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by
Ben Shapiro
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October 14 - October 21, 2020
progressive philosophers argued from the obviously unequal capabilities of men that only a radical societal restructuring could result in the desired equality and plasticity of humankind. This radical restructuring, in its ugliest form, became advocacy for eugenics.
Rawlsian logic has been used to justify the continuation of a heavily restricted free-market system burdened with massive redistributionism.48
according to the Disintegrationists, disparities are automatically the result of discrimination, often relabeled under vague terms like “privilege,” “institutional racism,” or “patriarchalism.”
intersectionality, as practiced today, goes further. It suggests that American society is structured in a hierarchy of victimhood, in which membership in a designated victim group confers automatic disadvantage, and lack of such membership automatic privilege.
This is how due process rights become secondary to concerns about identity.
Equal protection under the law is a far better remedy for discrimination than restorative discrimination. Equal protection works when it is applied. That’s precisely what happened in 1960, four years before the Civil Rights Act, when four black civil rights protesters in Greensboro, North Carolina, sat down at the lunch counter at Woolworth’s. Woolworth’s called the police; the police did nothing, as they were law-bound to do, since the students had violated no laws.
Disparity is discrimination has become a Disintegrationist article of faith. And heretics will be punished.
Segregation used to mean legally enforced discrimination based on race; now, according to the New York Times, students are fighting segregation by insisting on such discrimination.56
Unionist philosophy held that government was established to secure our rights, “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” This meant, in practice, that government powers were limited by the individual rights of citizens, and that consent could only serve to uphold such a limited government.
Democracy, Wilson stated, was bound by “no principle of its own nature to say itself nay as to the exercise of any power.” There was no “just power” to which people had to consent. And consent itself might be irrelevant to the question of true democracy—that is, the right of the community to determine its destiny. The question, said Wilson, was one of “organization, that is to say of administration.”62
This lack of consistent rule-based institutions springs directly from the Disintegrationist opposition to the founding philosophy of individual rights, protected by a government instituted for that purpose. If human nature is plastic, to be shaped by social circumstance; if the goal of government ought to be equality of outcome, not merely equality of rights; if individual rights are an obstacle to that goal rather than an inherent and inalienable element of nature; and if government must be
free to effect change regardless of “consent of the governed,” without reference to any “just powers,” then government itself must be ad hoc, pragmatist in orientation.
Disintegrationists have historically stretched the boundaries of the Constitution beyond the breaking point to grant government powers it was never delegated. Often, they cite the nonoperative clauses of the Constitution—the preface speaking of promoting the general welfare, or establishing justice—in order to attempt to rewrite the actual specifics of the document.
the federal government should be capable of overruling states in cases of local tyranny—but that is not an argument on behalf of federal tyranny.
As the federal government becomes bigger and more powerful, local communities lose control over their own lives, and must fight harder and harder to prevent domination by those who dismiss their values and concerns. The alternative to federalism isn’t national unity, but dissolution.
Saying that rights are constantly expanding and open for debate is a recipe for division. Saying that society can be improved, because children can be molded into literally anything, opens the door to life-or-death fights about what they will be molded into.
Setting up all Americans as either purveyors of a hierarchical and discriminatory system or as victims of that system, we disintegrate the ties that bind Americans together.
Even consent of the people collectively cannot override individual rights, lest tyranny be the obvious result.
The Unionist culture relies on four chief characteristics: first, tolerance for the rights of others, even when exercise of those rights cuts against our benefit; second, robust social institutions inculcating virtue and providing the basis for moral unity; third, stubborn-headed willingness to defend the rights of yourself and others against tyranny; and finally, a heady sense of adventure, of economic risk-taking, of willingness to value freedom over security.
The first line of defense for our rights lies in our cultural defense of and belief in each other’s rights.
Positive rights are not rights at all. They are demands that violate someone’s negative rights.
when a monopoly on coercion is wedded with self-assurance about morality, tyranny is the most frequent result.
The role of government is not to enforce virtue. It is to protect us from the violation of our rights by others.
Virtue lies in our nongovernment social fabric. The founders were deep believers that duty lies in the morality and religion taught by strong social institutions.
“We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People.”7
the founding fathers placed great stock in the militia—groups that could be mustered at the local or state level—in order to check the ambitions of an overweening national force.
“Arms like laws discourage and keep the invader and the plunderer in awe,” said Thomas Paine. “Horrid mischief would ensue were one half the world deprived of the use of them; for while avarice and ambition have a place in the heart of man, the weak will become a prey to the strong.”22
“One of the great untold stories about the civil rights movement was that it required violent resistance from blacks to be effective.”24
John Locke correctly pointed out that ownership of property is merely an extension of the idea of ownership of your own labor; when we remove something from the state of nature and mix our labor with it and join something of our own to it, we thereby make that property our own.26
Most of us in the West now live in so-called mixed economies—free-market economies with central planning programs stacked atop them. It’s easy to mistake the redistributive gains generated by central planning with the underlying prosperity to be redistributed. But that distinction is both critical and true.
“The inhabitant of the United States learns from birth that he must rely on himself to struggle against the evils and obstacles of life,” Tocqueville observed. “[H]e has only a defiant and restive regard for social authority and he appeals to its power only when he cannot do without it.”
There is nothing the human will despairs of attaining by the free action of the collective power of individuals.”36
a Progressive-era vision of rights that transforms perception of victimhood into entitlements, entitlements into rights, and natural rights into throwaways. Our rights used to be against the encroachments of government; now those rights are obstacles to the utopian visions
The Unionist bargain suggested that our culture of rights could be upheld only under certain conditions: we would have to tolerate the rights of others, even when the exercise of those rights didn’t accord with our preferences; we would have to support the existence of robust social institutions, outside the scope of government, to inculcate and reinforce virtue; we would have to stand up and be counted when rights were invaded, and pigheadedly warn an overarching government about the consequences for such invasion; and we would have to cultivate a healthy spirit of economic freedom, a taste
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We have moved from a culture that asks whether the government should have the power to intrude on our rights to a culture that asks why we should have the right to [fill in the blank]. The burden of proof, when it comes to infringement on rights, has shifted from government to the individual.
There is no way to ban hate speech without granting the government the power to destroy free speech. You cannot mandate “economic fairness” without giving the government the power to destroy entrepreneurship. You cannot mandate racial tolerance without granting the government the power to destroy freedom of association. There are costs to rights.
We must be eager to counter free speech with free speech.
The majority lives in the perpetual practice of self-applause,
the key social institution that now builds our social fabric is our job environment.
We’re on the fast track toward European-style regulation of our speech. Legislation that would require completely gutting the First Amendment is gaining steam. In New York City, businesses can be fined up to $125,000 for not using the preferred pronouns of transgender people, and up to $250,000 if they do so as “a result of willful, wanton, or malicious conduct.” The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has stated that it is illegal under federal law to call employees by nonpreferred pronouns. As Professor Eugene Volokh of UCLA Law School says, “people can basically force us—on pain of
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When we prevent people from asking questions, from exploring unpopular points of view, from expressing dissent, we breed discontent. Restricting comedy, censoring speech, erasing discussion—all of these obliterate the pressure valves a civilization needs in order to cope with inevitable tensions that arise in a pluralistic democracy. The proper response to someone who disagrees is discussion; the proper response to someone who wants to silence you is a middle finger. Increasingly, thanks to our culture of silencing, we’re throwing a middle finger at one another. That’s what Disintegrationist
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Unionist culture saw segregation as a failure of individuals to defend a rights-based system; Disintegrationist culture saw segregation as a manifestation of the rights-based system itself, maintained by institutions.
The Disintegrationists offered the bargain of eternal adolescence, and called it rights. The only barriers to this paradise lay in hackneyed, bigoted social institutions that had constructed our incurably diseased social body.
in the 1950–54 period, while some 17.2 percent of all first babies were conceived out of wedlock, more than half of the pregnant women were married by the point their babies were born. By contrast, in the 1990–94 period, 52.8 percent of all first babies were conceived outside wedlock, and more than three-quarters of those babies were born to single mothers.31
With the rise of the Great Society under LBJ, the government suddenly made the consequences of such a moral uprooting palatable. In order to provide a safe harbor from the vicissitudes of reality, government was prepared to step in. Social institutions were sources of cruelty, repression, and guilt; government could make you free. Johnson recast the role of government as a provider of rights rather than a protector of them: “The truth is, far from crushing the individual, government at its best liberates him from the enslaving forces of his environment.”43 A culture of rights, balanced by
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In the wake of the destruction of social institutions, the main solution to all problems became the government itself. This became a self-perpetuating cycle—because social institutions were no longer present to inculcate duties, rights were abused more and more, which necessitated more and more intrusions into rights by the government. Government dependency increased; government, in effect, became the grantor of true freedom. The wages of sin had once been death; now the wages of sin became a government check.
The destruction of religion and family leaves a gaping hole in the social fabric of the country. We no longer associate with one another; we used to hang out at church, go to bowling clubs with the people with whom we went to church, join the PTA with those same people. We used to find unity in widely accepted moral principles, taught in church, echoed at home. When the institutions that brought us together collapse, little is left to unify us. As conservative philosopher Yuval Levin has written, “At the root of the most significant problems America faces at home is the weakening of our core
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The founders saw an inherent right to self-defense predating the creation of government—our first right was the right to self-preservation.
we have rights preexisting government. Government must make an affirmative case for why it ought to be able to invade those rights—and that requires tailoring solutions to problems, a process Disintegrationists have steadfastly avoided, since they rarely have evidence to support their specific policy preferences on gun control.59 We need not make an affirmative case as to why we need our rights.
Markets are natural outgrowths of human nature, and natural rights. You own yourself, and you own your labor—and no one has the right to remove that labor from you for the good of the collective without just compensation. The success of free markets rests precisely on the fact that it reflects truths about human nature: about our desire to create, to acquire, to own, to control the environment around us.
