RUTHFULLY YOURS

“We know that the desire for freedom is not confined to, or owned by, any culture; it is the inborn hope of our humanity.” (NPR, Oct. 19, 2017) So said former president George W. Bush in his recent criticism of fellow Republican, President Trump. The idea that, by their very nature, all human beings desire freedom is an unquestioned premise of modern liberalism. It underlay Mr. Bush’s efforts at nation-building in Iraq, and it has underlain a century and a half of U.S. immigration policy. And it is false.

According to Freedom House, 40 per cent of the world’s population today is free, while 60 per cent is only partly free or unfree. The Index of Economic Freedom, published by the Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal, shows a map of the world in which economic freedom is confined to a just handful of countries, mostly in the English-speaking world and northern Europe. Freedom is the exception in the world today, as it has been throughout human history.

By “freedom” I mean the absence of physical compulsion—from three specific sources, foreign enemies, one’s fellow citizens, and one’s own government. As for the first, most peoples throughout history probably have resisted subjugation by other peoples. The desire for freedom in this sense is likely near-universal.

But when it comes to relations with one’s fellow citizens or one’s own government, the record suggests that many peoples have tolerated a great deal of physical compulsion—of women, for example. Saudi women are still prohibited by law from driving an automobile. It defies belief that Muslim women would have quietly tolerated subjugation by men for over a thousand years if the desire for freedom were inborn.

Now consider that of the 25 freest countries in the world, according to The Human Freedom Index for 2016, six are English-speaking, two are former British colonies, 16 others are in northern Europe, and one is in southern Europe. On the other hand, of the 25 least free countries, twelve are Muslim, nine are non-Muslim African, two are Asian, and two are South American.

Contrary to what President Bush said above, freedom is indeed a product of culture, which means that it is a product of ideas. The desire for freedom must be learned.

That which must be learned can also be unlearned over time, something of which American Leftists are well aware. That awareness was on display in a recent series of tweets from a professor at City University of New York. “The white-nuclear family is one of the most powerful forces supporting white supremacy,” wrote Jessie Daniels. (Daily Mail, Oct. 31, 2017) By “white supremacy” she meant not the Ku Klux Klan or neo-Nazis but simply the dominant, “white” culture of the United States, the culture, specifically, that supports the idea of freedom as the absence of physical compulsion, including by the government. Leftists like Professor Daniels fervently advocate using government compulsion to engineer a more “equal” society, by forcing Christian bakers to make wedding cakes for same-sex couples, for example, They are hard at work helping Americans to unlearn their desire for freedom.

The idea of freedom as the absence of compulsion gives rise to “negative” rights, such as freedom of speech and religion, rights that stipulate what government may not do. It was this conception of freedom that then-senator Barack Obama had in mind in 2001 when, arguing for the forced redistribution of wealth, he complained that the U.S. Constitution is “a charter of negative liberties.” (World Net Daily, Oct. 27, 2008)

For her part, professor Daniels lamented, quite accurately, that the family is the primary means of transmitting the culture that supports this “white” conception of freedom from one generation to the next. She favors reviving the “Marxist-feminist critique of The Family as an inherently conservative force in society,” a critique that made the family a primary target of the cultural Marxism, now known as political correctness, that has been eroding the foundations of our freedom since the sixties. (Daily Mail)

To anyone not blinded by political correctness, it is obvious that Leftists like professor Daniels and Mr. Obama are deadly enemies of the freedom of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. But former president Bush, like the entire political establishment, is precisely so blinded. “At times, it can seem like the forces pulling us apart are stronger than the forces binding us together. Argument turns too easily into animosity,” he mused, as though the Leftist origins of the conflict, and the incompatibility of the contending ideologies, were a great mystery to him. (NPR)

So, instead of defending the freedom of the Constitution, Mr. Bush implied, echoing the cultural Marxist line, that President Trump’s sensible efforts to screen Muslim immigrants more carefully and to control America’s borders are manifestations of “bigotry” and “white supremacy.” Mr. Bush has shown that the Republican establishment, variously frightened, paralyzed, or rendered incapable of rational judgment by political correctness, can be every bit as damaging to the cause of freedom as the cultural Marxists are.