Denying the value of enlightenment era classical liberalism in our founding is historical revisionism.
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One of the most annoying things about “common good conservatives” is just how dishonest they are. Many of them claim they care about the founding of our nation, but they seem to not understand what that means.
Take this Tweet from Michael Knowles on the subject of freedom of speech:
“The First Amendment is not an inalienable right. It’s a wonderful political tradition written and ratified by wise men in the late 18th century.”
Wait, really? Well someone should have told Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the following:
“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.”
Liberty is a synonym for “freedom,” and I must ask, what is a more basic freedom than freedom of speech?
This, like many things on the right, was once an obvious thing ruined by Sohrab Ahmari. On 11/12/2019, Ahmari tweeted the following:
“One of the blessings of embracing political Catholicism is never having to defend the atrocious slaver Thomas Jefferson. There are many men in the Founding generation whose life and ideas I can admire. But not Jefferson.”
Oh, so Ahmari only takes issue with the founding father who wrote the document that made America independent in the first place. May I remind you, Ahmari is an immigrant. Now tell me, could you imagine the reaction from VDare or Breitbart if a left-wing Mexican immigrant had made that statement and not an Iranian conservative columnist? Considering Jefferson was Trump’s example of what’s “coming next” after a Robert E. Lee statue was taken down, it almost certainly wouldn’t be pretty.
One of the rising stars in this movement is Josh Hammer, a former Daily Wire writer who now spends his days editing the op-ed’s of The New York Post (as does Ahamri) and looking oddly like Watto from Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.
Back in September, he wrote the following for The American Mind, a major outlet for his type:
“The intramural dialogue between the New York Post’s Sohrab Ahmari and National Review’s David French continues to unfold.”
Don’t remind me.
“In crafting the Declaration and the Constitution, the Founders did not put the procedural norms of English common law first. On the contrary, they built our regime directly on the foundation of the substantive political virtues: justice, human flourishing, and the pursuit of the common good.”
This is a weird form of doublethink. According to this logic, violating the constitution is, sometimes, constitutional if it helps “the common good.” What is “the common good”? The reason we should ban porn, and nothing else in all honesty.
Hey, here’s what Hammer tweeted at the start of the lockdown:
“A pandemic requiring national solidarity and a systemic commitment to ‘social distancing’ is a bit of a tough blow for the radical individualists who’d excoriate a ‘common good’-oriented policy posture.”
Where does he stand on it now? Well, now he’s posting articles from CNN (you know a Daily Wire contributor is mad when they’re citing CNN) saying this lockdown could itself kill 75,000 Americans. I guess they just aren’t part of the common good anymore, either that or “the common good” changes day to day.
Here’s something I really don’t get. Josh Hammer, along with his buddies like Sohrab Ahamri and Oren Cass, will commonly cite themselves as supporters of Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton, for those who don’t know, proposed a monarchy and believed that the “rich and well off” should govern. Meanwhile, the people who claim to follow in Hamilton’s footsteps believe this same idea is already in place and responsible for our current “hellhole” due to our “neo-liberal” (which I’m 90% sure is just a code for “Jewish”) ruling class.
Josh Hammer and his buddies like to call themselves “originalists,” which only makes sense if you believe our founders were utilitarian-they weren’t. However, applying a philosophy to the constitution might be a mistake. I have learned that the constitution is, in of itself, a philosophy.
It’s undeniable the main inspiration for this ideology was the enlightenment. The words “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” are derived from “life, liberty, and property,” which comes from enlightenment liberal thinker John Locke. These words were also placed in the 14th Amendment.
Hammer defines his theory as being brought about by legal minds like John Marshall, who was appointed by President John Adams, the guy who signed the Alien And Sedition Acts into law. John Adams is not a man we should trust on liberty, and neither should we trust his theorists (who created the “judicial supremacy” Josh Hammer hates so much).
Hammer is also a fan of Robert Bork, whose main contribution to law was breaking it. Oh, and I guess he also wrote the book with that title Dan Savage later parodied-for whatever that’s worth.
Denying the value of enlightenment era classical liberalism in our founding is historical revisionism. We can not replace old thinkers like John Locke and Thomas Jefferson with political pop-stars like Bork or Kavanaugh. We must, if we wish to be taken seriously, view the Constitution itself as a philosophy and unite behind it, instead of trying to shape it to fit our political narrative.
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This article strikes upon something that is very important in understanding our present political moment. There are very few who attempt to understand the foundational ideals of our nation’s founding. Instead, the founders have become a massive target for projection by those busy crafting their political narratives. This explains why we have white nationalists on the one hand who paint the founders as anglo-saxon purists who intended for a racially homogenous state and progressives on the other hand who wrest classically liberal notions towards support for a unitary, collectivist project. Neither the founders themselves nor their ideals are generally understood by those who have inherited the republic they crafted.