As the Independence Day holiday approaches, read the Declaration of Independence and ask yourself: How independent are you? Can you speak freely? Do what you want jobwise? Go wherever you want to go? Associate with whomever you like?
Do the answers to those questions matter to you? If not, you may be part of the faction that thinks individual rights are dispensable, that social expediency, as defined by certain people at a certain time, takes precedence over individual freedoms.
If those questions do matter to you, then you’re part of the group that thinks our founding principles do make this country a unique political experiment that’s led to greater freedom and prosperity than the world has ever known. And you probably feel like part of a shrinking minority.
The social-expediency faction dominates one of our major political parties. With its soul sold to identity politics, it clangs around in a Great American Pinball Machine, bouncing off peg after peg: This subject cannot be taught, that person cannot speak; police officers are no longer “heroic first responders,” they’re racists; being born with a certain skin pigment makes you evil; those people must give money to these people.
They can shut you up if they don’t like what you’re saying, or destroy you with ad-hominem attacks. They can disqualify you for any sin, real or fabricated, if it becomes propitious to do so. They do not respect or accept any election result won by their opponents. Anything the winners say or do is illegitimate.
Some, such as the Claremont historian and author Charles Kesler, call that “America’s cold civil war.” Maybe. But what’s the intellectual underpinning that manifests in all this hatred? Were you born with natural rights or not?
The Great American Pinball Machine has been around for generations, as evidenced by Woodrow Wilson, the 28th president and a leader of the Progressive movement. The Constitution got some gut punches from Wilson’s Progressives, who thought it antiquated. He also sneered at the declaration.
Wilson, in a July 4, 1911 speech to the Jefferson Club in Los Angeles, got into the pinball machine by telling listeners, “If you want to understand the real Declaration of Independence, do not repeat the preface.”
Nobody else called the first sentences of the declaration a “preface.” Wilson did in order to show disdain for the spirit of the American founding – that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights (life, liberty, pursuit of happiness). Dismiss that, and you dismiss the concepts that separated these United States from every other nation, before or since.
That’s fine, said Wilson. Dismissed.
All you have left, he said, is a bunch of griping about King George III.
Wilson’s descendants are the new King George. They explicitly and unapologetically want greatly expanded government to deal with new circumstances. The founders’ visions no longer apply.
Today’s progressivism descends from Wilson, the New Deal and Great Society. Wealth redistribution, victim groups, a leviathan administrative and regulatory state, punishment for infidels, ever-higher taxes, rapidly and constantly changing “principles” that might override a previously cherished “principle” – progressives don’t regret any of this. They want it.
Wilson disqualified a key part of one of the country’s founding documents. His descendants disqualify people, statues, institutions, even the country itself because some Americans had slaves. You wonder what country, now or ever, didn’t have faults, or which ones fought as valiantly and earnestly as the citizens of this country to correct them.
Wilson, in an 1887 essay titled “Socialism and Democracy,” asserts that there is no limit of public authority over an individual and that, “In fundamental theory, socialism and democracy are almost, if not quite, one and the same.”College kids probably couldn’t quote you any of this, but many of them are “woke,” mostly because they just think “socialism” sounds cool.
That leads into well-charted waters, at least to people who haven’t had blinders installed by college professors or pop media. As the pinball machine and Seattle are demonstrating, progressivism and anarchy are almost, if not quite, one and the same.
What can you do? Be skeptical about the “resistance.” Avoid, or at least be able to spot, propaganda, whether on campus or “the news.” And this July 4th, read the Declaration aloud, all the way down to where the founders pledge to each other their lives, fortunes and sacred honor. Ask yourself if you’d pay that price for freedom.
Reach Roger Ruvolo at rruvolo@att.net
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