Carnal Reason

I stumbled across this on The Bidinotto Blog

Philosophy, particularly ethics, sets the tide levels of public discourse and opinion concerning matters of values; and those value-premises underlie all political debates and policy-making. However, the premises of rational individualism to which I subscribe explicitly — and to which our Founders did implicitly — are no longer in play in our public life. They have been hooted off the stage, by Left and Right alike. As a result, the tide of discussion continuously surges below the high-water mark of principle, roiling instead in the murky shoals of welfare-state gang warfare, where — as Frederic Bastiat said long ago — everyone seeks to use the power of government to profit at the expense of everyone else.

To America’s Founders, such as Washington, government potentially was “a fearful Master,” and thus was to be strictly, constitutionally limited to a single task: that of protecting the rights of individuals — period. But to today’s Left and the Right, government is a much-prized behavioral bludgeon, to be seized and wielded against the individual without legal restraint, in order to pound him into compliance with their own value schemes.

To the Left, government should whip individuals into collective lockstep regarding its PC-egalitarian agenda on such issues as smoking, diets, guns, cars, nature-worship, land use, political speech and rhetoric, equality of income and “access” to things that don’t belong to you, drafting kids for “national service,” using schools to push PC propaganda, etc.

To the Right, government should whip individuals into collective lockstep regarding its traditional moral agenda, including abortion, sex, Darwin, cultural speech and rhetoric, marriage, national demographic purity, drafting kids for military service, using schools to push religious values, etc.

Neither side wants a government of limited powers, and rejects the initiation of force against others. Neither side respects individual rights, and rejects using the “fearful” power of government to compel the independent individual to toe its party line. Neither side recognizes property rights, and rejects the redistributionist welfare state.

More fundamentally, neither side rejects the cannibalistic “morality” of sacrificing the individual to the group.

Left and Right both agree that the individual is their private plaything, a sacrificial lamb for their respective pet causes. The only thing that they really disagree about is which individuals they are going to sacrifice, for whose benefit, and in the name of what cause.

Sing it, brother. On a related note, we have the Mayer Blog

It is becoming more and more evident that there’s no essential difference between Democrats and Republicans – or between left-liberals and conservatives. Both major American national political parties, and both sides of the traditional left-right political spectrum, have abandoned the key elements of America’s founding principles: principally, individualism (the three fundamental natural rights of the individual mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”) and limited government (government of limited powers, using coercion only as necessary to safeguard these individual rights). Instead, both sides offer varying versions of a collectivist political philosophy that has turned America’s founding principles on their head, constraining individual freedom and expanding the coercive powers of government in an ever-growing “welfare” and regulatory state.

I agree that neither party has any principled respect for individual rights (the only kind there are) but there is one difference between them. Many Democrats have (in deeds, if not in so many words) renounced allegiance to their country in wartime, in keeping with their tradition since Nixon took over Kennedy’s and Johnson’s war.

Posted on November 27th, 2005 by pwyll
Filed under: politics