In a previous post about the Republican Party in America, I stated that “If the Republican Party is to represent true conservatism, then it must return to its core principles . . . . of liberty and freedom, including economic freedom, and [it] must be in favor of limited government and oppose statism in all its forms
I think that that is primarily true, and that when the left speaks of liberation, they generally mean liberation from the inequalities of capitalism. How do we do away with economic inequality? By doing away with economic freedom; by having an all-powerful state redistribute wealth so that all are equal, except the redistributors themselves. (As in Animal Farm, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”) Of course, this kills the goose that lays the golden egg, because the leftist assumes that the economic pie is finite and stagnant, and all we have to do is divide it up more equally. But in fact, a capitalist economy is almost (I know, we’re in a recession) always growing, so that the poor in America are generally better off than the average citizen in a communist state. The proof: The communists had to build a wall in Berlin to keep people in; we might have to build a wall to keep people out.
But our prosperity and opportunity is generally not enough for the leftist. What the leftist wants is freedom from the vicissitudes of life. As Mike Adams wrote, Franklin Roosevelt proposed a Second Bill of Rights guaranteeing a right to a job, to a decent living, to a home, to adequate medical care, to a good education, and so on. Adams concluded:
These are, of course, not rights in any sense of the word. This is a promise of Utopia from a Statist president seeking to justify unlimited intrusion upon the right to own property. It is a false promise from a president who fails to understand what separates man from the lower animals.” ("Liberty and Tyranny," Townhall.com 5/06/09)
But the American left also views freedom in another way that is essentially Romantic in its origins. In this rather anarchistic view, freedom is freedom from all restraint, from all laws, authority, and social institutions. The Constitution of the United States, by way of contrast, was conceived of not as a document to restrain individuals – state and local judiciaries could adequately handle such cases – but rather to restrain any excesses and abuses of power by the federal government. It was designed to limit the power of the state. So Constitutional Law in America is not so much a restraint upon individual freedom as it is protective and constitutive of our freedom. I was an undergraduate in the mid-eighties (a slow learner no doubt) when I first realized that law, in a Constitutional Republic like the United States, was actually constitutive of liberty, and not the enemy of freedom. Hayek quotes John Locke on the role of the law in the preservation of freedom:
The end of the law is, not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all the states of created beings capable of laws, where there is no law there is no freedom. For liberty is to be free from restraint and violence from others. . . . (Constitution of Liberty, p. 162)
Hayek argued that it is the law that makes us free, but this is true only of the law of abstract general rules, which can be applied equally to all citizens. This is what is known as “the Rule of Law,” which differs from laws as specific commands, emanating from a legislative authority (Constitution of Liberty, pp. 155 – 6). When Obama states that he wants Supreme Court Judges who specifically have “empathy” for minorities, he is arguing for applying the law unequally, and privileging certain members of society to the detriment of others. As Hayek wrote: “The true contrast to a reign of status is the reign of general and equal laws, of the rules which are the same for all, or, we might say, of the rule of leges in the original meaning of the Latin word for laws – leges that is, as opposed to the privi-leges” (Ibid., p. 154). Both Affirmative Action and Hate Crimes are contrary to the rule of law and equality before the law, because they privilege certain favored (victim) groups. One might ask, why should it be anymore heinous to brutally murder a gay or lesbian or a member of some other privileged minority than anyone else?
There is also another sense in which the Romantic leftist view of freedom as “freedom from all restraint” proves to be inadequate. In the Burkean sense, it confuses liberty with license, which is freedom without responsibility. Again, if we turn to Hayek, he states, “Liberty and responsibility are inseparable” (p. 71). If we are free to act as we please then we must also be responsible for our actions. Hayek justifies “assigning responsibility” because it also benefits us by teaching us what we “ought to consider in comparable future situations” (p. 76). Taking responsibility for our actions is how we learn from our experiences; otherwise, we’re condemned to repeat the same mistakes over and over.
In the modern “therapeutic state” (see Philip Rieff’s critique of the same in The Triumph of the Therapeutic, 1966), which subscribes to the Romantic view of human nature, individual responsibility is discounted in favor of social responsibility. With origins in Rousseau’s thought, the belief is that we are born good and that it is society that corrupts us. A personal standard of behavior, or what we might call morality, ceases to matter; what counts in the new morality are what politically correct causes one espouses. What I call “bumper sticker morality” is proudly displayed on the rear automobile bumper of most card carrying leftists. When one deviates from the new morality, it is usually pathologized, as witnessed by the Soviet gulags or books by leftists such as Theodore Adorno et al, who published The Authoritarian Personality in 1950. The latter was a rather bogus study that argued that conservatives exhibited an authoritarian personality type. Funny coming from a group that rarely meets a totalitarian dictator they don’t admire: Stalin, Mao, Castro, all wonderful examples of humanity! This tendency to pathologize deviance and crime also extends to what I would call a “misplaced compassion” for career criminals and thugs. Such admiration is also amply displayed on bumper stickers: Free [input the latest celebrity criminal of the left].
But the bottom-line, so to speak, is that the new morality (some call it moral relativism) destroys individual responsibility. And while some determinists might contend that free will is a fiction, and if so, we cannot be held responsible for our actions, as William James has famously argued (The Will to Believe, 1896), the belief in free will and responsibility has great pragmatic value: How can one possibly be effective and successful in life if one does not believe that one has the freedom to act? To expand the point, just compare how successful and free societies are that believe in free will versus societies that ascribe to some form of determinism or fatalism. Also, to absolve the individual of freedom and responsibility devalues, de-humanizes, and infantilizes the individual. Without free and responsible individuals, how can we expect our democracy, which depends upon such individuals, to survive? Hayek quoted F.D. Wormuth as follows:
It is doubtful that democracy could survive in a society organized on the principle of therapy rather than judgment, error rather than sin. If men are free and equal, they must be judged rather than hospitalized. (Ibid., p.71)
The German thinker, Goethe, was rather prescient, when he wrote in a letter to Frau von Stein (June 8, 1787): “I think it is true that humanity will triumph eventually, only I fear that at the same time the world will become a large hospital and each will become the other’s humane nurse” (Quoted in W. Kaufmann, Nietzsche, p. 369).
A society of invalids and victims does not a free democratic republic make.
