned, instead, to cultural revolution.

Since that time, the Left have re-made the workplace to accommodate women and members of preferred minorities. They have re-made the military to accommodate women and homosexuals. They have re-made the schools and colleges, and especially the curricula, in which America as founded is now portrayed as unrelievedly oppressive of everyone who was not a white, male, and Christian. They have re-made the economy, driving much of our heavy industry out of the country or out of business.

The Left have re-made the family to suit homosexuals, and now they are re-making our whole idea of male and female. (Next up, they plan to repeal the law of gravity.) And they are re-making the ethnic, religious, and cultural demography of the United States, to the point where one must make amends for being Caucasian.

All of this is premised on the idea that the needs of the “oppressed,” such as blacks, women, homosexuals, immigrants, and even nature, must take precedence over the rights of individuals whenever a democratic majority (or an organized, determined plurality) deems it necessary. This is called tyranny of the majority, and it is as antithetical to the Founders’ Constitution as was monarchy. It does not take a paranoiac to recognize in all of this a dire threat to one’s own well-being, to one’s family’s, and to the nation’s.

Barack Obama was the first explicitly anti-individualist American president. On Chicago Public Radio in 2001 he complained that the U.S. Constitution is a “charter of negative liberties.” Negative liberties, such as freedom of speech and religion, specify what the government may not do to individuals. Mr. Obama complained that the Constitution does not specify what the government “must do on your behalf.” He said this in a discussion of government’s purported role in redistributing wealth.

The problem with positive rights, such as a right to a guaranteed income or a right to health care, is that one man’s right is another man’s obligation. If a homosexual couple has a right to a wedding cake, then some Christian baker may be forced to make them one, even if it violates his conscience. (A proper understanding of property rights would guarantee that a baker could serve or refuse to serve any customer for any reason he chooses.)

If the needs of others take precedence over my right to my own property, then it is only a matter of time before I will be required to surrender the rest of my rights for the good of whomever “the people” have determined needs me to give up my rights. Either the individual is primary and his rights are sacrosanct, or “the people” are primary and all rights are dependent on the whims of the mob.

In a genuinely free society, each individual runs his own life, and the government’s job is to keep the peace. Such a government must keep to an absolute minimum the number of positive obligations it imposes on individuals. But in a polity based on positive rights, such as Mr. Obama advocates, the government is continually telling individuals what they must do – such as that Catholic nuns must include abortion services in their lay employees’ health plans.

Individual rights are integrally connected with representative government. In the 1600s, the English fought a civil war, executed a king, and deposed another to establish the principle of Parliamentary supremacy. Since then, secure private property rights and a strong legislature have been defining characteristics of liberal (in the original sense) governance in the West. Note, by way of contrast, that legislatures are impotent or non-existent in anti-private property, anti-individualist countries like the USSR, Red China, North Korea, and Cuba.

But Mr. Obama, alone among U.S. presidents, repeatedly and egregiously attempted to exercise powers which, under our Constitution, may be exercised only by Congress. From his first month in office, Mr. Obama’s idea of governing seemed to be, “I’m the president, so I get to tell everyone else what to do.”

This attitude was on display when Mr. Obama commandeered one seventh of the U.S. economy in order to provide health insurance to the five per cent of Americans who did not have it. It was on display in his serial re-writes of the Obamacare statute, as that statute’s many flaws became manifest. And it was on display in 2009 when he responded to Congress’s refusal to regulate carbon emissions by having his EPA chief declare carbon dioxide a pollutant, thereby enabling the EPA to regulate the use of fossil fuels – which would entail regulating, directly or indirectly, most of the U.S. economy. 

It was on display when Mr. Obama attacked Libya in 2011 without consulting Congress, when he signed the Iran nuclear treaty without submitting it to the Senate for ratification, and when he did the same with the 2016 Paris agreement with China to join the UN climate change pact. 

And it was on display when, after Congress refused to pass the DREAM Act, President Obama ordered his Department of Homeland Security to defer deporting millions of illegal aliens and to make work permits available to them.

But nothing so perfectly reveals Mr. Obama’s authoritarian mindset than his 2016 order to public schools throughout the country that boys and girls must tolerate members of the opposite sex in their bathrooms. Mr. Obama said to the American people, in effect, “I know what’s best, and you will do what I tell you to do.” Nothing could be further from the letter and the spirit of the U.S. Constitution. Yet it is perfectly consistent with Mr. Obama’s understanding of government as the enforcer of positive rights. Mr. Obama acted, throughout his presidency, as though the “fundamental transformation” that he promised in 2011 had already taken place, and the United States was no longer a constitutional republic in which the legislature writes the laws and the president merely executes them.

Now, rather than retiring to his home town as almost every former president has done, Mr. Obama has set himself up in Washington with his consigliere, Valerie Jarrett, and his nation-wide network of “community activists,” the 30,000-member Organizing for America. It appears that he is not going away any time soon.

Meanwhile, the Left and the media have whipped their followers into a frenzy over an imagined collusion between the Russians and Mr. Trump to get him elected. Persons within the government are leaking the content of private conversations involving Mr. Trump and his advisors. Obama-appointed judges are fabricating legal justifications out of thin air to block Mr. Trump’s exercising of his legitimate powers. Senate minority leader Schumer has vowed to filibuster an eminently qualified Supreme Court candidate for no other reason than that Mr. Trump nominated him. And the Left has orchestrated a firestorm of hostility to President Trump such as no newly-elected president has faced since Abraham Lincoln won the presidency on the eve of the Civil War. They seem intent on making it impossible for Mr. Trump to govern effectively.

In the last paragraph of his Wall Street Journal piece on paranoia, Mr. Stephens says, “Conservatives used to understand … the consequences that flow from treating political differences as mortal threats to the state.” Whether to situate the new police station on the east or the west side of town qualifies as a political difference. Such differences can be worked out when the contending parties agree on fundamentals. But whether the United States shall be a constitutional republic of free individuals or an autocracy grounded in the tyranny of the majority is not a matter of “political differences.” It is a matter of life and death.

A tyranny arrived at democratically is still a tyranny. We are long past the point at which the American Left became a “mortal threat” to American liberty.