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Essays, Opinion, & Commentary |
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June 20, 2007
by Gordon Francis Corbett
In replying to a letter about appointees to the Supreme Court, one of my "progressive" correspondents said,
Evidently he and I differ concerning what constitutes "far-right ideologues" and what makes up President Bush's own ideology, such as it is. The first thing is to look at the definitions of "ideology" and "ideologue." The second is to see whether either fits Bush. Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary defines an "ideology" as,
On the other hand, Webster's defines an "ideologue" as,
Run these definitions through a blender and pour out the remains: systematic belief systems, some of whose adherents' idealism blinds them to reality. Bush is an idealist? A theorist? Balderdash. Today, ideologies take second place to pragmatism. Pragmatists see life as a series of idiosyncratic problems to be solved, often through bargaining. They denounce ideologies as "rigid," because ideologies prescribe and proscribe criteria for choices. Some are dead flat wrong, and some of their fervent advocates are blind to reality. Naziism and Marxism-Leninism head that list. Nevertheless, some philosophies' evidence, premises, and reasoning demonstrate their rightness so well that people learn them and use them to interpret reality. This is why men invented philosophy. The Greek Stoics said that the universe operates by reason. Because Man is part of the universe, its reason pervades Man. Man can use his mind to discover this reason if he so chooses, but, the Stoics said, he can also choose neither to reason, nor to obey the ideas that reason would let him discover. Somewhere around 350 B.C., Aristotle invented the study of ethics, which focusses on how men should act. Around 1250 A.D., Christian scholar Thomas Aquinas said that the natural law is that part of the law of God that lets Man discover God's law, and therefore, allows him to figure out how God wants human beings to interact. He also said that men have no duty to obey any statute that contradicts the natural law. In the sixteen hundreds, Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius said that because humans are social, they should reason out rules for living harmoniously. In the seventeen hundreds, John Locke's essays about rights proposed why and how government should and should not act, and so helped to inspire our break with Britain. Novelist-philosopher Alisa Zinovievna Rosenbaum, who wrote as "Ayn Rand," said that a right is "a moral principle that defines and sanctions a man's freedom of action in a social context." Only individuals can own rights. Every person's prime right is his right to his own life. All other rights flow from it, because their owner needs them to live. Author Sheldon Richman said that collectively, a person's rights form a zone of sovereignty protecting him against all human predation. Obligations are rights' behavioral guardians. An obligation is someone's expectation, perhaps based on a moral premise, that another will either act or refrain. If the "expectee" flouts this expectation, the "expecter" (or the government) will exact a penalty. That penalty must conform to the natural law. Proper law only sanctions a supposed obligation if meeting it protects someone's right. That stricture limits our paid public guardians to enforcing ethically valid obligations. Every person has exactly the same rights. Taken together, they form the following simple, but crucial, idea: every person may do anything if that action will not injure the precisely equal rights of another person. As a corollary, no individual may stop another person from doing anything unless that action would injure the rights of another person. This is the essence of natural human rights. One very important right is the right to make contracts. To do that, we agree to act or to refrain from acting in return for some specific benefit. The parties create obligations for each to perform as he promises; they also create, for each, a consequential right to expect that the other will do likewise. They meet their obligations in one of two ways. If a person does something to satisfy an obligation, he acts positively. If, to meet an obligation, he refrains from doing something, he acts negatively. One party's default triggers a lawsuit by the other. We need not dwell on voluntarily created obligations. However contractual parties satisfy them, we must remember that the parties create them. People may make any agreement that defrauds no contracting party and injures no one else's rights. Otherwise, what satisfies the contracts' obligations is irrelevant because they hurt no one. No agreement creates the involuntarily created obligation. An involuntary obligation, satisfied by negative action, springs from a natural right. The right's owner expects that no one will violate it. When someone does transgress this right, the owner may protect himself directrly or request governmental help. Anyone can name involuntarily created obligations that negative action satisfies. Follow these steps:
Step No. 3 gives the involuntary obligation. Not doing the action in Step No. 2 is the negative action meeting the obligation in Step No. 3. People violate other's rights by initiating either force or fraud. Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary defines force as "violence, compulsion, or constraint exerted against a person or thing." Webster's defines fraud as "intentional perversion of truth in order to induce another to part with something of value or to surrender a legal right." To envision how involuntary obligations prohibit force, consider the natural right to live. Individuals can violate that right by murdering other people. A law prohibiting murder protects that right. Not initiating deadly force satisfies that law. Similarly, consider the natural right to own. People can violate that right by defrauding others. A law prohibiting fraud protects that right. Not lying to others for gain satisfies that law. So far, we have examined voluntarily created obligations satisfied by both positive and negative action, and involuntarily created obligations which negative actions satisfy. One more category remains: involuntarily created obligations satisfied by positive action. This category has one occupant: obligations created consequentially, as when a couple's conceiving a baby obligates them to care for their baby. Otherwise, this category is empty. No one must act positively to preserve another's natural right, because natural rights function only negatively. Because the nature of rights limits public guardians to the enforcement of valid obligations, the right forms the foundation of politics. Politics studies the sanctioned use of force among human beings. What is the origin of the conventional political labels, "left" and "right"? After the French Revolution, the French national legislature's members seated themselves according to their philosophies. The revolutionary Jacobins sat on the chamber's left side; their royalist opponents sat on its right. The situational "leftists" said that they stood for modernity and progress. The situational "rightists" said that because they wanted to restore the "ancien régime," or "old leadership," they stood for tradition. In the twentieth century, someone created a circular political chart putting liberalism in one part and conservatism in another. Go too far in one direction, and you run into the other side's extremity. Only a middle position makes sense. This chart was probably created, not to describe liberalism and conservatism, but to facilitate compromise between their advocates. A better chart describes a linear spectrum ordering governments' power over the individual's rights. "Left" indicates power that regulates or denies to citizens the use of their individual's rights. "Right," on the other hand, shows corresponding decreases in that power. Political theories often prescribe these increases and decreases. From some kind of rough mid-point, "left" would indicate, perhaps in this order, FDR liberalism, Canadian socialism, British socialism, Swedish socialism, generic "banana republic" Latin American dictatorship, British, French, and Italian royal rule in the Middle Ages, Mussolini's fascism, Nazi fascism, Soviet satellite communism, Soviet communism under Stalin, Cuban communism, and Chinese communism. Each of these categories concerns the respective rulers' actions. All emphasize that rights are the property of government, which therefore may decide citizens' important matters and punish refusal to obey its decisions. These decisions and punishments violate individual citizens' or subjects' rights. Thus, the essence of leftist rule is the denial of those rights. The accidental differences, as Thomists would say, involve the degree to which each system seeks to deny them. Here is a very brief sketch describing some of our country's history from an ethically "rightist" point of view. The Founding Fathers divided themselves into "Federalists" (nevertheless favoring a unitary system) and "Anti-Federalists" (nevertheless favoring a truly federative system). They wrote our Constitution to protect citizens' rights by restricting officials' prerogatives and by creating conflicts of levels and interests. First, they restricted our officials by writing specific powers for Congress and giving them such additional authority as would be "necessary and proper" to implement the foregoing enumerated powers. Second, they wrote the Bill of Rights to deny Federal officials prerogatives enjoyed by King George III's policemen, and to protect any individuals' rights not mentioned in the Constitution. Third, they wrote the Tenth Amendment to keep Washington from supervising the States, to foster experimentation within the States, and to protect competition between them. Fourth, they set the Federal divisions--legislative, executive, and judicial--against one another and did likewise with the State and Federal levels. That is why the Framers originally had States' legislators electing Senators: to let States' Senators over-rule bills passed in the House. These divisions and separations made "Freedom Through Gridlock" the law of the land. They hobbled Federal officials to keep the people free. Not everyone could enjoy that freedom. Most black Americans lacked citizenship because they were slaves. Indians were regarded not as citizens, but as foreigners, whose technological ignorance prevented their stopping us from taking their land. Women also could not use their rights fully. For instance, most States did not let them vote. Our enslaved black Americans received their freedom when, after the Civil War, the Radical Republicans passed the Thirteenth Amendment. This was almost the only good to result from that tragic conflict. It destroyed capital totalling millions of gold dollars. It killed over six hundred thousand soldiers from both sides. Unknown numbers of Southern civilians died from disease and hunger. Even worse, after that war, Southern legislatures dominated by the United States Army let the Radical Republicans pass the Fourteenth Amendment. This Amendment lets Washington press uniform standards on the States, thereby crippling the Tenth and delivering victory to the anti-federative and politically unitarian "Federalists." Less fortunate than our blacks were the Indian tribes. Although it eventually recognized them as citizens, our government forced many Indians to live on reservations, which sometimes were remote from their traditional territories. In these cases, Indians were sometimes forced to journey on foot to their new "homes," despite hunger and other privations that caused frightful death tolls. Many still live on reservations, languishing in poverty. Women were more fortunate. Feminists organized to secure their rights by using the Constitution. Article 1, Section 2, Clause 1, says, "...the electors [voting in Federal elections] shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the State Legislature." No smart man marries a stupid woman, and vice-versa. That fact had always given women political power behind the scenes. Nevertheless, as the Suffragettes' movement spread, men realized that their wives and they really were equally intelligent. State by State, men voted to let women choose their States' legislators, and that permission let them vote in Federal elections. When the Nineteenth Amendment passed, most women were already voting. This story illustrates the Framers' genius. Americans identified a wrong. Using Constitutional provisions, they percolated the issue through the body politic and the States' legislatures. Although one could argue that the States' individual approvals of women's suffrage obviated the Nineteenth Amendment, we can at least celebrate the fact that it gave women the legal power to use a right that was always inherently theirs, and did so without violence. Not every Amendment has defended Americans' rights. The Eighteenth Amendment forbade the manufacture, importation, and sale of alcoholic beverages. Americans who wanted to continue drinking sought alcohol from illegal sources. To obtain and sell it to them, criminal gangs corrupted officials and shed blood throughout our country. Finally, the Twenty-First Amendment restored the citizens' freedom to buy alcoholic beverages. To designate positions to the right of the Constitution, I can only cite theorists or their specific works. From the Constitution, I think that the order might run like this: John Locke, Thomas Jefferson's draft of the Kentucky Resolution (because it proposed the Doctrine of Nullification), Patrick Henry and George Mason ("Anti-Federalist" theorists), novelist-philosopher Alisa Zinovievna Rosenbaum (Ayn Rand), Albert Jay Nock, and Lysander Spooner. The paragraph above cites authors or their creations. Neither the ideas in the authors' general writings, nor those in the cited specific works, have been fully tried. Nevertheless, they all emphasize that because only individuals own rights, including the right to decide, they may decide important matters for themselves. Government's job is to protect all of those rights. Therefore, the essence of rightist guardianship is the protection of those rights. The accidental differences concern the degree and manner in which each system seeks to guarantee them. Using an ideology requires knowledge of its tenets and arguments. Learning one requires hard study. Skill in selling it comes only after a depressing series of defeats. This process takes persistence, patience, and resilience. Marxism is a good example of an ideology. Marxism is an extremely complex body of theory and supposed facts whose understanding and application require a lot of brainpower. Conservative commentator William S. Lind, who is associated with the Free Congress Foundation, says that studying Marxism in a postgraduate program taught him to respect the intelligence of anyone who can interpret reality through its lens. Another is my favorite, Objectivism. Rosenbaum took many other philosophers' ideas and fit them together with a lot of her own hard thinking. Objectivism, too, is very complex, and I have quite some distance to go before mastering it. The Objectivist Center's David Kelley, among others, is filling in the gaps that Rosenbaum lacked the time to cover. He also is correcting some of her mistakes. President George W. Bush's decisions seem to have no philosophic basis. Nevertheless, each decision is a chip of information. Taken together, they form a revealing mosaic. Purportedly, President Bush defended our Second Amendment by having Ambassador John Negroponte tell a United Nations conference on the limitation of small arms that the United States would accept no restriction on its citizens' right to keep and bear arms; but, President Bush also has announced that he favors renewing President Clinton's misnamed "assault weapons" ban. Together, these indicators say that while he opposes a foreign body's overruling the Second Amendment, he does want it curtailed. Every person has an inalienable right to defend his property against all criminals, private and public. His primary property is his life. When criminals endanger his life, he may defend it with deadly force. "Deadly force" subsumes the use of firearms. Any policy supporting that right is rightist. Because any policy abridging that right transfers ownership of his life to another entity, it is leftist. One very big clue to Bush's true philosophy is his expenditures, which he camouflages with theater and subterfuge. On the one hand, he cuts our open income taxes. On the other, he finances gargantuan expenditures through borrowing. Most of the creditors are governments like Europe's, Japan's, and Red China's. Just as installment payments "tax" our personal salaries to pay our private debts, our government taxes us openly to pay its public debts. For the most part, though, the Federal Reserve System taxes us covertly. It creates new dollars faster than our economy's goods and services can grow. This process is true inflation; but, because we ship most of these new dollars to foreign creditors, they do not raise our domestic prices until foreign trade returns them. The result shrinks our purchasing power slowly, without the average citizen's realizing who, how, or why. A pickpocket's victim knows more. Purportedly, President Bush defended American sovereignty by withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol. This agreement included "greenhouse gas" limitations on rich nations' economies, to make rich countries transfer economic assets to poor ones. After Bush withdrew us from Kyoto, he made Congress pass CAFTA. CAFTA will regulate our trade with Central American nations. As NAFTA did for Canada and Mexico, CAFTA will send Central America our wealth and jobs. Where the Kyoto Protocol would help all poor nations, NAFTA and CAFTA will send assets only to Western Hemispheric countries. That flow will give greater Hemispheric economic power to the American Establishment. Furthermore, Bush's proposed "Free Trade Area of the Americas" would begin by abolishing trade barriers among the Western Hemispheric nations and end by joining them into one amalgamated country. A similar process turned 1957's European Coal and Steel Community into the European Union. Our national sovereignty stems from American citizens' right to own property individually and severally. That property's outer edge comprises our nation's borders, which the citizens' rights require their public guardians to defend. The parameters of that defense are set by our Constitution. Abolishing these borders would weaken our public guardians' ability to protect nearby property and would weaken the legality of private property. Abolishing our Constitution would remove every restraint the Founders crafted to confine our guardians to protecting our rights. Eliminating these geographic and political limits would reduce every American citizen's rights to a legal nullity and deliver their ownership to the Hemispheric political amalgam. Any policy favoring that result can only be classified as leftist. In the wake of 11 September, President Bush has purportedly defended America by having our armed forces fight specific enemies; but because he fights without a Congressional declaration of war, his orders are un-Constitutional. 11 September's attack violated directly the rights of everyone who lost life or physical property. Indirectly, it violated every American's rights. And, it amounted to an especially dastardly declaration of war. Declarations emanate from declarers. The true declarer of 11 September's war is Osama bin Laden's sponsor, a politician whose commissioning of bin Laden's attack President Bush has never mentioned, and about whose identity no Washington "journalist" has even asked. None of these people wants us to realize that bin Laden serves a sponsor. That realization might hamper secret diplomatic bargaining. Europeans call the preservation of such options "reasons of state." The whole concept of "The State" assumes either that the state's citizens' rights are the state's leaders' to manage, or that only "The State" can own rights. Either way, "The State" is a leftist concept. When our president acts upon this premise, his actions can only be leftist. Leftist laws, in order to be leftist, must violate our rights. They violate them because they stem from the idea that rights belong not to individuals, but to groups; and, ultimately, that they belong to all mankind collectively. Bush's actions are demonstrably leftist. Regardless, because he pays lip service to his party's conservative base and does not endorse the state as the proper manager of the people's collectively owned rights, ideological leftists do not "claim" Bush. They would remonstrate that Bush is not leftist, but corrupt. They would cite open leftists like Jim Hightower, Bill Moyers, Ralph Nader, and David Cobb. They would ask how their ideas compare with the actions of George W. Bush. They would point to Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, who advanced the leftist cause of world government, and ask how George W. Bush has furthered their work. They would protest that Bush has prevented the United Nations' dominating the Internet, disarming American civilians, and sending assets from our economy to poor ones around the world. And, of course, they would point to his connections with Halliburton Oil, the Carlyle Group, and other major beneficiaries. No, George W. Bush is not a philosophical leftist. His rhetoric differs from that of the men named in the preceding paragraph; and his actions, albeit leftist, he cloaks in a pragmatically unsavory and specious patriotism. Disarm a citizen, and you reduce his freedom. Suck the purchasing power from a citizen's savings, and you reduce his freedom. Ignore the sponsor of a terrible attack and conquer another nation that has not attacked us, and you expose our citizen to hazards that reduce his freedom. Amalgamate our government with Western Hemispheric regimes, and their tyrants will reduce his freedom. When finally our American citizen is dirt poor, and can feed himself and his family only by renouncing his economically worthless freedom, we will understand how Germany could host the Holocaust. Bush is not the only politician whose policies would reduce our freedom, but he is the one in power. We need to replace him with someone who respects our rights and will fight for them.
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