How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps

by Ben Shapiro

Those natural rights were considered inviolable by the founding fathers. And they lay the groundwork for the revolution by requiring that government be a protector of rights rather than the source of them.

None of this philosophizing ended the hypocrisy of a society that continued to tolerate slavery, of course. And this didn’t go without comment—Dr. Samuel Johnson famously quipped, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?” But it is worth noting that when the Declaration of Independence was written, slavery was common practice across the world; as we will discuss later, slavery itself was not outlawed in Britain’s territories until 1833, and not in India until 1843. And as we will also see, the founders were well aware of the conflict between their ideals of equality and the institution of slavery. None of them claimed that blacks were not, in fact, human beings covered by the Declaration of Independence’s high ideals. In fact, as C. Bradley Thompson points out, the argument for the race-based inapplicability of the Declaration’s guarantee of human equality didn’t emerge in the United States until the militant proslavery movement got under way in the 1830s, in direct response to the abolitionist movement.26

The Declaration of Independence is a purely Lockean take on the role and power of government: 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.”

Instead, Disintegrationists posit that social changes can remake the very nature of man.

Government cannot change the hearts of human beings—it cannot make them that which they are not. Simply changing material circumstances does not result in man replacing his heart of stone with a heart of flesh. And placing government guarantees of particular privileges as the center of American life requires tyrannical overlordship, either in the form of radical redistribution, or in the form of outright coercion. Americans are thus divided between those who receive and those who are forced to give.

The easy way to tell whether you do indeed have a right against me is to bring a gun to the party. If you try to kill me, and I pull a gun on you, I’m perfectly within my rights; if you try to steal my car and I pull out a gun to detain you, I’m perfectly within my rights. If, however, I stroll into your bakery, demand that you serve me a cake, and then pull a gun on you when you refuse, I have violated your rights—not the other way around.

The role of government is not to enforce virtue. It is to protect us from the violation of our rights by others.

Freedom of speech is a principal pillar of a free government; when this support is taken away, the constitution of a free society is dissolved, and tyranny is erected on its ruins. . . . An evil magistrate intrusted with power to punish for words, would be armed with a weapon the most destructive and terrible. Under pretence of pruning off the exuberant branches, he would be apt to destroy the tree.

What’s the problem with all of this? The answer is obvious: once you redefine rights to mean anything you want—and replacing rights with the “common good” does just that—rights no longer have any meaning, and you lose all protection. 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.

In their quest to remake humanity itself, Disintegrationists fight against individual rights. In return, they offer safety. Safety from the mob. Safety in the mob. Safety within the prescribed boundaries set by Better Humans™.

Clap-ter has replaced laughter; applause for political agreement has supplanted comedy entirely.

Now, the CDG should be able to fire whomever it wants for whatever reason. But the judge’s reasoning here makes clear that the law isn’t designed to protect employers or employees in nonpartisan fashion. It’s meant to enforce an agenda directed against certain expressions of perfectly rational speech.

The predictable result will be a renewed militancy, not a utopia of civility and kindness. 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 culture has brought us: not unity, but rage.

As with other utopian schemes, the desire to change human nature by overthrowing individual rights is doomed to both failure and oppression.

In fact, it is fair to say that while America has participated in evils common to all humanity, America has brought to humanity immense good that is entirely unique.

But because the story of America is not the story of unending tolerance for slavery, the Civil War, the bloodiest war in American history, was fought. More than 600,000 Americans lost their lives. Hundreds of thousands of Union soldiers marched into battle singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”: In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea, With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me; As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free!