Luke Ford

Michael Anton writes:

There is less dividing Paul Gottfried and me than I would have expected, which is good. For when the orc hordes—at Sauron’s urging—come for both of us, they aren’t going to discern, much less care about, any academic differences over this or that statement from the American founding era. They are going to see us identically as enemies to be exterminated.

I also welcome this chance to reiterate some points that bear repeating. To those bored with the repetition, I can only say that what I learned in politics apparently applies to intellectual debates as well: if you want your message to break through, you can’t repeat it often enough. This exchange also gives me the opportunity to take a few more whacks at Cracker Jack Claremontism, which can’t be beaten often enough.

The Claremont-Hillsdale School does indeed hold that all human beings “have inalienable rights to life and liberty.” Gottfried continues from here that this “did not mean that for the founders ‘all men’ were equally entitled to citizenship or that all human beings were equally fit to exercise that right.” And he’s absolutely right. Only Cracker Jack Claremontism holds to that silly view. Anyone who’s actually studied the founders (and if we’ve done nothing else, we’ve certainly done that) knows that it’s false.

A Separate and Equal Station
Among the Powers of the Earth

Let’s take these two issues separately. The first is membership in the political community. We may say that, for the American founders, their government’s exclusivity as a political community internationally mirrors the principle of freedom of association at the domestic level. Just government originates in the social compact—that is, a compact in which men freely choose to form a government for their mutual protection and benefit. At the founding of such a government, agreement on membership must be unanimous, and in both directions. That is, no one who doesn’t want to be in the compact can be forced to join, but also no one whom others don’t want to take in can be allowed to join either. The social compact is invitation only.

It remains so in perpetuity for newcomers. Children born to members of the existing compact are automatically made members but may, if they later choose, renounce that membership via emigration. No one from outside the compact, however, may join it without the consent of its existing members. As Gouverneur Morris, the man who actually wrote the U.S. Constitution, put it: “every society, from a great nation down to a club, has the right of declaring the conditions on which new members shall be admitted.”

In other words, in recognizing the universal ground of individual rights, and in choosing to rest the legitimacy of their new government thereon, the founders were not saying or implying that Americans had any obligation to extend the enjoyment of such rights to the rest of mankind. Much less were they making any attempt to do so. They were simply explaining the ground of their revolution and the basis for their new government.

The Declaration of Independence is quite clear on this point. In splitting off from Britain, the American people “assume[d] among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them.” “Separate” means just that. We’re a nation. You can’t join our nation unless we, collectively, invite you. You may have, by nature, the same rights as we have, but our government secures only our own rights, not yours.

COMMENTS:

* This piece is very inside-baseball, addressing political-philosophical conflicts between traditional conservatives (which Gottfried (one of their prime representatives) and Anton both refer to as paleocons), and Straussians (a term Anton interestingly avoids), who historically have often associated with/been lumped in with neocons, though they’re not identical with other neocons and have in fact been getting better of late.

Straussians heavily emphasize the Lockean-liberal-inspired opening language of the D of I, especially as interpreted/magnified by Lincoln. This is the orientation of the 1776 Commission. Traditional conservatives are leery of this, seeing such language as too ideological and actually helping to drive modern liberalism. They don’t see a definitive American “Founding” occurring at a particular point in time, but a British tradition that was shaped by American experience and eventually resulted in the Constitution adopted in 1789.

The most pertinent underlying question is whether emphasizing the D of I helps or hurts conservative efforts.

Paul Gottfried writes May 8, 2021:

Michael Anton raises several good points in his brief against Brion McClanahan’s assault on the 1776 Commission and that commission’s yoking of universal equality with the American founding. Anton is perfectly correct that state declarations of the rights of citizens drafted during or after the American Revolution incorporate the natural right phraseology of the Declaration of Independence. Thus, the attempt by members of the Old Right, including Willmoore Kendall (whom I usually follow in these matters), to downplay natural rights language in the American Founding is open to question.

Anton is also right that at least several of America’s founders opposed slavery in principle, even if such a theoretical opponent as Thomas Jefferson only freed a small number of his slaves. It is of course also true that Jefferson in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) wished to send the emancipated slaves out of his state because of what he thought were intractable differences between the races. Like the signers of the Declaration who went along with what the Claremont Institute understands as the authoritative passage in that document (and not all members of the Continental Congress approved of that wording), we are supposed to assume that all human beings have inalienable rights to life and liberty.

But that did not mean that for the founders “all men” were equally entitled to citizenship or that all human beings were equally fit to exercise that right. Certainly, Jefferson, even as a critic of slavery, did not believe that blacks were able to do so in the foreseeable future; and I doubt that many members of the Continental Congress were ready to extend the vote to women. The reason is not that the founders were not as enlightened as Michael Anton and the 1776 Commission. They simply understood the right to life and liberty as stopping with that right and not requiring the full panoply of civil and other rights that our modern political and educational leaders attach to the notion of equality.

In Novus Ordo Seclorum, Forrest McDonald offers a detailed analysis of what educated 18th-century Americans understood by equality. Looking at five general usages of that term, several of which were derived from the politics and epistemology of John Locke, McDonald concludes that equality for most of the founders “did not necessarily imply a conflict with the institution of slavery.” According to McDonald, few people of that generation went as far as Alexander Hamilton, who assumed the “blacks would prove to be intellectually and socially equal to whites,” given the proper conditions and a long enough apprenticeship. Although Jefferson “trembled” with fear of divine retribution when he contemplated the evil of slavery in 1776, “few of his countrymen trembled with him.”

What may be argued, however, is that certain convictions held by the founders, e.g., belief in a shared moral sense and the equal dignity of all human beings before a Divine master, would have led them over time into a stronger anti-slavery stance. But this is different from ascribing to these figures an anguished preoccupation with the injustice of slavery. Please note that Lincoln before the Civil War opposed slavery but did not wish to grant full rights of citizenship to freed blacks. Like other members of the American Colonization Society, Lincoln was hoping that the emancipated blacks could be resettled somewhere other than in the United States. The restricted concept of equality that most early American leaders accepted was not as expansive as the one that Harry Jaffa or Michal Anton would like us to accept. It was far more limited in scope.

COMMENTS SECTION:

* The imaging that there was a founding based on two sentences in a document (the Declaration), a fall from grace, and a redemption under Lincoln is a religion.

The Declaration was not intended to be a founding document. It was a plea for help from other nations. Jefferson tells us what the Declaration was in his 1825 letter to Henry Lee. The Declaration is not what Jaffa and his students imagine it to be.

There was no founding. America grew organically from the mainly English settlements.

* The problem with ‘all men are created equal’ is how to cash out that value without destroying every community standard or even normalcy itself.

‘All men are created equal’ means in practice that any individual can imagine an ‘inequality’ and demand it’s correction.

This is why ‘conservatives’ cannot say ‘No’ to any aspect of the equalitarian Left and make it stick.

Now conservatives are pro-transsexualism because ‘equality’ now includes the equal right o decide one’s sex and to demand the necessary medical interventions to remove the ‘chains’ of ‘natural sex’.

* All men are created equal means we share a common humanity, shared general characteristics that impose upon all of us – within the limits of our particular endowments – similar obligations to think and support ourselves. From this equality comes an equality of the individual rights we require to sustain our lives within a functioning society. There is absolutely nothing in this concept that requires treating any inequality as an injustice requiring correction and thus ample opportunity to say no to the left, at least by those who actually understand the principles properly.

* The natural rights of every individual, following Locke, exists in a state of nature prior to government and the so-called civil rights that government brings to those within its jurisdiction. Of these natural rights, property rights, is the right which distinguishes us from the political left.

The “civil rights” legislation of the 1960s violated property rights just as Jim Crow did. Some opponents of Jim Crow, as you remember, opposed the new Civil Rights laws precisely on those grounds.

When I read an essay by a conservative that doesn’t revolve around the concept of property rights, I wonder what good are conservative intellectuals and how are they going to help us revive our founding principles.