How the Left Stole the Founding
“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.”
So begins the greatest work of practical political philosophy every written. In part, what these words were conveying was straightforward — that America is a rights-based Constitutional Republic. But rights in themselves are fundamentally a way of expressing how human beings relate to one another politically, that is, as part of a polis or political community. By adding “Creator”, the founders were declaring, rather than merely implying, that how man relates to man is ultimately informed by how God relates to man.
Unlike the secular political Left, the founders understood the role of Creator was already occupied and so was unavailable for government. Put another way, at the time of the founding, God was the capital G institution, government was the little g institution.
Once the Left began in earnest its project of destroying the American culture — both political and social — the first priority became, out of necessity, the destruction of “rights” with its unique understanding of man’s relationship with man and with God. The Left saw in part what this would look like: government becoming the capital G institution, and God possessing a lowercase g at the beginning of His name.
If “Government” usurped the role of God, then it became the endower of rights. As any astute observer of the 20th Century knows, this gave rise to an important totalitarian (and now Leftist) mantra: “The Government giveth and the Government taketh away.” Taketh away your rights, if you don’t toe the party line.
As I see it, there were two major movements in bringing about this concerning perversion of the American way of life. The first was historical revisionism, which has a long and illustrious history on the Left (one of the most recent examples being Nikole Hannah-Jones’ fictional work The 1619 Project).
However, the most impactful and enduring revision was the theory that America’s founding was an “Enlightenment” project; by entrenching this lie within the American mind, Leftists were able to connect the Enlightenment’s virulently secular sentiments to the American founding and so subvert the Founders’ idea of ‘separation between Church and state.’
The results, after a century of such crucial misinterpretation, are all too obvious: teachers can host drag shows in public school classrooms, but they certainly can’t pray, in those same classrooms, to the “Creator” whom the Declaration cites as the original purveyor of political rights to mankind. And that’s civic education in the 21st century folks!
For the remainder of this article though, I’d like to focus on the second major movement within the American Left to pervert the Founding, one which I call “the false rights movement”.
After all, what better way to destroy a rights-based Constitutional Republic than to attack real rights through the creation of false rights? What better strategy to demolish healthy citizen relationships than to encourage all manner of unhealthy citizen relationships through a wrong appreciation of rights, especially when the Left is so good at supplying these fabrications?
Indeed, the Left can generate fake rights faster than Chat GPT can generate poorly written papers. A non-exhaustive list might include: the right to feel good, the right to free education, the right to never be offended, the right to healthcare (which is simply the right to a doctor’s labor and so a disguised version of slavery), and so on. . . .
By way of a brief overview, let’s examine the right never to be offended, which has radically changed how individuals interact and relate to each other as citizens and human beings. Among other things, the right never to be offended means the right to one’s own subjective truth (expressed judicially by Chief Justice Kennedy when he opined that “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe and the mystery of human life.”
This view entails not only that one has the right to form one’s own thoughts and come to one’s own conclusions (which of course is true), nor merely that one has the right to express these thoughts and conclusions in actions. Rather, this right to one’s own subjective truth means one can and should expect others to actively participate in affirming one’s expression of subjective truth, e.g., using preferred pronouns. Embedded within this so-called right is also the notion that if people are unwilling to affirm another’s expression of his own subjective truth, then coercion is justifiable in extracting that affirmation, e.g., this is what the penalties for ‘transphobia’ are about
Violation of made-up rights has provided the left with an endless stream of excuses to punish any and all dissenters.
Meanwhile, we’re all expected to ignore the contradiction inherent in the proposition that if everyone has the ‘right’ to expect his own subjective truths to be affirmed, what happens when subjective truths are inconsistent or irreconcilable? But then, the Left is not logical, the political expression of postmodernism.
I could continue with case study after case study of similarly fanciful, similarly damaging “rights”, but hopefully, the reader gets a general idea. Like all philosophies which are destructive rather than creative, Leftism cannot write its own original Declaration of Independence – it can only rewrite the work of the Founding Fathers.
Unfortunately, that rewriting has been overwhelmingly successful. Like an emanation from a penumbra, one can discern a single shadowy sentence written all over the walls of the past century: “We find these truths to be self-evident, that all humans are created equal, that some humans are more equal than others, that they are endowed by their Government with certain revokable rights, that among these are the right to unreality, radical autonomy, and the pursuit of all perversions of pleasure…..”
