Happy Birthday America!

 

I wish you and your loved ones a wonderful 4th of July, the day to get the high explosives out of the cupboard....the liberals will get their chemical bombs out, 'cos after all they are not dangerous are they....check the all important expiry date stamps....

Scott Johnson has a great post about the eternal meaning of Independence Day, whilst Thomas Sowell wonders if patriotism is obsolete. Cindy Sheehan has gone on that all important diet for the cameras, it does make you put on a few pounds, I can vouch for that.

Visit Michelle Malkin for America's 230th Birthday celebration in remembrance of our men in uniform, and a little July 4th Schoolhouse Rock video, Lorie Byrd for a great Wizbang Blogosphere round up, and The Anchoress takes us on a July 4th tour from Jonah to Hitchens and back with some wonderful graphics. 'One Nation Under God' from Jim with a soldier's memorial, and an incredible not to be missed tour of The Pentagon from Ed Morrissey. What does The ACLU have to say today we wonder?

For me, today is the day to remember the age-old and perpetual struggle against oppression, wherever we find it:

"He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."
-- Thomas Paine, Dissertation on First Principles of Government, December 23, 1791

And, most important of all, today is the day to balance the demands of two polar opposites, two antithetical extremes; on the one hand are those who wish to banish Christian tradition and values from public life and on the other hand are those whose fundamental demands seem to wish a return to the Christianity of early America.

Many Christians who think of America as founded upon Christianity usually present the Declaration as "proof." The reason appears obvious: the document mentions God. However, the God in the Declaration does not describe Christianity's God. It describes "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God." This nature's view of God agrees with deist philosophy but any attempt to use the Declaration as a support for Christianity will fail for this reason alone.

Well, that's the ACLU version... But as we commemorate the founding fathers, we are often reminded not to ignore Thomas Paine's famous quote: "Of all the systems of religion that ever were invented, there is no more derogatory to the Almighty, more unedifying to man, more repugnant to reason, and more contradictory to itself than this thing called Christianity."

Of course put in its proper context, namely, that this nation was founded by Christians seeking religious freedoms from the Church of England which had become extremely oppressive, is not in the interest of those who promote the notion that religion needs to be removed from our society. "It negates everything that our founding fathers fought for, and most especially that our men in uniform died for. It is the ultimate betrayal of those who came before us. And it must end."

In fact, I believe Alexis de Tocqueville perfectly captures the mindset of the founding fathers then and of a vast majority today: "The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of Liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other."      

Amen.

Comments

[Kenny Pierce]

See, Ghost, my libertarian soul just has a very hard time taking seriously anybody who claims to be concerned about internal checks and balances on government but isn't bothered by the big regulatory agencies. This is especially true since the people concerned about Bush are concerned about powers he is exercising in wartime, while the regulatory agencies are intended to be perpetual, it being intended that the common man should never be out from under their thumb whether in war or peace. Naturally the defense of such agencies is that they are intended to protect the common man, not oppress him -- but then exactly the same defense could be made, with (IMHO) quite a bit more persuasiveness, for the wartime powers claimed by this President. (That is, for the wartime powers he actually claims, not those that his enemies pretend that he claims.)

I have been complaining about government power and its abuse of private citizens for all my adult life. But I can see that the ordinary tradeoffs shift rather dramatically when a foreign enemy is actively engaged in trying to kill as many Americans as they can figure out how to kill, and I am therefore willing to give this President more rope temporarily, as long as that rope is intended for terrorist necks. But it seems to me that most of the people who have their panties all in a wad over George Bush's threat to our liberty, and have suddenly discovered the charms of "checks and balances," are Johnnie-come-latelys who never were terribly worried about such threats until this particular Republican took the White House. That may very well not apply to you, Ghost; but whenever I hear someone complaining about Bush's "executive overreach," I immediately ask them about other examples of American governmental overreach that seem to me at least as obvious and at least as imminently threatening to liberty but that don't involve Dubya -- since I tend to suspect that such people are much less motivated by a love of liberty than by a hatred of the Shrub, "checks and balances" and the danger of giving too much power to government being valuable to them only as the most convenient pretext under which to attack this man whom they hate. I pretty much always get back a response pretty much like yours...which seems to say that if Dubya's not involved it doesn't bother you.

And that in turn makes it pretty hard not to feel like your problem isn't really philosophical, but personal.

(I might add that I have a similar reaction when pro-choice people start babbling about the sacrosanct inviolability of stare decisis -- that is, I wonder about all those Supreme Court decisions that have departed from precedent in order to achieve a result palatable to liberals, and ask myself cynically whether they have a problem with those decisions. Liberals loved the overturning of precedent -- justified on the grounds that the Constitution was "living" -- as long as it hadn't occurred to them that they might lose control of the Supreme Court. The moment it sank in that conservatives might actually gain control of SCOTUS and start rolling back the more outrageous liberal decisions, the Teddy Kennedy type of liberal suddenly discovered that stare decisis was the most fundamental of all imaginable principles of Constitutional interpretation. This does not leave me impressed with the Kennedy clone's candor or intellectual consistency.)

Here's another question for you, Ghost, since you care so deeply about the principle of checks and balances: if Supreme Court Justices decide to impose their own agendas rather than stick to what the law actually says, what effective check or balance is there on that power? Under what circumstances -- if any -- can any other branch of government say, "This Court is attempting unduly to extend its power and is attempting to exercise a legislative function in violation of Constitutional separation of powers"? The fundamental point of checks and balances is to make sure that the question, "Quis custodiet custodies?" always has an answer. Well, who judges the judges? A President must face reelection after four years and can rule at most only for eight. A shamelessly partisan Justice like Ginzburg is there for life. If what you're worried about is systemic rather than personal, why are you so much more worried about the potential for Presidential abuse of executive power than you are (or at least seem to be) about the potential for Justicial abuse of the judicial power?

Oh, and furthermore, the balance between the federal power and the powers of the states received just as much thought from Madison as did the balance between the three branches of government. Does the complete subversion of that balance through the shameless abuse of the Commerce Clause, bother you in the slightest? That, again, strikes me as a much grosser deformation of Constutitional checks and balances than does any of the controversies involving Bush's exercise of executive power in wartime, even on the most anti-Bush possible (but still sane, i.e., non-Democratic-Underground-fever-swap) interpretion of the evidence.

[Ghost Dansing]

I think the EPA is OK Kenneth...and OSHA too. Let's have some investigations into what Dubya and his gang has been up to under their interpretation of Executive Powers, and then I'll tell you what I think about checks-and-balances.

By the way, I think SCOTUS just indicated that this Republican administration has put itself at risk for charges of war crimes...perhaps rather than being anti-Liberal, they just have massively poor judgement.

[Kenny Pierce]

Ghost,

I'm afraid that all you're doing, is one of two things (as usual, given how differently our minds work, I'm not entirely sure what it is you're trying to say). Either:

1. You are trying to maintain that the definition of "liberal" that prevailed in the 19th century, is still the only appropriate, or at least the dominant, definition today. If that is the case, then you are oblivious to the fact that words change their meaning and in particular that politically charged terms change their meaning very rapidly indeed as they are cynically coopted and perverted by propagandists. To place Teddy Kennedy -- who never saw a redistribution-of-wealth-by-government-coercion idea he didn't adore -- in the same class as John Stuart Mill, is to show oneself utterly incapable of making even the most basic political distinctions. Indeed, if what you are trying to argue for is a 19th-century use of the word "liberal," then the modern-day equivalent is "libertarian" -- a word that was originally coined precisely because the traditional word "liberal" had been hijacked to mean largely the opposite of its original meaning, making it necessary to come up with another word to mean what the old liberals had meant in so calling themselves.

2. Or else you have a highly idiosyncratic and personal meaning of the word "liberal" and you want the rest of the world to adopt it. Presumably "liberal" is defined, in this sense, as "somebody like the Ghost." I hope you won't be too offended if I observe gently that you are sui generis (albeit delightfully so), and that any word that describes you reasonably accurately will be almost useless for purposes of describing anybody else.

The meaning of a word is determined by its dominant usage in the relevant linguistic community as a whole. To put it another way, the modern-day meaning of the word "liberal" is best established by asking oneself a simple question: if you say the word "liberal" in a room full of randomly selected Americans, what individual is going to come to people's minds first as the prototypical liberal, the one guy who best embodies what it is to be a "liberal"? I think a plurality of Americans would think of Ted Kennedy before they thought of anybody else.

And Teddy Kennedy is hardly "liberal" in your terms.

Oh, by the way, if you object to the corruption of the term "liberal" so that it no longer is synonymous with "classical liberalism" -- well, so do I; but it is the people who coopted the term who perverted it, not their political foes.

Now, a different topic:

You seem very exercised by the threat the Republican President poses to the checks-and-balances system of the Constitution. May I ask if you are equally distressed by:

1. The tremendous expansion in the power and role of the Supreme Court in the last fifty years, which expansion represents the biggest change in the balance of power among the three branches to have happened in a century?

2. The existence, thanks to the innovations of the Democratic Party (that is, the people who have for the past eighty years insisted on being called "liberals"), of immense federal regulatory agencies never contemplated by the Fathers; composed entirely of people not elected by and not directly answerable to the people; and combining in themselves the power to make rules, the power to determine when those rules have been broken, and the power to impose punishments upon the rule-breakers -- that is, combining in themselves the executive, legislative and judicial powers that the Fathers so carefully separated by the Constitution?

My own sense is that the federal regulatory agencies represent a vastly grosser violation of separation of powers, a vastly more thoroughgoing circumvention of the system of checks and balances, and a vastly more oppression intrusion upon the daily private lives and liberties of America's citizens, than would the most questionable program that has ever occurred to George Bush in his wildest totalitarian fantasies. On the one hand you have OSHA, the EPA, the Department of Agriculture, the EEOC, etc.; on the other hand, you're going to put up against that...the fact that when Bush decided to listen in on conversations that people were having with al Qaeda, he didn't tell enough Congressmen first? If you think the latter is a greater threat to the checks and balances envisioned by the Founders than is the former, then I must tell you that I think you are self-deceived and that it is not really checks and balances and fidelity to classic liberalism that motivates you.

[Ghost Dansing]

The Liberal interpretation of the founding documents of the United States are Liberal because the documents are Liberal, and they were written by Liberals. If you attack classic Liberalism, you are attacking the foundations of the United States.

The fact that in the minds of some Americans, they can't even talk about Liberalism, is the result of a successful propaganda campaign that started sometime after the Eisenhower administration, where Liberalism was gradually associated with radical-Socialist and even Communist models of government that culminate in totalitarian implementation. The problem is that if you remove the concepts of government derived from classically Liberal thought from the National dialogue, it opens the door to extremist views...not from the "left" and Communism...but from the "right"...Fascism.

The criticism of the latest culmination of American "conservative" thought... embodied in the current Republican administration...that it is "fascist-leaning", is not because Dubya is "Hitler" or "Mussolini", but that there is a tacit (tacit because it is not even grasped by many Republican voters) advocacy for neutralizing the checks-and-balances inherent in what is quite a brilliant Liberal governmental structure.

You might think that "conservatism" is simply about whether you think abortion should be legal, or whether Church and State should be separate (it should)...you may think that being a "liberal" is just being a "commie", but what it's really about is neutralizing the Judiciary and Legislative Branches of Government in favor of a "strong man" style Corporate Plutocracy with far reaching powers for the Executive Branch, and simple "majority rule".

That is not "Liberal", and it's not "Liberal" in the way you think it's not "Liberal".

Liberalism and Liberal governmental structures are the natural enemy of extremist ideologues, and extremist, totalitarial governmental structures such as Communism and Fascism. Liberalism must be overcome for either to prevail...

Unfortunately, Liberal government stands against extremism, but can be undone from within by extremist elements, for example Weimar.

The key is that the citizens must be committed to Liberal processes...checks and balances...as opposed to extremist points of view. If extremist points of view prevail in the electorate, it opens the way for Liberal governmental structures to be dismantled as the Nation slouches toward some totalitarian or plutocratic form.

To remove the term "Liberal" from the National Dialogue...to deface it and suggest that it is something less than it is, is a danger.

By the way...the ACLU is the ACLU...it wins as much as it loses and takes-up purely Constitutional issues for the "left" as much as it does for the "right"...so get over it.

And to suggest that the over 2000 denominations of christianity are in fact "one religion" that can form the basis of any government without exerting exclusionary dogmatic hegemony is folly. Evangelical, Fundamentalist and Dominionist strains of christianity have been politicized in the United States, are therefore corrupt and suspect in their own right as essentially political organizations rather than Churchs.

[Hawkeye]

@Ghost

Liberalism in the American context is nothing that you are describing. Liberal vs Conservative are narrow labels defing two competing points ofg view about the mutability of the founding documents underlying the American Governmental experience.

Liberals are so called because they favor a "liberal" interpretation of the US Constitution. This in no way refers to the Classical Liberal tradition. It refers to the notion that the Constitution is a "living document" subject to general interpretation as the circustances either require or permit. They are 'liberal' in their interprtation. This has lead to the discovery of new and hitherto undefined 'rights' such as the right o an abortion, and new, hitherto undocumented powers of Congress not found in the original enumeration, such as the authority to delegate one of Congresses enumerated powers, namely to regulate the value of the curency, to an ostendsble member of the executive branch, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve. To a Liberal, the Constitution is read thusly: If a power is not specifically excluded from government, then it must be permitted.

Conservative is a label that has been applied to that school of thought which believes the Constitution says what it says and no 'interpretation' is needed. If no authority for a particular action is explicitly granted, then the national government is prohibited from taking that action, and such authority is reserved to the states and the people.

[rich]

When the Constitution was written several states, notably Massachusetts, had established churches (Mass. stopped state support in the 1830s, I think.)

I think at that time the Bill of Rights to the Constitution was written there was a distinction between a state supported or "established" church, such as the Church of England in England or the Puritans in Massachusetts, and a "gathered" church, which was voluntary and not supported by the state.

If in fact there was such a distinction, then a prohibition on an "established" church should not apply to a "gathered" church.

If the historical distinction is correct, then the "establishment" clause should not be used to banish religion from the public square because it does not reach "gathered" churches. All churches in America today are "gathered" churches.

One other issue the founding fathers do not get much credit for is their concrete actions opposing slavery.

One of the first legislative actions, anywhere, that banned slavery was the Nortwest Ordinance of 1787 passed by the Continental Congress before the Constitution was written.

The founders also should be recognized for making an express provision, in negative language, for legislation allowing the abolition of the slave trade by the Congress after 1808. This was done in Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution.

Congress did outlaw the slave trade effective January 1, 1808, one of the first legislative actions to do this.

As for the compromise in the enumeration clause providing for the counting of slaves as three fifths of a person, most do not understand the context.

The North which was against slavery did not want the slaves counted at all because they were not permitted to vote.

The South which was in favor of slavery wanted slaves counted as persons even though they would not allow them to vote because this would increase its representation in the Congress.

The enumeration compromise, although not a complete victory for the North, was another concrete action taken to deny the propriety of slavery.

In those times these were significant actions.

[Old Dad]

Ghost Dansing,

But what of de Tocqueville's observation? Our seminal definition of liberty is, of course, the Declaration. God knows that Jefferson was a very odd sort of deist, and certainly not a conventional Christian, but most of America at the time was--and still are, to a certain extent. Jefferson's critical observation is that our equality is rooted in human dignity--God given. We recognize this equality and dignity through acts of political will. God knows, imperfectly.

This essentially political formulation fit very well with our then predominantly Christian sensibility, so much so that we enshrined religious liberty in the First Amendment. You must understand that for many Christians (and Jews for that matter) it is not possible to separate faith from politics, and it is faith, not politics that requires us to respect religious freedom.

I think that explains, in part, the secular misunderstanding as often evidenced by the ACLU. From a Christian perspective, an oppressive and illegal enforcement of a religious practice would be abhorrent and unChristian. On the other hand, pursuit of life and liberty consistent with Christian values and within the legal and political strutures of our country is not only required by faith, but a great good.

Jefferson's inseparable wall was primarily intended to protect church from state, and not vice versa. But the tables have turned somewhat, and not without some good reason. Secularists have the same Constitutional rights as do we all. It seems sometimes to many Christians, though, that we get the short end of the stick to often. For example, the ACLU sued unsuccessfully to have three crosses removed from the city seal of Las Cruces, NM. Very silly, no? And we all no about a similar dust up in the City of Angels.

As Americans, we need to have each others' backs. I need to protect your freedoms, and you mine. It seems to me, though, that secularists need to be reminded that one of the greatest protections of their freedoms is a common sense respect for freedom of religion.

P.S. Didn't mean to pigeon hole you as secularist or otherwise. I have no idea.

[Ghost Dansing]

Liberalism is a political current embracing several historical and present-day ideologies that claim defense of individual liberty as the purpose of government.

It typically favors the right to dissent from orthodox tenets or established authorities in political or religious matters. In this respect, it is sometimes held in contrast to conservatism.

Since liberalism also focuses on the ability of individuals to structure their own society, it is almost always opposed to totalitarianism, and often to collectivist ideologies, particularly communism.

In its original political meaning, the term "liberal" refers to a political philosophy, founded on the principles of the Enlightenment, that tries to circumscribe the limits of political power and to define and support individual rights. In the present, a variety of ideologies attempt to claim the mantle of 19th century liberalism, from libertarianism via social-liberalism to American liberalism.

U.S. liberalism of the Cold War era was the immediate heir to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal and the slightly more distant heir to the Progressives of the early 20th century.
Although Roosevelt died before the Cold War era, the political stance of Cold War liberalism can be found in Roosevelt's Four Freedoms (1941): of these, freedom of speech and of religion were classic liberal freedoms, but "Freedom from want" and "freedom from fear" were another matter entirely. Coming off of the Great Depression, and with World War II already being fought in Europe and the Pacific, Roosevelt boldly proposed a notion of freedom that went beyond mere government non-interference in people's private lives. "Freedom from want", especially, could justify positive government action to meet economic needs, a concept more associated with socialism and social democracy than with prior versions of liberalism.

Defining itself against both Communism and conservatism, Cold War liberalism resembled earlier "liberalisms" in its views on many social issues, but its economic views were not those of free-market liberalism; instead, they constituted a mild form of social democracy.

The Enlightenment flowed from the Christianization of Europe. Liberalism flowed from the Enlightenment. Liberalism spawned Liberal Government in America that allowed for individual freedom to practice any religion, because most of the "christian" sects that had been evicted from England and Europe were considered heretics or otherwise unwanted by their former society. Liberal government also provided for a government that resisted the domination by ANY particular sect or religion.

It was revolutionary...it was a good thing...the concept of church-state separation was a breakthrough for humanity, and an the moderating forces of Liberal government is probably the only hope of deliverance from humanities never-ending dialectics between ideological extremes be they religious, political or a hair-ball conflation of both.

So, America?

She's a rebel
She's a saint
She's salt of the earth
And she's dangerous

Green Day

[gringoman]

Miss Anne---or an amazing supernatural pagan look-alike, now born again on the 4th of July---is at this very moment swooping down on the progressive heathen.

"Coulter Rides Again." At gringoworks.

[Kenny Pierce]

I'm not a great expert on the Founding Fathers (though having read the Federalist Papers and the Declaration and the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution and Franklin's Autobiography and great big chunks of Locke and Mill, I'm ahead of the average American). But for what it's worth, from where this amateur sits:

The ACLU's argument isn't so much facially wrong as it is hopelessly shallow. The Deism of those Founders who were not orthodox Christians (and the ACLU, with little regard for the fallacy of emphasis, eternally plays up the four or five Founders it can find who are Deists while ignoring the overwhelming number of Founders who were in fact Christians in every sense) certainly did disagree with Christianity on certain Christological and theological points. But it drew all of its moral and ethical principles from Christianity. Deists of that period didn't necessarily recognize this, I don't believe, because having grown up surrounded by Christendom, they thought the moral principles of Christianity were largely "self-evident." But had they grown up in Imperial China rather than in pre-Revolutionary European Christendom, a rather different set of moral and ethical assumptions would have seemed to them "self-evident" -- they thought they were drawing from natural philosophical principles moral conclusions that in fact were inculcated in them by the dominantly Christian culture in which they lived. I think it highly unlikely, for example, that even the fiercely anti-clerical Paine would have been anything but appalled by the very idea of partial-birth abortion, or that he would not have maintained that such a practice was self-evidently depraved, barbaric and inhumane. In that sense, even though the Deists' theology was not Christian, their ideas of right and wrong were -- and one of the most fundamentally American principles is that it's not nearly so important to agree about arcane technical points of theology as it is to agree about what is right and just in the way people treat each other. In pretending that the character of the nascent American nation was determined by the theological ideas of a small minority of the intellectuals involved in shaping the American forms of government, rather than by the thoroughly Judeo-Christian morality taken for granted throughout 18th-century American society as a whole including by the Deists, the ACLU argues, IMHO, disingenously.

And it also ignores, I think, the fact that it is very difficult to get everybody in a society to agree on what is right and just in how people treat each other, if they don't agree on a whole bunch of theological points as well. The unity of the American nation has largely been lost precisely because Left and Right no longer agree on even the most basic principles of ethics and morality and justice -- even when they use the same words, they usually mean very different things by them. Insofar as the Religious Right argues that its basic principles of justice are closely related to those accepted by the Founders, and that the basic principles of the Left would not have met with the Founders' approval, I think they are correct (though I don't necessarily agree with the practical political measures the Religious Right thinks should therefore be implemented in modern-day America). My respect for the ACLU would increase considerably if they were simply candid enough to admit as much.

But I'm not holding my breath waiting for that one.

As are all my opinions, that one's worth what you pay for it...and my hourly rate is much lower than that of an ACLU lawyer.

[Jeremayakovka]

Happy 4th! Proud to mark with you and all ATB's readers.