This past weekend I spoke at the Cowlitz County Republicans’ Lincoln Day Dinner in the State of Washington. Before I broke with the GOP in 2008 I was often invited to speak at such events. These days, of course, the powerful influence of the party’s dominant quisling leadership militates against such invitations. Every now and again, however, republicans (note the small ‘r’) like myself, who still adhere to the principles of the American Declaration of Independence defy the prevailing winds of that leadership and invite me in.
As in many states around the country, such republicans continue earnestly to battle against the surrender of the GOP’s commitment to the “nation, conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” They are generally people who share my dedication to respect for “the laws of nature and of Nature’s God”; the defense of God-endowed unalienable rights, including the natural bonds that define and constitute the basis for the institution of marriage; and the understanding of economics that is rooted in respect for liberty as an unalienable right.
As an unalienable right, liberty is not unlimited freedom. It is rather the choice to use our capacity for freedom to stand “with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right,” as Lincoln put it in his Second Inaugural address. In this respect, liberty is the free choice of human individuals. Like a master programmer, the Creator has prescribed routines that govern the activity of all created things. Unlike non-human creatures, who are programmed to respond to things in one way, human beings are endowed with the capacity to respond, in one way or another, to the inclinations God has programmed into the fabric of existence, which impel us to take actions intended to preserve and perpetuate human existence, individually and on the whole.
When we accept and act according to those inclinations, embracing God’s intention for our good, individually and on the whole, our activity is an exercise of right endowed (i.e., substantiated) by His will as our creator. We do things his way. We follow, as it were, the current of activity he established within us. We literally consent to His will, embarking upon a present course of action intended to produce a course of future events that correspond to it.
When the Declaration speaks of the “consent of the governed” many seem to assume that this refers to the government they are about to institute. But since that government has no existence until they consent, they are not yet governed by it when they consent. But the use of the past tense implies that they are already governed in some way. The import of the phrase is clarified once we realize that their consent is an exercise of liberty as an unalienable right. It is therefore an exercise of right as endowed and determined by the highest authority, which is the Creator, God. So they are governed by God.
This also makes sense of the reference to the just powers of government. The use of the word “just” is restrictive. It excludes unjust powers, i.e., powers used for purposes inconsistent with God-endowed right. When the Declaration says that these just powers are derived from the consent of the governed it evokes the combined force of all those who consent to exercise (implement) God-endowed right. They literally constitute a concerted power that is just because of their common commitment to do right.
By evoking the contrast between just and unjust power the Declaration points to the difference between just and unjust people. Though it is generally forgotten or denied these days, the government envisaged by the Declaration was not intended to be a government of murderers, thieves and scoundrels, established in order to maintain the discipline required to achieve their predatory ends. The doctrine of right was predicated on a commitment to righteousness, i.e., a common will to implement right as substantiated by God’s endowment of humanity.
I think this is why, in the end, every discussion about the use of government power in the United States ultimately becomes a discussion about right and wrong, justice and injustice. It’s why Lincoln was right to insist that the nation could not survive “half-slave and half-free.” It’s why America’s mobilizations for war in the 20th century had always to be predicated on some defense of right. It’s why the present effort to define our foreign policy without regard to right has us priming the instruments of our own destruction.
The elitist faction’s intellectual toadies can blather on all they like about the end of American exceptionalism. Most Americans still believe that we’re supposed to do the right thing. Given the general experience of mankind, that supposition alone makes us exceptional. In that respect, the whole point of our form of government is to make sure that the exception proves the rule, meaning to say that people committed to do what’s right, as individuals and on the whole, join forces to make sure it’s safe to do so.
The quisling leaders who now govern the GOP on behalf of the self-serving forces of the elitist faction reject the notion that America’s national identity and purpose is predicated on moral premises. That’s why they keep trying to convince people that the only issues that matter are those of material power matter.
Who cares if the Supreme Court discards the premise of right by purporting to define marriage without regard to natural right?
Who cares if we discard the premise of individual rights and private property by denying the obligation that arises from the first premise of all belonging, which is the claim established by the bodily ties by which children belong to the parents who engendered them, and vice-versa.
Who cares if we discard the premise of limited government by adopting measures that purport to promote and provide for the welfare and security of the American people by trampling on their inalienable rights?
The quisling leaders who presently dominate the GOP don’t care, and they don’t want Republicans to hear from people who sincerely do. That would explain why I was told that some such leaders in Washington State encouraged people to boycott the dinner at which I spoke about such things. For all that, the dinner was a success. It confirming my faith in the decent Americans there and around the country.
April 15, 1865 is the day on which Lincoln died from an assassin’s bullet. Many Americans still believe that America is the union in rights and righteousness that Lincoln professed it to be, and that so many gave their lives to prove that it was. The battle to save that union is still ongoing, more insidiously now. People who believe in it, as Lincoln did, must persevere, without regard to party. By doing so, they may yet bring the day when April 15 will be a day for remembering the price once paid to cement America’s commitment to respect for God-endowed rights; instead of the day by which we pay the tribute now unconstitutionally extorted from us by elitist would-be tyrants, bent on destroying them.