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[Pre-order a copy of Daniel Greenfield’s first book, Domestic Enemies, by clicking here. Orders will begin shipping on April 30th.]
We are two years and spare change away from the American semiquincentennial which will celebrate 250 years since some brave men ratified the foundational document of our nation.
The Declaration of Independence’s bold assertion that the people were “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” is all the more relevant in the age of relativism where fewer people believe in a ‘Creator’ or in unalienable rights. That radical document is why America remains the only place on the planet where freedom of speech is absolute.
Other nations have their constitutions and human rights charters which run longer than an old-fashioned telephone directory, but their rights are granted by the government and then taken away by the government. Under the guise of buzzwords like ‘stakeholders’ and ‘evolving social contracts’ your rights are constantly reevaluated by committees according to leftist doctrine.
Unlike the absolute rights of the Bill of Rights, the reevaluation of rights follows a Marxist paradigm in which the existing state of rights is an imperfect system imposed by the privileged on the underprivileged, and must be constantly shaken up to liberate the new oppressed.
Your rights are not absolute, they are relative to how oppressed the committee thinks you are. And if you’re only as free as your oppression, then you have to be oppressed to have rights.
These rights are not a gift from the Creator, but from systemic racism, that you have rights is not something to be proud of or grateful for, but a mark of shame that indicts you for having benefited from whiteness, being adjacent to whiteness, the patriarchy, heteropatriarchy or cisheteropatriarchy, and the only way to atone is to cede your rights to the next group.
The clash between traditional feminism and the transgender movement clearly shows the difference between absolute and relative rights. In the absolute rights model, equality for women would have been a permanent victory, but in the relative rights model, by winning equal rights, women stopped being the oppressed and instead became the oppressors of transgender men.
Feminists have responded to the transgender movement with both absolute and relative arguments. The absolute argument is that womanhood is a fundamental biological reality and not a relative state of mind that can be redistributed to anyone who comes asking for it. The relative one is, like nearly all relative rights arguments, an assertion of unique victimhood.
The Marxist paradigm easily defeats past claims of victimhood. By the sixties, the old class warfare model had evolved to adopt and dispose of such past claims like an efficient factory, beginning with the original class of victims, the white working class, once the vanguard of the revolution, but quickly banished to the ranks of reactionaries and oppressors of the oppressed.
From the lofty progressive vantage point of the current year, every domestic group on whose behalf the leftists of a century ago had advocated, coal miners, factory workers, women, Italian and Jewish immigrants, the rural poor, have now become the contemptible enemies of mankind.
At the rapid pace of radicalization, everyone from white gay men to black men to lesbians, are being prepped for the social abattoir. By 2035, the only true victims may be groups so bizarre and warped as to be barely conceivable today. Before they too are exposed as the oppressors.
Under intersectionality, each right is also a wrong, and each liberation conceals another oppression. The process of liberation is a constant search for new wrongs, new minorities to liberate and then denounce in a constant upheaval of society that masks the oppressive transfer of power from the citizenry to a revolutionary vanguard that also doubles as the true ruling class.
The true oppression is a liberation movement that frees no one, only pits people against one another, giving each grievance its hour in the sun, before turning the aggrieved into the aggressors, so that only the revolutionaries can ever wield any meaningful power by arbitrating who the oppressors and the oppressed are at given moment.
And that is what relative rights look like.
When rights are dependent on defining who the oppressed and the oppressors are, then those rights are not truly inalienable rights given by the Creator or by a foundational document, but by the constantly shifting paradigms of academia and the accompanying leftist politics.
Who the oppressed and the oppressors are can change overnight, as feminists found out. Yesterday, women were the oppressed, today any man who puts on a dress is oppressed.
The difference between your rights being determined day to day by King George III or the editorial department of the New York Times is a preference for one tyranny over another.
Absolute rights, like those in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, build one achievement on top of another. And that is the rights that most Americans, even most liberals, thought that they were getting, but instead the oppressed groups of yesterday wonder why the revolutionary moment seems to have passed them by leaving them with less than they had.
What happened to the revolution, they wonder? What happened is that it’s a revolution.
A revolution is a state of instability. Freedom doesn’t come from revolutions, but from the order that emerges afterward. That’s why Americans commemorate July 4th, 1776 as Independence Day. July 4th was neither the first nor the final shot fired for independence. Like the French, we could have made an original violent confrontation, the Boston Massacre, into our Bastille Day. Or we could have made Evacuation Day, a mostly forgotten holiday marking the British departure from New York City and the end of British rule, into the date of our independence.
But instead we chose to commemorate the aspirational vision of the Declaration of Independence. Revolutions and battles come and go, but we wanted to build our independence around a new order of liberty, not around the perpetual revolution championed by some radicals.
In my book, Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against The Left, I described the radical American leftists who wanted to perpetuate the revolution and saw France as a model.
“Eternal providence called on you, you alone, since the world began, to reestablish on earth the empire of justice and liberty,” Robespierre had rhapsodized. During the Reign of Terror, the French leftist had assured fellow radicals that it would all be worth it for, “by sealing our work with our blood, we may witness at least the dawn of universal happiness.”
Some American leftists plotted to topple George Washington and the Constitution to pursue a French style perpetual revolution that would, after enough bloodshed, offer universal happiness.
Today the “dawn of universal happiness” has been replaced by the “right side of history”, but both are revolutionary movements of relative rights that are always incomplete and seeking perfection. But human affairs are by definition imperfect. The American experiment offered the security of absolute rights while the leftist approach is to rob of everyone of their rights over and over in search of the perfect state, the empire of justice and liberty, and the right side of history.
The real struggle is still between the absolute rights guaranteed nearly 250 years ago by the Declaration of Independence, and the relative rights promised by the leftist revolutions which are still going on today. And it is this clash of rights that will determine the future of our rights.
1976 seems like only yesterday. I often remember the celebration we had that night.
I remember it well. Eight yrs old, wearing my Cub Scout uniform, I marched in a parade with my dad’s VFW post, and they let me hold one of the American flags. I never let it touch the ground, everyone gave me props for that. It was hard, that flagpole was heavy. Lots of barbecue, lots of music, dancing, it was so much fun.
Scary, it does seem like yesterday. We celebrated it all year at school. We had plays, projects, assemblies with interesting historians, and a good Ben Franklin impersonator was one of them.
We had a mock election, fall of 5th grade, and I was one of three kids in the whole Georgia elementary school of 700-something kids that voted for Ford.
Rights from a creator are now rights determined by China and Iran in the UNITED NATIONS.
Great work Daniel.
“When one gives up Christian belief one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality”– Friedrich Nietzsche, “Twilight of the Idols” (1889).
The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were are and will always be the two best documents ever written by mankind in human history
Very important and critical insights about Freedom and Oppression have been presented in this article by
Daniel Greenfield.
I hope America is paying attention.
And Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration, is who we should take notes from in order to get this country back together. His governmental ideas were the best of the Founders. And they worked. America SAW it work.
Then we abandoned it for Hamiltonian statism.
The “revolutionaries” / “activists” / “self annointed elites” etc are the new priesthood class. Like all priests they set up and control games of virtue / excommunication. That’s the source of their power. Marxism with all its mutations is a Christian gnostic heresy. Cancel culture is lynching people with a sense of moral superiority. Most of what we see on the left are displays of moral virtue in a framework set up by the new priesthood. The framework shifts all the time and the zealots have to outdo each other so it is bound for the extreme. Young people raised in this new religion, esp young women, automatically parrot the tenets with more conviction than Jehova Witneses parrot their learned responses.
Marxism is religion masquerading as secular science it is preparing the way back to real religion, back to a theocracy.
The only way to maintain a totalitarian state that can last more than a century is actual, mystical, supernatural, religion. It is only by promising Eternal Utopia or Eternal Damnation in Hell or Heaven in a supernatural after-life that people will willingly suffer a lifetime of pain and misery here on earth.
“You are probably wondering here: “What about Communism? Isn’t it a logical, scientific, atheistic philosophy, and yet doesn’t it lead straight to totalitarianism?” The short answer to this is: Communism is not an expression of logic or science, but the exact opposite. Despite all its anti-religious posturings, Communism is nothing but a modern derivative of religion: it agrees with the essence of religion on every key issue, then merely gives that essence a new outward veneer or cover-up.
The Communists reject Aristotelian logic and Western science in favor of a “dialectic” process; reality, they claim, is a stream of contradictions which is beyond the power of “bourgeois” reason to understand. They deny the very existence of man’s mind, claiming that human words and actions reflect nothing but the alogical predetermined churnings of blind matter. They do reject God, but they replace him with a secular stand-in, Society or the State, which they treat not as an aggregate of individuals, but as an unperceivable, omnipotent, supernatural organism, a “higher unseen power” transcending and dwarfing all individuals. Man, they say, is a mere social cog or atom, whose duty is to revere this power and to sacrifice every thing in its behalf. Above all, they say, no such cog has the right to think for himself; every man must accept the decrees of Society’s leaders, he must because this is the voice of Society, whether he understands it or not. Fully as much as Tertullian, Communism demands faith from its followers and subjects, “faith” in the literal, religious sense of the term. On every account, the conclusion is the same: Communism is not a new, rational philosophy; it is a tired, slavishly imitative heir of religion.” – Leonard Peikoff
Ah, an oldie but goodie. Marxism leads to a theocracy. You must be running out of things to scare us with.
What an amateur you are.
He’s not entirely wrong.
Socialism and Marxism emerged from the most Calvinist sects of Christianity.
Globalism is the same as Calvinism. Look at Geneva, Toronto, New York, Boston, Amsterdam, Berlin, Glasgow, and London. These are leftist cities which all push the woke leftist globalist WEF culture. They also used to be hyper Calvinist as well.
Wokeness, Marxism, Globalism and other leftist ideologies are driven by Calvinism.
Let me know when the great Calvinist reawakening arrives.
It doesn’t have to be Calvinism or Roman Catholicism it can be Islam. That’s why the globalist-totalitarians are importing Islam to the West.
Contemporary Christianity is too diluted, too leashed by reason, too influenced by secularism, too influenced by Thomist-Aristotelianism, too influenced by the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment, to become puritanical, fundamentalist, and theocratic Christianity. Most American Christians today will resist and reject a Calvinist, Roman Catholic, or Puritan theocracy. But in 50 to 100 years they may not. If the secular nihilism that is going on today continues American Christians of 50 or 100 years from now will eagerly prefer a Puritan theocracy over the secular insanity.
Religion as such, puritan monotheism, leads to collectivism. To the subjugation of the individual to a “higher” power. To submission to Jehovah or Allah.
To the totalitarians like Obama, Hillary, Gavin Newsom, it doesn’t matter if their totalitarian state is secular, Calvinist, Roman Catholic, or Muslim so long as they are the ruling class and they live in the lap of luxury in unearned, stolen, wealth.
Marxism is a theocracy. Marx is a prophet. Lenin to Obama etc apostles. The revolution is the second coming. They build paradise on earth. The activists are the priesthood class. They “save” the people in this life instead of their eternal souls. etc. Just a few narrative mutations. Even the historical “eras” are a mutation of the Christian eras (Antiquity, Christ, Second Coming etc.). Christianity invented the POV of God, from where anyone can tell what is “good” and what is “bad”. All the left is abusively stuck in this imaginary universal POV from where they claim to know what is hood and bad for the whole world.
In order to defend rights a rational, logical, secular, reality-based, demonstrable theory of rights is necessary.
You must PROVE that rights are necessary and REAL for how else are you going to convince someone that rights are right, necessary, and moral if that person does not believe in your God?
So how are you going to PROVE that rights come from your God? How are you going to PROVE that rights are right, necessary, real, and moral?
Even Christians and Jews do not agree on what the precise nature and definition of their God is because God according to Judaism and Christianity is supernatural, existing in another dimension, beyond man’s reasoning mind to perceive and understand, “God works in mysterious ways”. That’s why religious sectarian wars erupted among Christians and Jews. In the New Testament Jesus himself is considered a heretic, blasphemer, and impostor by his fellow Jews, he is NOT God nor the Messiah, is rejected by the Jews, and the Romans receive their sanction and encouragement to crucify him.
Furthermore, as Objectivist philosopher Leonard Peikoff correctly states,
“All rights rest on the ethics of egoism. Rights are an individual’s SELFISH possessions—his title to HIS life, HIS liberty, HIS property, the pursuit of HIS own happiness. Only a being who is an end in himself can claim a moral sanction to independent action. If man existed to serve an entity beyond himself, whether God or society, then he would not have rights, but only the duties of a servant.”
According to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, God gave man freedom but only the freedom to choose to be his servant. If a man rejects God, if he refuses to be the servant of God, God will punish him by sending him to eternal Hell. That’s not freedom at all, not in any rational sense.
Let’s let the atheists provide us with our rights. That should work out just fine.
As you age into nothing, your desperation continues to grow and grow. As if you see yourself running out of time.
I’ll put my faith in the Founders. They have stood the test of time, whereas your crackpot philosophy has already withered to nothing.
Must be tough being our perennial failure.
> You must PROVE that rights are necessary and REAL
> So how are you going to PROVE that rights come from your God?
Can you prove that a ruling person has the right to dictate to another person what that person can say? How that person can worship? etc?
What give the ruling person a natural right to decide such things?
Also, the bill of rights does not say rights are given by god. The bill rights says endowed by his creator. His creator could be nature.
“…Endowed by their creator…,” isn’t in the Constitution or the amendments (the bill of rights), it’s in the Declaration of Independence. Your knowledge of our founding documents is so deficient, it’s no wonder your understanding of them is. Luckily, our founding fathers explained what they meant, if you bother to read them.
I’d actually have some respect for you if you knew anything about Christian theology, but you don’t. At least Nietzsche was well versed in the faith. You just parrot a dead woman.
God gave us free will. This means he gave us choices: To be Christ’s servant (follower) or not to be Christ’s servant (follower). True freedom is found in the decision to accept God’s gift of grace by following Jesus, the Annointed One, aka, the Christ.
I’d tell you more but it’s late, in the temporal as well as the figurative sense.
I have always believed it is significant that the Preamble to the U.S Constitution says government created in that document is intended to create a “more perfect Union,” and not a “perfect” Union.
Then the Founding Fathers then wrote a Constitution that created a government with limited powers, separation of Powers, and checks and balances that would make the creation of a “perfect” society impossible. That was intentional.
Our Constitutional system requires compromise. Compromise inevitably creates frustration and disappointment by some or all of the people who have to compromise. Where there is compromise, frustration and disappointment that can never be perfection.
But the Founding Fathers realized that compromise, frustration and disappointment are better than the terror that inevitably follows when one person or group has to much power and is unconstrained in their efforts to create the “perfect” government or society.
This is the great wisdom and strength of our Constitution and our Country.
The great economist Thomas Sowell, who happens to be black, said what I think is the wisest thing anyone has ever said. Mr. Sowell said:
“The important question is not what is good. The important question is who decides what is good.”
The Founding Fathers realized that no one person or group should ever have the power to decide what is good or “perfect” for the rest of us.
If that prevents us from ever achieving a “perfect” Union, so be it.
We have all seen the terror and genocide that inevitably follows from the alternative whenever is is attempted.
“There can be no compromise on basic principles. There can be no compromise on moral issues. There can be no compromise on matters of knowledge, of truth, of rational conviction….
In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit….
It is only in regard to concretes or particulars, implementing a mutually accepted basic principle, that one may compromise. For instance, one may bargain with a buyer over the price one wants to receive for one’s product, and agree on a sum somewhere between one’s demand and his offer. The mutually accepted basic principle, in such case, is the principle of trade, namely: that the buyer must pay the seller for his product. But if one wanted to be paid and the alleged buyer wanted to obtain one’s product for nothing, no compromise, agreement or discussion would be possible, only the total surrender of one or the other.
There can be no compromise between a property owner and a burglar; offering the burglar a single teaspoon of one’s silverware would not be a compromise, but a total surrender—the recognition of his right to one’s property.” – Ayn Rand
Thus sayeth your wannabe goddess. Thank God she has zero influence on anyone except for the nut cases that haven’t outgrown her kindergarten philosophy.
Somehow, I don’t feel oppressed, except for the leftists trying to oppress me. But I know you feel oppressed by a two thousand year old religion.
There wouldn’t be moral issues if there’s no eternal lawgiver to declare and establish laws. That would be God. See the Big 10. Everyone would just do whatever is right in their own eyes – which of course, is pretty much America today.
“The source of man’s rights is not divine law or congressional law, but the law of identity. A is A—and Man is Man. Rights are conditions of existence required by man’s nature for his proper survival. If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to keep the product of his work. If life on earth is his purpose, he has a right to live as a rational being: nature forbids him the irrational. Any group, any gang, any nation that attempts to negate man’s rights, is wrong, which means: is evil, which means: is anti-life….
Since knowledge, thinking, and rational action are properties of the individual, since the choice to exercise his rational faculty or not depends on the individual, man’s survival requires that those who think be free of the interference of those who don’t. Since men are neither omniscient nor infallible, they must be free to agree or disagree, to cooperate or to pursue their own independent course, each according to his own rational judgment. Freedom is the fundamental requirement of man’s mind.” – Ayn Rand
There are the inalienable rights as stated in the Declaration of Independence, and the “special” rights that the Left demands. The formula goes this way: Define and create a category of “special” victims. Demand a “special” set of rights that award them “special” privileges (that usually require restricting the rights of others). Now, isn’t that special?
Picking winners and losers is what our govt does best. Could be the reason there is such a quest for power. I don’t think that was the Founders intent but the “honorable” representatives that followed them have made it their mission even before the ink was dry.
We were taught one person’s right’s end where another person’s rights begin, and other than the right to a trial by a jury of one’s peers, the exercise of a right never requires another to give up their rights or property. If anyone else has to give up any of their rights or property to exercise it, it’s a privilege, not a right.
Most of the people bleating endlessly about privilege and their rights these days have no clue what they are, or how to differentiate between them.
Rights are not things automatically handed out upon birth. In this world, the only rights anyone has are those they’re willing to fight for and die if necessary to keep them. A quick assessment of all the countries around the world proves that point quite convincingly.
America is a free country because this country’s founders fought and died for those rights and freedoms. The only way we can or will lose them is if we’re unwilling to do the same. And rendering Americans unwilling has been a part of the left’s (re: Marxists) insidious agenda for more than 80+ years.
In my opinion, the only reason the subject of rights comes up at all is because there’s a diminishing number people in this country who are willing to stand up and fight and defend the rights and freedoms expressed in the US Constitution that our founders valiantly fought and died for.
Weak and timid people tend to be fearful and thus, afraid and unwilling to fight back when bullied. It’s happening right now all across American and most Americans are too afraid to acknowledge it. Moreover, Americans are being inculcated 24/7 with destructively ideology and moral rot & depravity that can only lead to one conclusion–the self destruction of America.
Proof? The LGBTIA+++ push? The deliberate dumbing down of education? The moral rot and depravity thrown in our faces 24/7/365 by the entertainment industry? The acceptance of “open” borders? Sending billions of tax payers dollars to foreign countries that don’t give a sh*t about America? I could go on and on but my point is made..
And we think we can stop it all by VOTING? Are you effing serious? Josef Stalin put it succinctly when he once said that “those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything.” (The 2020 presidential was elegant of that concept!)
Fellow Americans, we’re almost at the point where lofty rhetoric has reached the end of it’s utility.
Thomas Jefferson once wrote that “the tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” That time is once again upon us once again.
The alternative is totalitarianism under the auspices of globalism which is what the Uniparty has in mind for the future of our country–America.