The Declaration Under Siege - The Bulwark - 0 views
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rights human declaration American idea relativism natural law natural rights
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Margaret Thatcher explained the stark difference between American and European political traditions with elegant economy. The Iron Lady said that European nations were made by history but the United States was made by philosophy.
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Last month, the State Department issued a thoughtful and carefully reasoned report on that quintessentially American philosophy, and the unique nation that came into existence to conserve and champion it
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The report explores the cause of natural law and natural rights, as articulated by the Declaration of Independence (as well as the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights). In this theory, rights inhere in human individuals at birth, which is why we call them natural. “The sacred rights of mankind,” wrote Alexander Hamilton, “are written, as with a sun beam, in the whole volume of human nature.”
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Thus government does not create rights, nor does it dispense them. It merely recognizes and respects them. As George Will likes to say, the most important word in the Declaration of Independence is secure: “[T]o secure these rights, governments are instituted among men.”
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The assumption of natural rights and government’s limited role to secure those rights, the bedrock premise of American political thought, finds itself widely embattled today. It is under pressure on university campuses and in the prestige media, and even challenged by self-professed advocates of human rights
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The United States was from its beginning a republic “dedicated” to certain self-evident truths, foremost among them that “all men are created equal.
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These founding principles of equal rights and human freedom—America’s public philosophy—contain what Will (in his bracing tome The Conservative Sensibility) calls “an epistemological assertion” that important political truths are not merely knowable but known.
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In the world of 1776, the truths held to be self-evident by America’s founders were ferociously contested by kings and monarchs who claimed a divine right
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Today, although despots still contest America’s great epistemological assertion, the problem in the West is closer to the opposite: everyone claims the truth is known, but with the crucial stipulation that no one’s truth is better or worse than anyone else’s.
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Tom Nichols has written deftly about this phenomenon. “It is a new Declaration of Independence: no longer do we hold these truths to be self-evident, we hold all truths to be self-evident, even the ones that aren’t true. All things are knowable and every opinion on any subject is as good as any other.”
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Thus does the American Founders’ assertion of truth, and its implication that not all claims to truth are equally valid, comes off as “judgmental” to modern ears
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A central aim of progressivism has been to blur the distinction between what have been called “negative rights” (those that, like the Bill of Rights, protect life and liberty) and “positive rights” (those that obligate the government to provide certain services in pursuit of equality). This project brings concentrated focus on economic and social rights rather than fundamental political freedoms, and this ever-widening circle of rights has brought the older, limited system of rights under scrutiny.
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If their expansive vision of rights is accepted as legitimate, it would bring the older vision—with its ironclad protections for free speech, and its ideals of a colorblind society, rational discourse, and the scientific method—into disrepute. These classical liberal ideals self-evidently clash with newly asserted rights, since they have already begun to be curtailed to make way for them.
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The commission assails the left’s elastic conception of rights on the logic that Frederick the Great would recognize: “to defend everything is to defend nothing.” It argues that this proliferation of elective rights for certain groups (some of which are good in and of themselves) endangers the essential liberties of all.
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Modern politics, built on progressive foundations, assumes that natural rights constitute an incomplete and therefore inadequate body of rights.