|
Kesler on Bush’s distortion of natural rights
In an expansion of his recent article in Imprimis, Charles Kesler critiques President Bush’s degradation of America’s natural-rights philosophy into a kind of sentimental multiculturalism, in which, for example, people are assumed to be “entitled” to democracy, to be delivered to them by us, simply by virtue of their being human and having feelings, and in which we must welcome illegal aliens crossing into our country because they love their families. Bush pretends to speak the language of natural rights, which is based on a belief in truth, but is actually promoting a relativistic openness that makes human needs and desires—or, rather, the needs and desires of other humans—its only standard. He seems to have no grasp of (or attachment to) the basic principle that all Americans used to imbibe by the time they had graduated from elementary school: that our rights are contingent on our mutually recognizing the objective validity of rights in each other, and the limitations that others’ rights place on our own freedoms. Instead, according to Bush, rights come simply from people’s possession of human feelings, needs, and desires. Moreover, it’s always other people—foreigners, minorities, non-Westerners—whose rights and entitlements we must assert and protect in a kind of global welfare state, while they have no corresponding obligation toward us. They are the recipients; we are the guarantors. This peculiar mix of ideas seems to be a cross between the neoconservatives’ abstract universalism on one hand, and Bush’s low-church, emotion-laden evangelism (colored by his upper-class WASP paternalism) on the other. We really must be grateful to the supposedly high-level intellectuals who have encouraged Bush in this mindless trampling of our national tradition.
The Republican party was the one leading institution left in America that still had some adherence, attenuated though it was, to the natural-rights philosophy on which our country was founded. Bush has turned that philosophy into something very near its opposite, and, in so doing, is turning the Republican party into a vehicle of leftism. Don’t expect your typical Republicans to understand any of this, though. All they know is: “We’re in a war. We must support our president in a war.” Right. No matter what this president does, no matter how leftist he is in his positions or how irresponsible he is in the conduct of his office, no matter that he seeks literally to open our borders to the entire world (declaring that “family values don’t stop at the Rio Grande”), no matter that he signs on to racial preferences for the sake of achieving mathematical racial diversity in every institution, no matter that he says that “home ownership,” “owning your own business,” and “opportunity” are “civil rights,” which he says are being denied in America by “bigotry,” no matter that he leads America into an open-ended war for global democracy while refusing to name the enemy, no matter that he calls our actual enemy a “religion of tolerance and peace,” no matter that he sticks our men in a “democracy-building” mission in a country where the undefeated terrorist enemy blows them up at liberty as they ride along Iraq’s highways in unarmored vehicles, no matter that he fails in his most basic duty to give to the people a regular, reasonable accounting of the war, no matter how he didn’t even have the uprightness to give a speech explaining the absence of WMDs, we’re supposed to keep up the old rah-rah for Bush. Sorry, any annoyed Republicans out there. The mission of this website, as stated in the masthead, is to offer commentary on current events from the point of view of traditionalist conservatism (a part of which, though far from the whole, is the natural-rights tradition of the American Founding). And that is what it will continue to do. Email entry |