An essential feature of a liberal government is the protection of minorities, and of the rights of minorities against plunder by the majority. The ultimate of minorities is one person. And so the ultimate of liberalism … is the protection of each person against the plunder of one or more other persons.
-F.A. “Baldy” Harper (Liberty: A Path to Its Recovery)
And in this time when the Socialists have moved the Overton Window to emphasize the Collective via “to protect the common good”, we see the diminution of the Individual. What Harper merely does is to restate that which is of import of our philosophical founding:
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
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.
That to secure these Rights. Governments have Powers and Individuals have Rights that restrain what Government can do against them. The Founders knew that only the philosophy of Negative Rights that erected a wide and expansive fencing that kept Government in its little enclosure would maximize the Freedom and Liberties of “The One” – the Individual.
The Left used to be all about the Individual (even the ACLU). Now, based on its ever acceleration towards Socialism, they are leaving this sense of the Individual behind just as they did in the late 1880s and early 1900s and move towards Socialism’s sense and mandate of the Common Good of the Group in all things.
Will they listen to Harper’s admonition? Hardly, nor that of our Declaration of Independence. Progressives are ALL about not just the Majority but the crushing of any minority. Contra what our Declaration stated. No one should be surprised – Socialists returning to America from visiting Germany in the 1880s had the idea that the Constitution was outmoded and that THEY should be able to tell everyone else how they should and will live their lives.
Pursuit of Happiness? The Socialists of today are still mired in the neo-Feudalism of that time rather than the REAL Radicalness of our Founders that uplifted the Individual over the aristocracy. You would not be wrong to call the Bernie-Bros and Democrat Socialists the reborn Aristocracy, the neo-Noblesse of the Moral Guardians of the Woke.
(H/T: Cafe Hayek)
Note: The image comes from this post: Democracy vs Republic. We all know that the Democrats and the Left are always whining about “our Democracy” when we on the Right are correctly correcting them in that the US is a Republic. In no small part, our Founders struggled with how to NOT have us as a pure Democracy knowing from history how badly things turned out when the Majority just ran over the minority.
We are about to see that where the Democrats now hold the Federal “trifecta” – if they remove the filibuster in the Senate, we will see the atrocity of what Pure Democracies can yield. And make no mistake – they have been incrementally trying for this ever since the 17th Amendment was pass that repealed the election of US Senators by State Legislators that were supposed to protect each State’s Rights in our system of protecting Liberty.
Take a mosey over and read it.
