Category Archives: culture

Progressive Gun Control Agenda

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Here are some of their thoughts.  A more complete listing of their proposals is at The Dailey Caller:

Reinstate and strengthen a prospective federal ban on assault weapons: These weapons are designed to fire a large number of rounds in a short period of time.  They constitute a lethal threat to law enforcement and other first responders.

This is…foolish.  There is no such thing as an “assault” weapon, other than a carefully manufactured-by-legislation definition.  Not even the military has “assault weapons.”

Moreover, the threat to law enforcement and first responders from this sort of mythical weapon, or the semiautomatic rifles on which this mythology is purported to be modeled, is far less than is the threat of pistols, knives, clubs, fire (especially when responding to arson fires), drunk drivers, and so on.  This excuse fixes a nonexistent problem.

Reinstate a prospective federal ban on assault magazines: These magazines hold more than ten rounds and allow a shooter to inflict mass damage in a short period of time without reloading. Banning them will save lives.

This, too, is nonsense.  There is no such thing as an “assault magazine,” other than a carefully manufactured-by-legislation definition.  Here, too, even the military has no such things.

Moreover, the threat to lives from these artifices pales compared to the real causes of killings, some of which were enumerated just above.

Both of these, also are useful—critically so—in allowing private citizens to defend themselves.

There are these, too:

Require a background check for every gun sale, while respecting reasonable exceptions for cases such as gifts between family members and temporary loans for sporting purposes: It is estimated that four out of ten gun buyers do not go through a background check when purchasing a firearm because federal law only requires these checks when someone buys a gun from a federally licensed dealer.

The rest of this item is a red herring; I’ll ignore it here.  Four out of ten sales don’t go through a background check because they’re private sales from one citizen to another.  With the cost of a background check running to hundreds of dollars, this serves only to suppress those private sales.  On top of this, requiring a background check for a private sale represents an atrocious invasion of privacy for the purchaser by the seller—even if the seller has no intention of the invasion other than an arbitrary, superfluous law requires it.

Strengthen the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) database: Immediate action is needed to ensure the information in the NICS database is up to date.  Many federal and state agencies remain deficient in transferring important records to the database.

No.  This is simply Progressives demanding government compile dossiers on honest American citizens on the off chance that a small number might prove unsavory.  This is nothing more than a presumption of guilt without due process—without even probable cause.  The United States isn’t France.

Some of their thoughts are on the right track, though.

Pass legislation aimed specifically at cracking down on illegal gun trafficking and straw-purchasing: Straw-purchasing is when a prohibited buyer has someone with no criminal history walk into a gun store, pass a background check and purchase a gun with the purpose of giving it to the prohibited buyer.

Nice idea, but it’s not necessary, and we already have too many mostly redundant laws on the books.  And the areas of non-overlap are nothing more than sources of confusion and litigation.  Moreover, this is a law honored in the breach, as DoJ’s Fast and Furious illustrates.

Prosecute those prohibited buyers who attempt to purchase firearms and others who violate federal firearm laws: Federal law bars nine categories of people—including felons and those prohibited because of mental illness—from buying guns.

Absolutely, enforce the laws on the books, including applying the sanctions the laws supply.

Close the holes in our mental-health system and make sure that care is available for those who need it: Congress must improve prevention, early intervention, and treatment of mental illness while working to eliminate the stigma associated with mental illness.

This is on the right track, but government involvement must be absolutely minimal.  In the Soviet Union, the government defined disagreeing with the government as a form of mental illness.  We don’t need the USSR’s gulag reborn here.

Support responsible gun ownership: Congress should support safety training, research aimed at developing new gun safety technologies and the safe storage of firearms.

Certainly. As soon as Congress has reformed our tax code to simplify it and lower rates in parallel with greatly reduced Federal spending, so our economy can finally recover and we as a nation can afford this sort of expenditure.  At that point, Congress should begin jawboning with the States to do this sort of thing.

Given the active interference with individual freedom and responsibility represented by those first few items, though, I have to ask: what problem are the Progressives actually trying to solve—disarming the population they wish to govern, or reducing violence?

Washington, DC

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Washington[.] It’s a wonderful world, a place where every problem of life can be reduced to just two words.  Gun control.  Immigration reform.  Climate control.  The deficit, which of course can be solved in two words: a “balanced approach.”  Things so hard haven’t been so simple since Tinker Bell taught children to fly in “Peter Pan,” also with two words—pixie dust.

I was tempted to file this under my Humor key word.  But Daniel Henninger is as deadly serious as the disconnect this quote describes.

The Coming Elections and Electoral Struggle

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I’ve written a few times about how Republicans and Conservatives can attract voters to their party and cause, and how conservative principles will draw Americans of every stripe—that demographics do not threaten us, they aid us—if only we would talk to folks.  Those are principle arguments, though.

David Horowitz has a pamphlet out, “Go For the Heart: How Republicans Can Win,” that goes into far more detail.  Horowitz makes the principle arguments more cogently, and he has some things to say specifically about what to say.

Below are a couple of excerpts.

In the 2012 election, Democrats attacked Republicans as defenders of the wealthy who are not paying their “fair share.”  Republicans responded by deploring “class warfare rhetoric,” which does not answer the charge that Republicans are defending the wealthy and are uncaring.

“Caring” is not one among many issues in an election.  It is the central one. Since most policy issues are complicated, voters want to know above everything else just whom they can trust to sort out the complexities and represent them.  Before voters cast their ballots for policies or values they want a candidate or party that cares about them. …

… In the 2012 election, 70% of Asian Americans cast their ballots for Obama, even though Asians share Republican values, are family oriented, entrepreneurial, and traditional.  Asian Americans voted for Obama because they were persuaded that he cared for minorities—for them, and Romney didn’t.

The Republican response to the Democrats’ attack (that’s “class warfare rhetoric”) doesn’t work because it’s an abstraction.  “Class warfare rhetoric” has no human face; it’s about a political style.  Criticizing the wealthy for “not paying their fair share” is a direct attack on an easily identified target, which is why so many wealthy taxpayers—including entertainment figures who are normally Democrats—were outraged by the slander.  More importantly, the Democrats’ attack on the rich is an emotional appeal to those who are not rich.  It tells them that someone cares about them.

And

Elections are necessarily about “us” and “them.”  Democrats are as adept at framing “them,” as Republicans are not.  Democrats know how to incite envy and resentment, distrust and fear, and to direct these volatile emotions towards their Republican opponents.  Meanwhile, Republicans are busy complaining about the style of the Democrats’ argument.

I’m reminded of the mouse remonstrating with the owl.  The mouse thinks the owl’s ways are wrong; the owl thinks the mouse is lunch.

An answer:

The only way to confront the emotional campaign that Democrats wage in every election is through an equally emotional campaign that puts the aggressors on the defensive; that attacks them in the same moral language, identifying them as the bad guys, the oppressors of women, children, minorities and the middle class, that takes away from them the moral high ground which they now occupy.  You can’t confront an emotionally based moral argument with an intellectual analysis.

Horowitz goes on, then he summarizes.  Essentially, Republicans need to stop playing small ball, need to stop reacting (piecemeal as it is) to the…Democrats’…initiative: Republicans—and Conservatives, say I—need to seize the initiative, to go on the offensive:

  1. Put the aggressors on the defensive.
  2. Put their victims—women, minorities, the poor and working Americans—in front of every argument and every policy in the same way they [Democrats] do.
  3. Start the campaign now (because the Democrats already have).

For instance:

Throughout the Republican campaign, there was a lot of talk about “job creators.”  There were a lot of defenses of “job creators,” whom Democrats quickly redefined as rich people who don’t pay their fair share.  That’s the problem with playing a “prevent defense.”  Most Americans see job creators—employers—as rich people. … If you’re fighting for the underdogs, you have to go on the attack.

What about job destroyers?  What about Democrats who are killing the jobs of ordinary Americans—not just failing to create them…?
…
Why are Republicans so reluctant to name the victims of Democrat policies, particularly the victims among America’s minority communities and working classes?  Why don’t Republicans identify Democrats as a threat to those communities as Cuomo declared Republicans a threat to women?

Thus,

The bottom line is this: If Republicans want to persuade minorities they care about them, they have to stand up for them; they have to defend them; and they have to show them that Democrats are playing them for suckers, exploiting them, oppressing them, and profiting from their suffering.
…
The way for Republicans to show they care about minorities is to defend them against their oppressors and exploiters, which in every major inner city in America without exception are Democrats. Democrats run the welfare and public education systems; they have created the policies that ruin the lives of the recipients of their handouts. It’s time that Republicans started to hold Democrats to account; to put them on the defensive and take away the moral high ground, which they now occupy illegitimately. Government welfare is not just wasteful; it is destructive. The public school system in America’s inner cities is not merely ineffective; it is racist and criminal.

Horowitz’ pamphlet contains much more than just those items, though, and it’s well worth reading in its entirety.  One place it can be read is at Power Line.

There’s one more thing Conservatives–including Tea Partiers–should do, that Horowitz doesn’t mention.  We should put up candidates in Democratic primaries, forcing a primary contest if necessary, to make Democrat Senate and House incumbents actively defend their in-office records.  In public.

Conservatism and Liberalism

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I wrote yesterday about who a Conservative is; today I’d like to discuss the relationship between conservatism and liberalism, and how the two evolve.

The relationship between the two is fairly stable—conservatism and liberalism have generally oppositional views of how best to support our people and our country—it’s their individual roles in politics that evolve.  Indeed, the two have swapped roles since our founding.

In broad, general terms, an 18th Century Conservative holds a fundamental belief about the role of government in men’s lives similar to the more or less enlightened view delineated by Edmund Burke contemporaneously with our Revolution.

Burke has been termed a friend of the American colonies for his support for them and for their rights in the English Parliament.  However, he was a monarchist through and through.  He argued forcefully for our rights as Englishmen, true enough.  But those rights, in his view, consisted entirely of the right to be subjects of a pater familias monarchy, of a government that claimed for itself the authority to define the detail of that right, to define for today what our freedoms might be—until the monarchy saw fit to withdraw those rights, those freedoms tomorrow.  This was so because a mere commoner was viewed as incapable of reason, he could not determine for himself what was best for him: he needed the…guidance…of his betters.  Moreover, the right to govern, circularly, was an inheritable right, but only by those already comprising that government, for their superior fitness to govern was demonstrated by their being part of the government.

Set in contrast to that, as I noted in that earlier post, the 18th Century Liberal belief of the sovereignty of man over his government; the principle that legitimate government can only be formed by men themselves, voluntarily; and that liberties and responsibilities are inherent in each of us individually as gifts from God, not severally as handouts from government.  Thus, a man, says that 18th Century Liberal, has rights and responsibilities that are indivisible from him because they are inherent in his humanity, in his very existence.  And he has the innate wherewithal, from that, to determine his own lot in accordance with his own imperatives.

Then government exists to protect these rights and for no other purpose.  When such a government strays too far from this duty, the citizens of this wholly voluntary polity have an equally inalienable right (in the Declaration of Independence, our Founders aver a duty, as did Locke) to do whatsoever is necessary to bring that government to heel or to replace it with a more obedient one.  This is the very antithesis of the world of governance extant in the 18th Century Conservative’s mind.

That 18th Century Conservative’s view was repackaged and articulated in more modern terms by (among others) Theodore Roosevelt and Herb Croly, founders of the Progressive (modern Liberal) movement early in the 20th century.  Since, it has become the central theme of liberals generally (for instance, Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said that she was a proud Progressive).  Here is what Herb Croly wrote in his The Promise of American Life,  in 1909:

To be sure, any increase in centralized power and responsibility, expedient or inexpedient, is injurious to certain aspects of traditional American democracy.  But the fault in that case lies with the democratic tradition; and the erroneous and misleading tradition must yield before the march of constructive national democracy….  [T]he average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat.

President Theodore Roosevelt, in his 1904 Annual Message to Congress, had this to say:

The Government must in increasing degree supervise and regulate the workings of the railways engaged in interstate commerce.

And again, in his 1908 Annual Message [emphasis added]:

The chief reason, among the many sound and compelling reasons, that led to the formation of the National Government was the absolute need that the Union, and not the several States, should deal with interstate and foreign commerce; and the power to deal with interstate commerce was granted absolutely and plenarily to the central government…. The proposal to make the National Government supreme over, and therefore to give it complete control over, the railroads and other instruments of interstate commerce is merely a proposal to carry out to the letter one of the prime purposes, if not the prime purpose, for which the Constitution was founded.

And again, in his 1910 New Nationalism speech:

It has become entirely clear that we must have government supervision of the capitalization, not only of public-service corporations, including, particularly, railways, but of all corporations doing an interstate business.

…

We grudge no man a fortune in civil life if it is honorably obtained and well used.  It is not even enough that it should have gained without doing damage to the community.  We should permit it to be gained only so long as the gaining represents benefit to the community.

Because Big Government knows best how to manage business, for what purpose a man should be required to use the fruits of his labor, and that man can be allowed [sic] to enjoy his success only in approved ways.

We’ve seen this desire in modern Liberals—Progressives—to insert Big Government into our economy, into our lives, with the 21st century nationalization of both our health insurance industry and our health care industry and with the effective control over our financial industry achieved with Dodd-Frank and its unconstrained Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

We’ve also seen the Progressive disdain for our Constitution—the product of those 18th Century Liberals—and thus for the rule of law in, for instance, unconstitutional “recess” appointments of officials while the Senate was in session and in the imposition by regulation of that which our representatives in Congress had explicitly rejected.  This is rule by the men of government, instead.

We’ve also seen their modern belief in Big Government clearly stated.  In October 2008, Democratic Party Presidential Candidate Barack Obama, responding to a citizen questioner in Toledo, OH, who asked “Your new tax plan is going to tax me more, isn’t it?” said, “I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”  And President Obama said at a rally in Quincy, IL in April 2010, “I think at a certain point, you’ve made enough money.”  Here is the Progressive saying in so many words that Progressives in government know better how to dispose of a man’s property, how his money should be spent, what constitutes sufficient wealth.  How a man should be allowed to enjoy what success he is to be permitted to achieve.

Today’s opposition to this Progressive liberalism is the modern Conservative: a man who now seeks to conserve those 18th century liberal principles that are fundamental to the American social compact.

Notice that: the names have reversed position, with what was once known as liberal now known as conservative, and what was once thought conservative has become liberal, but this evolution is one of name only (this often is a point of confusion when talking about liberalism vs conservatism).

But the fundamental tenets remain unchanged.  One respects the wisdom of the individual, common man and holds him sovereign over government, with rights and duties inherent in each as endowments from our Creator.  The other, in contradiction, hews to the view of government as the solution, and so government must grow to meet the problems of the day; what we obtain, and how we enjoy it, are for government to determine.

The monarchist is now the champion of Big Government and wants to change from limited government to that Big Government, while the limited government erstwhile liberal wants to conserve those principles of limited government and of individual liberty and individual responsibility.

What is a Conservative?

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This post—a long one, so heads up—borrows heavily from a premise I develop early in my book A Conservative’s Manifesto.

One theme that ran through the English colonies in North America, early on, was the view that some men are better than others, and those others are born to be led—they have no liberty, only those “freedoms” and “rights” handed down from on high by the government that rules over them.  The common man is incapable of reason, is unable to decide what is best for himself, and must be led by his betters.  Of course, this governance always is for only the best of reasons: “We know better,” and “It’s for your own good.”  And it flowed, then, from a pater familias and kindly king.

However, those same colonists were an essentially self-selected population of men and women who had gotten fed up with the religious persecutions rampant in the Old World—both Great Britain and the European continent.  They also were tired of the lack of political and social freedom of that former life, especially as those stood in stark and growing contrast with the lives circumstance forced them to lead in these New World colonies.  No fatherly monarch, no benevolent and watchful Parliament, stood guard over these people; they were far too remote geographically, and rapidly becoming so emotionally, as well.  These men and women had, for their very survival, to depend on themselves and on each other, to rely on their own creativity and their own initiative—as, for instance, the survivors of the Jamestown and Plymouth colonies discovered.  They began to see, empirically, that they were capable of reason, they were fully able to decide what was best for themselves.

As a result, the colonists, having already selected themselves according to a characteristic of being able to seek something better for themselves, also began to understand what “better” might be and to pursue it.  This growing realization and a parallel growing sense of themselves as peers (in several senses of that word, even though lacking in title) of their English cousins in the empire, rather than as dependents, accelerated rapidly in the 18th century.  Their growing sense of distance and separation was helped along by an increasingly intrusive monarchy and Parliament as Great Britain sought to strengthen its hold on the colonies—both to preserve Empire and as weapons against continental powers in an also rapidly growing economic and political competition.

The American Revolution began when two major groups of people got fed up.  It began when the gentleman farmers, the lawyers, and the well-educated (most of them church school educated, church schools being the dominant source of secondary education), many of whom were men of the cloth—this colonial aristocracy, this American gentry—finally had had enough of interference from a monarchy distant and remote, not only geographically, but psychologically and morally, as well.  These men knew Locke and Rousseau, and their classical education also had taught them Roman and Greek ideas of law and polity.

The Revolution also began when the merchants, the businessmen, the small farmers, the laborers, these men who worked for a living (with no pejorative intended toward the American gentry) had had enough of interference with their business, with their pocketbooks, with their livelihoods, with their ability simply to do as they wished, from a monarchy distant and remote, not only geographically, but psychologically and morally, as well.

These two groups of colonials, one perhaps articulating the problems more crisply than the other, had done with the crown’s trampling on individual liberties, had done with the crown’s separation of man’s natural rights from the men themselves—rights that Locke had recognized and described 100 years prior and that Rousseau was articulating simultaneously with the growing colonial rejection of crown abuses of them.  Although the proximate causes of the Revolution were economic and political, the Revolution was broader and more far-reaching.  With a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, the gentlemen mutually pledged to each other their Lives, their Fortunes, and their sacred Honor, and they enlisted the common man to the cause of freedom, as well.  Thus, the second paragraph of our Declaration of Independence contains an explicit reaffirmation of these natural rights as elucidated by Locke and Rousseau:

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. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

As our Founders wrote, building on Locke and Rousseau, the relationship between the citizens of a polity and that polity’s government is a social contract that is originated by the citizens, among the citizens, and that is maintained by the citizens.  The government is an instrument of the people, not the other way around.

Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense during the winter of 1776 while actively fomenting rebellion, “A government of our own is our natural right….”  Paine repeated this in 1791 in his Rights of Man:

There never did, there never will, and there never can exist a parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controuling posterity to the “end of time,” or of commanding for ever how the world shall be governed or who shall govern it: and therefore all such clauses, acts or declarations, by which the makers of them attempt to do what they have neither the right nor the power to do, nor the power to execute, are in themselves null and void.

Further, as Locke and Rousseau emphasized, and as our Founders acknowledged in word and their action of the Rebellion, these natural rights cannot be given up by man to a government; they are God’s gift to man and so are indivisible from us.

Our Founders went further.  Not only is a government the servant of the people, the direction of this relationship utterly determines and controls the nature of the powers that the government has.  This government, this object of the social contract that men have with each other to create that government has only those powers, only those authorities and permissions, explicitly granted to that government by the people in their social contract with each other; and that government has no other such powers, authorities, or permissions whatsoever.

Thus, the social contract which our Founders wrote and which Americans approved among themselves and for themselves, includes the Constitution of the United States, which created a government with the following structure, carefully crafted to correct the deficiencies, both moral and physical, of the monarchy being replaced.

  • an assemblage of representatives of the people, elected by the people.  (Originally, one part of this assemblage, the Senate, had its members chosen by the States’ elected assemblies, in turn elected by the citizens of each state).
  • to counterbalance this assemblage, a national executive officer, also elected by the people (albeit indirectly; the choice is made by an Electoral College, but the electors of a particular State are chosen by a mechanism determined by that State’s legislature, and these legislatures, again, are elected by the citizens of the respective State).
  • counterbalancing these two, an independent judiciary as a third equal branch of the government, whose purpose is to try matters of law, both civil and criminal as created by the representatives and carried out by the executive officer.  The Supreme Court of the United States also makes the final determination, when particular cases rise through the appellate process to it, of the Constitutionality, the legitimacy, of any law.

It originally was envisioned that gentlemen would become the elected officials.  The thinking here was that gentlemen, having no pecuniary interest in the world, were best suited to govern because they would do so disinterestedly and solely with the best interests of the nation at heart (centuries old habits die hard, even in the fire of Revolution).  Here is where the radicalism of our Revolution appears.  The citizen soldiers, the common man, who did most of the actual fighting (through their sheer numbers in the continental forces; this is not to denigrate the sacrifices of gentry, who fought with every bit as much courage and sacrifice), took the American aristocracy, the gentlemen of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Paine with his pamphleteering, et al., at their word: government should flow up from the people and not down from the pinnacle of an aristocracy.  These private citizens and these pecuniary merchants and businessmen voted in earnest, alongside the gentlemen, in the elections subsequent to victory, and more radically, they stood for office and got elected to city governments and to State and Federal office, in competition with the gentlemen.

Thus, this liberal/radical movement, for this is what it was, even though it was not so organized, brings us to the major outcome of our Revolution.  Society, politics, and the underlying conceptualization of these were changed completely in our new nation compared to the English colonies of just a few short years prior:

  • A completely new social contract among the citizens of the new country was created, one which laid out the new nation’s principles of liberty and which created a republican government subordinate to the people, who are sovereign in that new nation, and which removed all monarchy from the polity.
  • Perhaps most importantly, the individual was recognized as politically superior to government, in control of government, with national sovereignty acknowledged as residing solely in the people and not at all in the government.
  • Related to this, government was recognized to be, and created as, an instrument of the people with the sole purpose of protecting the individual’s natural rights.
  • Religious tolerance (not merely nominal freedom) replaced persecution, and the new government-as-people’s-servant was explicitly enjoined from taking any action that might even begin to seem like taking a stand on religion.
  • Society was severed from government.  Perquisites of social standing, business deals, honors, and the like no longer flowed from a monarchical peak downward through a pyramid of class relationships.
  • Society itself changed and was no longer hierarchical.  Who one was or could ever be was no longer defined by to whom one was connected or where one lived.  Who one was or could become was defined instead by the character and characteristics of that person.
  • More than not merely not hierarchical, society became truly classless:
    • The relationship between a common man and a gentleman changed.  One might work for the other (it was, indeed, a two way relationship, as many of the gentleman were economically ruined by the war and others were unable to collect enough in rents to cover expenses, and so these gentlemen had to work for pay, as well), but each was the equal of the other where it most mattered—civilly, in the eyes of the law and in open court; religiously as our social contract also explicitly recognized, in the eyes of God.
    • Businessmen and merchants were getting elected to legislatures at all levels of government jurisdiction; government service no longer was the sole province of disinterested gentlemen.
  • Central government was limited to a very few, explicitly identified powers.  If the Federal government didn’t have these powers, the people did or their State governments did, and neither needed any permission from the Federal government to exercise them.  Further, the non-named powers were not government’s to give or to withhold; they resided solely in the people or their State governments—which, being closer to the people, were even more directly under their control.

And so we come now to my definition of an 18th Century Liberal.  The Liberal movement had succeeded in withdrawing government from its absolute control over life, and the movement had replaced that with a government that was subordinated to free men as a product of a social contract among free men, with the sole function of preserving the individual liberty of free men, and with powers limited to exactly those necessary to achieve that end and no more.

This Liberal movement also had changed the state of mind of man from that of a dependent whose worth, whose very definition, depended on his connection to others in a governing hierarchy, and restored him to his proper status as a free and sovereign individual and thereby restored to him his understanding of his own true worth.

This movement had restored man, with his rights morally inseparable from his person.  This movement had restored to the individual man his own morality, his own responsibility to act and to accept the consequences of those actions.

This movement had restored to the individual man his freedom of choice.  This movement had restored to him the actual ability to enter into agreements, of his own free will, with his fellow man, and to engage those agreements for any purpose he would—including the purpose of forming a government that can, and can be required to, devote itself to the preservation of his abilities and of his freedoms.

In sum, this movement had restored to the individual man his rights to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.  This movement was consummated by these men, now finally freed of a government thrust upon them against their will (a government which tended to deny the very freedom of that will), reaching an agreement among themselves on the proper nature of a government working for them as sovereign, and then by their establishing that government.

An 18th Century Liberal, then, is a person who recognizes and acts to achieve and to support the following:

  • The individual man is sovereign over his person and his beliefs.
  • The individual man, acting in concert with his fellows, is sovereign over their common polity.
  • The individual man is the sole decision maker as to what he will or will not do, and is acknowledged to have a rationality and freedom of will to do so.
  • The individual man is the sole person responsible for the outcomes of his actions.
  • The individual man is fallen and imperfect but can take his own steps to improve himself, both in physical circumstance and morally, without government mandating those improvements or their means of achievement.
  • The government formed through the mutual agreement of these free men is subordinate to, responsible to, and has only those powers explicitly granted it by, those free men.
  • The government formed through the mutual agreement of these free men must be kept small and limited to, and in, the powers granted it by those free men.
  • The government formed through the mutual agreement of these free men has as its sole purpose the preservation of the liberties of those free men.”

Our contract thus acknowledges that we begin life equal—created equal, equal under law, with equal opportunity—while protecting our freedoms to pursue our own interests and to achieve our own goals without government interference.  This is key: freedom to do as we will and sole ownership of our private property are inseparable from our responsibility for our actions; if we cannot act freely, if we do not own our property exclusive of all other claims, then we cannot assume that full responsibility.  On the other hand, if we do not assume that responsibility, if we somehow slip that off onto another entity (government, for instance), then we give up control over our actions—we lose our freedom.

Now, what is a Conservative?  Today’s Conservative is that 18th Century Liberal: he lives by the principles codified in our social contract, written 230 years ago, which has needed modification only a few times, and then only after open national debate of those specific Amendments.  A modern Conservative trusts to the wisdom, talent, and strength of the individual American citizen, acting individually or in concert with his fellows (a non-government collective action), to resolve crises and to make better lives for ourselves and our children, doing so without the hindrance of government welfare.  A modern Conservative recognizes that on those rare occasions where government assistance is warranted, that assistance must be narrowly defined, short-lived, and a last resort.