I'm a Friend of the Founding

I wasn’t sure I’d post today, on the Fourth of July itself. But, before we head out to do fireworks, I’d like to share just a little bit, in celebration of our country—and our founding documents based on our radical founding ideas.

"The Declaration of Independence," by John Trumbull, 1819
image found here

I was listening to Andrew Klavan the other day[i], and he had a segment that used different words from the Spherical Model, but still a good description of the dichotomy between the northern and southern hemispheres of freedom and tyranny. He talks about the divide specifically as between friends of the founding of America and enemies of that founding.

Andrew Klavan
image found here

So, in honor of the Fourth of July, here’s the transcript of those few minutes:

We know that our country’s divided. But I think we’re using an old template to describe how it’s divided. I stopped using the word “liberal” a long time ago, because there’s nothing liberal about the left. They oppose free speech, free thought, free markets, freedom of religion. The only freedoms they support are the unbridled fulfillments of physical desires, which are guaranteed to turn you into a dependent slave.

So I call them “leftists” now, but maybe leftist isn’t quite right either. It’s kind of an old-fashioned word to describe a European phenomenon.

And what about conservatives? Are we really conservative? Well, we’re sort of conservative. But in America conservatives aren’t about blood and soil, or even really about tradition necessarily, except insofar as our traditions preserve our essential America ideas.

Unlike conservatives in other nations, American conservatives are trying to conserve the most radical political document ever written—the Constitution—which guarantees a limited government of specified powers tasked with guaranteeing the individuals’ right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

So, that’s not really conservative in the usual sense of the word. In fact, what I think we’re seeing is a division between friends of that founding and enemies of that founding. Those of us who believe the creation of the United States in the image of our Declaration and Constitution is the greatest political event in history and therefore worth saving, and those who think, no, we should return to the age-old habit of top-down government or race-based identity politics, rather than the radical politics based on our founding ideas.

You can tell friends of the founding, because they talk about founding ideals. They quote Jefferson. They quote Madison, Adams, Franklin. They wrestle with the original intentions of the Constitution and the underlying principles of the Declaration. We can have passionate but civilized debates about whether a new idea, like gay rights, is antithetical to those founding intentions or is in fact in keeping with them, because we have source materials and writings and foundational ideas we can compare our arguments to, and then move ahead, abandoning out-of-date practices or clinging to those practices that still hold true to the founding.

But the anti-founders, they got nothin’. All they have is an amorphous sense of their own glowing compassion, tolerance, and virtue. So, these empty phrases like “That’s not who we are,” which literally means nothing. They invent mean-sounding words like Islamaphobia or transphobia, which describe utterly nonexistent phenomena; nobody’s phobic about transgender people or Islamic people. They just want to demonize legitimate concerns about whether violence is inherent in Islamic theology and whether sexual identity is eating away at morality, and even sanity.

They address issues of high emotion and zero importance, like use of pronouns or abortion rights for girls who are actually guys[ii]. They’re guided and manipulated by emotive pictures on the left-wing news. Babies dying at the border is a crisis, but babies dying in Chicago, not so much.

Most of all, the enemies of the founding define everything that opposes them as hate. Of course they do. Since they’re defined by their love and their virtue, anyone who’s against them must be hateful, and therefore can be opposed by any means necessary. So the enemies of the founding call the friends of the founding, not just wrong, but evil. And they license their own evil in the process. They call us hateful while they obviously seethe with hate. They call us violent while they assault us and scream at us and spit on us in restaurants. They call us racist while they see everything in terms of race. And they call us fascist while they try to undermine every freedom our founding defends.

Momentary issues and the huge presence of Donald Trump distract us from the essential nature of this division. But, in each issue, each crisis, each argument, it’s important to remember what exactly we’re fighting for, so we can defeat these forces of violence and hate.

---

[i] This was from his podcast Monday, July 1, 2019. The whole podcast is available here. This short segment can be seen on Facebook, here.

[ii] This is a reference to a comment by Julian Castro in the Democratic presidential debate last week. He’s apparently unaware of biology. Afterward, he received praise, at least in our newspaper, the Houston Chronicle, for his breakout, excellent performance.