Labels of liberal/Left and Conservative/Right no longer mean what they used to. The ideals of the traditional Left and Right are now inverted. It is not the conservatives of the Right that are the reactionaries, but the so-called “Progressive” Liberals. It is the Left that does not want to go forward, but rather regress to the past. They want to revert to a country divided against itself by labels of race, gender, and sexual orientation. The world they want to “create” is a degenerating return to a world of feudalism. This liberal utopia is marked by control and planning driven by the State, administered by an elite and technocratic bureaucracy, one that results in the majority of subjects living in a form of twenty-first century serfdom with government handouts as the lever of control. The elite of the Left want to reimpose a class structure in which they will be in charge.
Historically, it was the conservative Right that was the supporter of strong centralized government, of monarchy, and of hereditary aristocracy. Today, it is the Left that advocates for a large and all-controlling central government and bureaucracy. It is the Left, not the Right, that embodies the elite ruling class of technocracy, oligarchy, and hereditary rule. Classical liberalism supported the inalienable rights of the individual, including the right to be left alone without interference from government. Today, it is the conservatives of the American Right that advocate for that tradition as essential to the American Dream.
The early American rise of Democratic Party under Andrew Jackson was founded in reaction against the Hamiltonian Federalists who sought for a strong central government. In these early days, Democrats positioned themselves as the party of the people. This idealism was not to last. The election of Abraham Lincoln and the question of slavery would push the Democratic Party to support the South and the slaveholding interests.
The Democratic Party from the Civil War era became, and remained for most of its history, the party of the white Southern establishment supporting slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation. Only in the aftermath of the civil rights era, under Democratic President Johnson, did the Democrats manage to convince black Americans that they were on their side. Yet their programs of entitlement and victimization only served to enslave black Americans once again.
Historically, it was classical liberalism that advocated for freedom of individual thought (e.g., the liberty to reject Church doctrine in favor of science or reason, the freedom to be an atheist, a naturalist, or whatever the case may be), the freedom of expression (speech, protest, petition of grievances), and freedom of the press (what we’d call the media). Conservatives, Tories, and royalists were the ones pushing to ensure that the media was under the control of the sovereign or central government power, and that religious thought, doctrine and expression didn’t deviate from the State Church.
Today, it is the Left that is the primary advocate and enforcer of the censorship of divergent political views and information that doesn’t agree with their policy and doctrines. It is the Left that is seeking to control and limit freedoms speech and thought on our university campuses and in our schools. It is the Left that believes that the masses are not capable of making major decisions, and thus cannot be entrusted with information deemed too dangerous in common hands. It is the Left who believes that minorities cannot be entrusted with choices about their own livelihoods, and that the State must protect them from themselves.
It isn’t just communism that is the Left’s expression of socialist and progressive ideals. Twentieth century fascism in Germany and Italy were populist movements of the Left, not of the Right. Hitler’s National Socialist (Nazi) Party was a socialist movement fueled in reaction to the conservative forces within Weimar Germany that wanted to restore the German aristocracy. Similarly, Italian fascism was a socialist movement initially born of the labor movements of the Left, which stood in opposition against both liberalism and the monarchy, although it opposed international communism and class strife in favor of nationalism and imperial expansion.
The core tenets of republicanism (equality, liberty, and fraternité in the French variation) were revolutionary liberal ideals. Social equality had existed nowhere outside of the innovation of republicanism, and liberty was nearly as scarce. No conservative of the eighteenth or nineteenth century believed that the masses were qualified to make important decision regarding the welfare of the nation or to rule over themselves. Not even the American Founders believed this in formative early days of the United States. They sought to create a form of representative government that would protect the nation from the excesses of pure democratic rule. The idea of We the People, (that is to say, government of, by and for the people) was a radical ideal of liberal republicans that has been repeatedly challenged in American democracy. Today, it is under direct attack, and at grave risk of being lost.
Today the root of the problem is the progressive Left’s embrace of Statism, alongside the alliance between the political parties, the elite class, corporate interests, and a compliant media. Unless this unholy alliance is broken, the ideal of the consent of the governed will remain an empty phrase.
Who are we? Where are we going? And why are we so divided? Why America Matters addresses these questions and argues that the place Americans call home is worth fighting for. The widely held belief of past generations—that America is special, with an extraordinary role to play in the world—remains true, but has been undermined by external adversaries, internal contradictions, and weakness of vision.
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