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Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future was published in June, 2023, by Sentinel, a conservative imprint of the Penguin Group. The book is 269 pages, inclusive of end notes and index. Author Patrick J. Deneen received his BA and PhD from Rutgers. He has taught at Princeton and Georgetown. He has been at Notre Dame since 2012; his faculty bio reports that “his teaching and writing interests focus on the history of political thought … liberalism, conservatism, and constitutionalism.”
Deneen’s 2018 book, Why Liberalism Failed, made a big splash. It was praised by, among others, President Barack Obama, who wrote that the book, “offers cogent insights into the loss of meaning and community that many in the West feel, issues that liberal democracies ignore at their own peril.” Reviewer Damon Linker called it “the most electrifying book of cultural criticism published in some time.” On the other hand, Christian Alejandro Gonzalez, in the National Review, wrote, “Patrick Deneen’s critique of liberalism exhibits an undue nostalgia for the past and ingratitude for the virtues of the present.” Perhaps given the attention that was paid to Why Liberalism Failed, Regime Change has also garnered a great deal of attention. That attention has spanned from the very positive to the very negative. The book has been covered in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, as well as by various think tanks and podcasts.
Foundational to Deneen’s project is a division of humanity into two groups. Deneen uses various words to label these two groups. A listing of Deneen’s labels will give the reader a sense of Deneen’s rhetoric, worldview, and agenda. Deneen’s two classes of persons are the few and the many. These same two classes he also labels oligarchy / demos; nobility / plebes; elite / populace; laptop class / working class; anywhere people / somewhere people; super zip code people / flyover country people; aristoi / popolo; strong / weak; grandi / popolo; aristocrats / peasants; rich / poor; white collar / blue collar; coasts / flyover; aristoi / demos; educated / uneducated; urban / rural; financiers / farmers; cosmopolitans / rooted; those who desire and benefit from the new, change, progress, and dynamism / those who benefit from stability and tradition; the bourgeoisie / the proletariat.
These two classes, which we can summarize as the few and the many, have their own distinct motivations, virtues, flaws, and abilities. The few are cultivated and have refined tastes. They are patrons of the arts. But they are also prone to being tyrannical, oppressive, and hypocritical. “Today’s elite is altogether new in the history of humanity,” Deneen insists, and yet he also insists that political theories from 2,400 years ago best serve to elucidate this elite. “Classical theory is superior to modern practice.”
The many are “grounded in the realities of the world … in tune with the cycle of life and rhythms of the seasons, tides, sun, and stars.” They also exhibit “frugality, inventiveness, craft, common sense, gratitude for small blessings, and stoic cheerfulness.” “They seek stability, predictability, and order.” The many possess “‘common sense'” – the scare quotes are Deneen’s. They draw on “a vast reservoir of traditional knowledge, the collective memory of ordinary people from the lessons drawn from daily life … a traditional society appears ignorant in the eyes of ‘experts’ but in fact is constituted by a deep well of experience and common sense wisdom.”
Deneen diagnoses America as a country in decline. Signs of decline include pornography, abortion, family breakdown, deaths of despair, drug addiction, decreasing life expectancy, increasing transgenderism, urban blight, lower birthrates, addiction to electronic stimuli, a large gap between the rich and the poor, Woke college campuses, the economic crisis of 2008, the Iraq war, trigger warnings, globalism in the form of a “universalized commercial ethos,” multiculturalism, diversity, and identity politics.
Deneen attributes America’s decline to a failure of liberalism. Liberalism required and valued continuous progress and creative destruction. It extended a false promise that everyone could be a member of the few. Liberalism and liberals have vitiated the institutions that support human life, namely, family, neighborhood, church, and religion. Liberalism’s many bad ideas include unquestioned acceptance of meritocracy, the concept of the individual as sovereign over himself, and the harm principle, that is, the concept of harm to others determining what is just or unjust. The harm principle was described by eighteenth-century liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill. Deneen writes that the harm principle has become “an aggressive tool of domination and even tyrannical power … the ultimate means of empowering the ‘experimental’ over those who believed there ought to be limits to the libertarian dismantling of all norms.” Tradition, custom, and Christianity, rather than the harm principle, should determine what is right and what is wrong.
Deneen blames, and defines, both the right and the left as liberals. Those on the right are economic liberals who are responsible for America’s manufacturing decline. Those on the left are social liberals responsible for lax sexual mores. “The two sides of liberalism … are revealed to be identical.” These liberals are in cahoots with each other to keep the commoners down. They work together to prevent the creation of a genuine people’s party. Neither kind of liberal can elevate America.
The answer is a conservatism that is “an inheritance of a premodern tradition.” The solution is what Deneen calls a “mixed constitution” representing the few and the many, the elite and the masses. Deneen also labels his program a “new right” and “common good conservatism.” For Deneen’s mixed constitution to succeed, the problem of the current elite must be solved. “The answer is not elimination of the elite (as Marx once envisioned) but its replacement with a better set of elites.”
To find role models for this better elite, Deneen turns to the past. In the past, Deneen writes, “elites were defined by long-standing relationships to geographic locations and the lower or working classes.” Deneen approvingly quotes Alexis De Tocqueville, “In aristocratic peoples, families remain in the same state for centuries … a man almost always knows his ancestors and respects them, he believes he already perceives his great grandsons and he loves them. He willingly does his duty by both.” The “territorial aristocracy” “was obliged by law or believed itself to be obliged by mores to come to the aid of its servants and to relieve their miseries.” Deneen quotes Edmund Burke who “lamented the replacement of a nation of ‘men of honor and cavaliers’ with ‘economists and calculators.'” He summarizes Benjamin Disraeli’s novel Sybil as depicting “The Church” as a “democratic and democratizing institution, open and caring equally for all members, regardless of rank … the aristocracy motivated out of ‘noblesse oblige'” was moved “to afford ‘access to the humanizing arts of civilization.'”
Thanks to liberalism, today’s elite is no longer loyal to a place or a population. Deneen writes that today’s elite makes no real effort to communicate with or understand “the lower and working classes.” His better set of elites will be responsible for giving “voice to the nature of the good itself … they will be entrusted to be stewards and caretakers of the common good.” They “can and should be a defender of the cultural traditions that are mostly a development of bottom-up practices.” This new elite will elevate the many. In this mixed constitution, the two kinds of human, the few and the many, will suppress each others’ flaws, and enhance each others’ virtues. Both groups will become their best selves. People will feel gratitude toward the past and a sense of obligation toward the future. This is a mixed constitution.
“This ‘new’ conservatism is in fact quite old, it is a new manifestation of ‘original’ conservatism, the conservatism that arose especially as a response first to Enlightenment liberalism, to the French Revolution, and to Marxism.” As a demonstration of his dedication to the past, Deneen draws support from several writers from history. His team members include Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, Polybius, Thomas Aquinas, Niccolo Machiavelli, Alexis de Tocqueville, Edmund Burke, Benjamin Disraeli, G.K. Chesterton, and, from the twentieth century, Charles Murray, James Burnham, Christopher Lasch, Wendell Berry, Michael Lind, JD Vance, and Tucker Carlson. In opposition to this pantheon, Deneen positions John Stuart Mill, John Locke, Francis Bacon, John Dewey, Ayn Rand, John F. Kennedy, Jonah Goldberg, George Will, Karl Marx, “some of the most prominent of America’s Founding Fathers,” Kevin D. Williamson, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, and James Stimson.
In the America Deneen would like to see, Christian values will be supported by the state. The state will reward people for getting married, staying married, and producing multiple offspring. The state will make it harder to get a divorce. Deneen repeatedly uses the word “Christian.” In this book, he does not use the term “Judeo-Christian.” He does not address how America will manage non-Christian citizens in a country that privileges Christian identity. Deneen is a Catholic. He does not address how his idea of a Christian America will manage differences between Catholic and non-Catholic Christians. It was a better time when “Hollywood produced and lionized such films as The Song of Bernadette, Boys Town, and It’s a Wonderful Life” and when “religious figures like Fulton Sheen, Billy Graham, and Reinhold Niebuhr were widely admired.”
Porn will be “banned.” “Renewed efforts to enforce a moral media should be pursued.” “Legislation that promotes public morality … should be considered.” Abortion may be illegal. National service will be a requirement. Same-sex marriage will either disappear or simply not be supported by the government. Common good conservatism “opposes liberalism’s main commitment of liberty understood above all as individual choice … it begins with the primacy of the family.” “A foremost commitment” is a “Cabinet-level position” “a family czar” that will “support and shore up marriage and family.” There will be “financial incentives for families producing three or more children” and “relief from all future income taxes for working mothers of four or more children.” Sexualization of modern culture will decrease. Gender roles will be reinforced. National identity will be supported and cosmopolitanism will be resisted. Cultural and economic globalization will diminish. There will be “renewal of the Christian roots of our civilization.” “Only a Christian culture can recharge the West’s potential.”
America’s manufacturing and agriculture will be protected through tariffs. “Domestic manufacturing in certain areas should simply be mandated.” Workers will be protected by unions. There will be a “redistribution of social capital;” this will “break up the monopoly of social power.” Funding will be increased for public education.
At least one worker per family will receive a wage adequate to support a family. There will be a robust social safety net. Borders, both political and cultural, will be secure. Those who hire illegal immigrants will be punished. Cultural products that reflect the national culture will be supported by the government. Monopolies will be broken up. Corporations will not be able to use their economic might to punish states, as happened when North Carolina tried to protect woman and girls from men invading their bathrooms, and when Indiana protected the rights of businesses to decline commissions that violated their beliefs.
Deneen closes with five goals:
1.) Overcoming “Meritocracy”
Americans must overcome thinking of themselves as “self-making, striving individuals.” They must, rather, think of themselves as members of a collective, and as responsible to both the past and the future.
2.) Combating Racism
Racism is “pervasive” in America. “Preferential admissions, hiring, and other forms of affirmative action” are necessary.
3.) Moving Beyond Progress
We must value stability and balance.
4.) Situating the Nation
People will transfer their loyalties to the nation.
5.) Integrating Religion
America will become a land of piety, truth, equitable prosperity and just government.
How will these changes come about? There will be a “raw assertion of political power by a new generation of political actors inspired by an ethos of common-good conservatism.” “Control and effective application of political power will have to be directed especially at changing or at least circumventing current cultural as well as economic institutions from which progressive parties exercise their considerable power.” Means will include “people in a mob shouting abuse at the senate” and “mobs running through the streets, shops boarded up … the demands of a free people are rarely harmful to the cause of liberty” as described in quotes from Machiavelli.
Deneen supports “Machiavellian means to achieve Aristotelian ends.” “A main impetus should be … putting elites into greater contact with, and developing sympathies for, the values and commitments of ‘the many.'” PhDs should be directed to interact with the working class. University students should be required to take “trade” courses. College students should be required to wire a lamp. Graduates of elite schools will be encouraged to take on “lower-paid vocations” of a public service nature. “Economic institutions”‘ power should be “curtailed” or “dismantled” through “popular tumult” in the name of the common good.” “People should dispel any nostalgic views about free enterprise.”
Education will play a major role in remaking society. “A society formed around principles of justice, knowable through philosophic exploration of truth, can provide a genuine alternative to the tyrannical impulse … education will place heavy focus on the study of philosophy and theology.”
“Common good conservatism … rejects … the shrinking of government.” The House of Representatives could be increased to 6,000 members. Washington DC should be broken up, with agencies distributed throughout the US. Caucuses will replace primary elections. Suburbanites and commuters will be forced to bear “the actual costs associated” with “a transportation system that favors placelessness.”
I’ve done my best here to present Deneen’s views, as accurately as I am able. I say “as accurately as I am able,” because, repeatedly, while reading this book, my reaction was one of the following; “What is this man actually saying?” “Is he really saying what he is saying?” “Does he know what he is saying?” and “Does he know what he is not saying?”
Sometimes the most honest review is just four words. I hated this book. I looked forward to reading it. I am Catholic. I am one of those prototypical “many” Deneen adopts as his cause. I am from a poor, blue collar, immigrant family of coal miners and house cleaners. I wish I could eradicate porn and abortion, and I loved The Song of Bernadette and I wish we still had a culture that granted Academy Awards to such films. I also wish I could fly.
Before I address his substance, let’s talk about Deneen’s style. Regime Change is structured like a rambling rant. It is repetitive, and not just in redundancies an editor should have axed, like “support and shore up.” He makes the same observations over and over again. The book does not state a thesis, support that thesis, and then deliver a conclusion. On its final pages, he brings up racism and environmental degradation, topics he had not previously addressed. He tosses out one thesis statement after another: right and left elites conspire to suppress the masses; the government should subsidize childbirth; America should privilege Christianity; PhDs should wire lamps. He doesn’t support any of these theses with facts. He just issues diktats that one must accept because Christianity or because Polybius or because porn. Not a single idea in the book is fully developed. A self-indulgent rant is no way to argue against Woke and for the value of objective facts.
Deneen’s writing is excessively abstract rather than concrete. Abstract nouns are subjective. What constitutes love to me is not necessarily what constitutes love to you. What I think of as love changes from usage to usage. I use the same word, “love,” to talk about how I feel about peanut M&Ms, puppies, and Jesus. Concrete nouns are less elastic. The words “four-inch basalt rock” is less open to interpretation. Deneen repeatedly uses the phrase “the nature of” without supporting with concrete facts his declaration of the nature of an abstract concept. The most egregious example: in common good conservatism, the elite will exercise “their responsibility to give voice to the nature of the good itself.” Four abstract nouns in a row: “responsibility,” “voice,” “nature,” and “good.” Responsible writing uses concrete nouns to support abstract concepts. Deneen sidesteps that responsibility. An academic celebrity presumes to tell us what is good for us. He has followers. If his team ever gains power, I damn sure want to know how he defines the “good” for me.
He says he wants to eliminate porn. “Porn” is another abstract noun Deneen never defines with the concrete. Are we talking about snuff films? Great. They are and should be criminalized. Are we talking about Vargas girls, or even Tom of Finland? Where does porn stop and where does art, or historical significance, begin? Deneen never tells me why his elite should decide. And how will Deneen’s elite eliminate porn? House-to-house searches? Draconian measures have a way of turning ugly; see the Zimbardo prison experiment. How does Deneen’s Utopia sidestep mankind’s proven penchant for abuse in the name of eliminating evil?
In addition to over-use of abstract nouns, Deneen exhibits a couple of other writerly tics that struck this reader as ways to weasel out of taking responsibility for what he is saying. Deneen uses multiple scare quotes per page. Scare quotes inform the reader that what a word is meant to convey is different from the dictionary definition. “I” “was” “never” “sure” “what” “elusive” “meaning” “Deneen” “wanted” “me” “the” “reader” “to” “get” “from” “so” “many” “scare” “quoted” “terms.” Also, Deneen repeatedly uses the word “genuine.” His usage of this word reminded me of those who say that we can’t judge communism as a belief system because “genuine” communism has never been tried. These folks are wrong, of course; communism has been tried and it has failed catastrophically. Deneen is proposing Utopian ideas that defy human nature. Don’t worry, though. If one applies the “genuine” version of Deneen’s ideas, all will be well.
In a related tendency, Deneen is coy. He alludes to Jack Phillips, the Colorado baker who has been persecuted for his refusal to custom design a cake for a same-sex wedding, but Deneen doesn’t name him. Deneen refers to a “deeply flawed narcissist.” From the passage, the reader can infer that Deneen is talking about Trump, without naming Trump. Deneen condemns the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. He doesn’t name the parties. Coy, abstract writing is evasive writing. It’s way to signal what you want to say without actually taking on the risk of saying it. Another interpretation is that Deneen’s coyness is a form of “wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say no more” clubbiness. He and his followers understand; that’s enough. You outsiders don’t need to be let in on the full meaning of the sacred mysteries of Deneen.
Deneen offers a unitary explanation for all the bad things that Deneen doesn’t like. Liberalism is behind porn, environmental degradation, and deaths of despair. We should be wary of unitary explanations. They have a dark history; witness what happens when a powerful person says that all the things we don’t like are the fault of witches, or Jews, or immigrants.
Is “liberalism” really the best explanation for the decline of American manufacturing? What about history? World War II sparked American manufacturing. In the immediate post-war period, the American mainland was unscathed while Germany, the UK, China, and Japan were devastated. Slowly but surely these countries got back on their feet, or attained new manufacturing prowess, and presented America with competition it did not face in the immediate post-war era. Deneen supports unions. Unions drove textile manufacture out of Paterson, NJ. Does that make unions bad? No, unions wanted to protect workers from byssinosis and other work-related hazards. Life is too complicated to reduce to Deneen’s formula.
Liberalism is responsible for addiction to electronic stimuli? Why not blame Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, or Guglielmo Marconi? I was trekking in the Mount Everest area when some lodges began to electrify. Before electrification, trekkers and Nepalis alike huddled together around oil lanterns. We experienced deep communitas. Our interactions were warm, as if we were a temporary family. As the lodges electrified, there was no longer any need to huddle near a lantern. People scattered about the room, and communitas vanished. The Nepal I lived in had many features of a pre-modern, feudal setting. Manual labor wrested minimal calories out of harsh mountain landscapes. Travel was by foot. When foreign aid agencies gauged roads out of the mountainside, everything changed. Suddenly silence was broken by loud Hindi cinema music. Suddenly there was open prostitution. Suddenly paths were full of garbage. All these changes occurred in a theocracy ruled by a Hindu god king. The system didn’t change. Technology changed. Human behavior followed technology. A true new path for those of us who prefer a different kind of modern society will not sink under gratuitous references to ancient philosophers or blame everything one does not like about society on a single, omnipotent enemy. Rather, that new path will address how humans can successfully ride the technological horse without falling off and breaking our necks.
Deneen wants PhDs to abandon their study and get closer to the many. And yet he wants us to study theology and philosophy, the most esoteric of disciplines. Utopian regimes have an ugly history of targeting intellectuals and forcing them to perform manual labor. Think of the Khmer Rouge sending urbanites to rice paddies, or simply killing off anyone who even looked educated, like those who wear glasses. In America, not a few PhDs pay for their degrees with manual labor. I worked as a carpenter, landscaper, and domestic servant on my way to a PhD. Real PhDs do real work that contributes to everyone’s well being. Forcing scholars to abandon important research and fumble around with work they can’t do well doesn’t serve any positive end. My scholarly publications and teaching contribute to the world. When I was a carpenter, I almost killed my workmate, because I’m a lousy – and dangerous – carpenter.
There are two kinds of people in this world: people who divide the world into two kinds of people and people who don’t. Deneen never convinced me that there really are mutually exclusive populations called “the few” and “the many.” The characteristics he assigns to each population sound like descriptions of astrological signs. The many are ” in tune with the cycle of life and rhythms of the seasons, tides, sun, and stars”? Seriously? Yeah, and Scorpios are really sexy.
I thought of my own hometown: tiny, culturally remote, blue collar, largely poor. One of my classmates rose to become one of the few. This person is quoted in national news stories and has worked with world leaders. That trajectory would have been unlikely in Ancient Athens, where between a fourth and a third of the population was enslaved. Women had virtually no rights. Clearly Deneen’s major terms, “the few” and “the many” meant very different things in Ancient Athens than they mean today.
Deneen might take his own advice and get his PhD posterior out into the rice paddies. The solutions to our current dilemmas, he insists, is in the “premodern” era. Over forty years ago, I lived in tiny villages in two of the poorest countries on earth. In many ways, they were pre-modern. I saw children die of stomach aches, toothaches, and infections from scratching parasite bites. I almost died myself, oddly enough, of the same infection that killed Deneen’s nemesis, John Stuart Mill. If modern healthcare, or even just basic hygeine had been accessible, this infection would not have been an issue. No matter how hard we tried, we foreign aid workers could not convince the locals of the germ theory. Deneen needs to read Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough. The book is flawed, but it offers a compendium of folk beliefs from around the world. Pre-modern folk’s conceptions of sympathetic magic were simply wrong. They lead to really stupid ideas, millions of unnecessary deaths, and human suffering. Don’t romanticize the pre-modern world till you have lived there, and been affected by its deadly idiocy. And don’t trivialize the scientific method till you have watched a child die because someone took a dump upstream from the village water supply.
Similarly, bashing capitalism is a luxury of those living in a capitalist country. I’ve lived in countries where people captured and tortured members of the enemy tribe for no other reason than their identity. Capitalism encourages people to interact in a mutually beneficially fashion with members of the enemy tribe; it breaks down artificial identifications used to justify mass murder.
Deneen’s quote from Burke about feudal economies and their “cavaliers” calls to mind Ben Hecht’s opening titles for the movie Gone with the Wind. “There was a land of cavaliers and cotton fields … Here in this pretty world, gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of knights and their ladies fair … it is no more than a dream remembered, a civilization gone with the wind.” Sentimentality about past ages of cavaliers is a red flag, as photographs like this attest.
When I was a child, I heard my older relatives talk about life under the Romanovs and the Hapsburgs. Not a single one had anything good to say. Food? “We starved. Cabbage. Potatoes.” Homes? “Smoke. Cramped.” Authority? “They tortured you if you missed a day of work in the fields.” Education? “They burned our books. They destroyed our schools. They outlawed our language.”
Children in History provides a brief description of lives for Russian serfs. “From May through October serfs commonly worked barefoot … Some brutal landowners would put boys into iron collars … At night some serfs slept in special sheds, all together on straw. Frequently in these sheds stood heavy wooden fetters to ensure that they would not escape. When serf boys lay down to sleep, they put bare feet into these fetters.”
From Serfdom to Self-Government: Memoirs of a Polish Village Mayor 1842-1927 by Jan Slomka reports that, “People were treated worse than cattle are today. They were beaten both at work and at home for the merest trifle. Every farmer had first to do his dues at the manor house, whether with his team or on foot. Only then could he work his own land, sowing and reaping at night. No excuse as to pressing needs at home was of any use … No one dared go to the manor with any complaint … Running away would have done no good, for elsewhere it was no better – rather worse.”
I descend from these people. Any romanticized portrait of “noblesse oblige” and “cavaliers” will not wash.
One of the past thinkers Deneen recruits to his team is Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas stated that heretics “deserve … to be severed from the world by death.” Heresy is an abstract noun. One person’s heresy is another person’s orthodoxy. Who will decide, in our Catholic integralist Utopia, who is a heretic and who deserves capital punishment?
Deneen and his ideological fellows have inevitably run up against charges of anti-Semitism. I find the responses here and here to be unsatisfying. These responses play victim. “Oh, you bad guy liberals are picking on me the way you liberals always do.” Sorry, that response doesn’t begin to address how Jews, and every other non-Catholic, will be treated in a Catholic integralist Utopia.
The concept of the separation of church and state comes from Jesus Christ himself. Matthew 22:15-22 is a text of world historical importance. Other verses, like John 18:36 and Luke 12:13-14, reinforce it. The Catholic Church has had a changing relationship to the concept. A good summary of this changing relationship can be found here. Another article here discusses current Vatican teaching on the separation of church and state. In his December, 1990 encyclical Redemptoris Missio, Pope John Paul II wrote, “The Church addresses people with full respect for their freedom. Her mission does not restrict freedom but rather promotes it. The Church proposes; she imposes nothing. She respects individuals and cultures, and she honors the sanctuary of conscience.” American Catholics, according to a 2021 Pew poll, support separation of church and state. In short, Catholic integralism is not reflective of current church teaching, it is not reflective of Jesus’ teaching or the early church as described in the New Testament, nor is it a position favored by the majority of American Catholics. I can only hope that Deneen’s project remains a minority goal among Catholics and all others.
Danusha Goska is the author of God Through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery
Deneen wrote a rant that should not be taken seriously as a work of political and social thought
Patrick Deneen’s ideas in “Regime Change” are readying society for the
tyranny on whose brink all of mankind now totters. Even though no
mention of this modern tyranny is in his book. That tyranny is the
digital and total control over every human being on Earth – beginning
with digital ID and digital currency. The control of the riff raff, the “many”
by the elites, the “few”.
His attempt to lure people to his globalist-communist way of thinking by
putting a Christian spin on it is disgusting. He is trying to appeal to a
society worn down by leftist tactics of LGBTQ-Trans perversions, fighting
for parental rights, a crumbling economy, destroyed cities from drugs
and homelessness, out of control crime and so much more.
And what does being American mean – which is ignored in his book? It
means individual freedom – from tyranny – and for the God-given right
to it. I hope Deneen’s book flops and I’ll quote from a publication which
was a smash best seller in its day: “The cause of America is in a great
measure the cause of all mankind” – from Common Sense by Thomas
Paine.
My dear Danusha, Christianity in its pure, consistent, and serious form leads to the brutality of theocracy and the renunciation of the personal pursuit of happiness on earth. It leads to “common good conservatism” which is Mr. Deneen’s euphemism for a Christian theocracy.
Mr. Deneen is a serious and consistent Christian and you are not. My beautiful Danusha you are a philosophically inconsistent Cafeteria Christian and you fail to realize it. Cafeteria Christians like you are dangerous because you open the door for the serious, consistent, Christians like Mr. Deneen.
Just yesterday I ran across an article by a writer named Adam Frank on Robert Wright’s book on Buddhism and I archived a striking observation from that article that applies to all religions that have become more rational and modern due to the current historical ascendancy of reason over mysticism and faith. An ascendancy that has been eroding since 1781 when Immanuel Kant published his attack on reason. You can substitute Christianity or Judaism in place of Buddhism,
“Religions always have a way of outgrowing their own scriptural and ritual basis, while simultaneously holding on to them. As author Karen Armstrong has shown, practitioners in any age are always selecting out those parts of their religions that are meaningful to them while ignoring the parts that seem dated. She called the process “creative misreading”.
Sharf has no problem with the creative misreading that allows Buddhist Modernism to share space with scientific worldviews. “My concern,” he told Tricycle, “is not with the selectivity of those who read Buddhism as a rationalist and scientific religion — it is perfectly understandable given the world in which we live. It is really not a question of misreading. It is a question of what gets lost in the process.” – Adam Frank
My concern, as an Objectivist, is that once reason is no longer in the ascendancy in the West. when the West abandons reason, Christianity necessarily will go back to its pure and consistent form. The form Mr. Deneen is not so coyly advocating.
Has it occurred to you that, with all of your unhinged anti-Christian bigotry, it is your kind that is contributing to the supposed shrinking of actual reason in the West. It is actually cranks like you that are causing the withering of Objectivism in the West.
The only advantage to having Christianity go back to it’s pure and consistent form is that atheist cranks like you will be on the chopping block.
And heretic Lutherans like you will be burned at the stake by the true church of Christ, the Catholic Church.
Martin Luther despised the deplorable peasants even more than Hillary does.
“[Luther] made things worse with his even more incendiary tract: “Against the Murderous and Thieving Hordes of Peasants”, published in May 1525. Baptism made men free, Luther said, but in soul not body – so peasants could not violently revolt in God’s name. The rulers were justified according to the teaching of St Paul in Romans 13, ‘bearing the sword’ to punish, as Luther put it, ‘faithless, perjured, disobedient, rebellious murderers, robbers, and blasphemers’. The peasants needed to submit to authorities and ‘give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar’, as Christ put it.
Luther then got violent, writing: ‘Therefore, let everyone who can, smite, slay, and stab, secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful, or devilish than a rebel. It is just as when one must kill a mad dog; if you do not strike him, he will strike you, and a whole land with you’.” – Joseph Hartropp
Yes, Danusha, “Give unto Caesar” to Luther meant that your life here on earth belonged to Caesar, your immortal soul belonged to God after you were dead. Either way a man was never free in the modern, secular, meaning of complete, SECULAR freedom, to pursue his personal happiness.
“[Luther] formally enlists God on the side of the state. Unconditional obedience to the government’s edicts, he holds, is a Christian virtue. “In like manner we must endure the authority of the prince. If he misuse or abuse his authority, we are not to entertain a grudge, seek revenge or punishment. Obedience is to be rendered for God’s sake, for the ruler is God’s representative. However they may tax or exact, we must obey and endure patiently.” – Leonard Peikoff, “The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom In America”
It’s so hard to take you remotely seriously.
Your obsession with Lutherans has more to do with me than your phony obsession with Lutherans.
Unlike you I don’t worry about some Christian Theocracy starting up tomorrow when the “true and serious” Christians take back the Catholic church. I don’t worry about being “burned at the stake”. I don’t worry about any of the crap you are obsessed with.
But I’m not surprised that you are trying to use scare tactics, like the good little leftist. You are that lame.
She still won’t date you, in spite of that sarcastic “My dear Danusha” approach.
Me and Danusha don’t need to date, she’s my Platonic love. I’m in love with her soul not her lustful, sinful, fallen body. We’ll date in Heaven after we’re dead and redeemed from our fallen Adam and Eve mortal state.
Yes, you are that full of shyte. And your sarcasm just keeps getting lamer. You couldn’t get a date in h**l
No T. she won’t date you. I know you tried early on. I was witness to it. Suggesting Objectivist books for her to read. Pathetic.
She still has position and respect and you don’t.
And no one wants to do your lame-o homework assignments.
Only Christianity provides the foundation that can anchor human reason – the Logos. History shows human being are easily corrupted by power, and that when the Christian church has power and influence, it attracts those who desire that power for very un-Christian reasons. The Church has failed to guard against these persons.
So, you are right about one thing – the Church is largely to blame for what is happening to us today. But you are wrong about the reasons. Western Christendom is practicing syncretism with the false religions of the age – wokism, marxism, anti-racism, etc. It is polluting the Gospel of Christ by marrying it with these false religions.
If the problems you ascribe to Christianity were legitimate, then one would expect to find Christianity to be uniquely or largely associated with those problems. It is not. The unique association between Christianity and no other religion is the spread of western values (along with the Scriptures and the Gospel). The unique association between brutality and the loss of individual value, freedom and identity is unequivocally associated with Leftism, Marxism and every -ism that is now polluting the Church.
“My dear Danusha.”
That’s Dr. Goska to you, sonny.
In a rational higher education program there would be no PhD. degrees. The PhD. is a German-Prussian pretentious invention.
The only time I use the PhD. title “Doctor” is when I want a good laugh, Like when I say “Dr. Jill Biden”.
Well, now we know. You couldn’t get your PhD. Maybe you didn’t even try, considering that Objectivism isn’t even taught at the college level.
I used to think you were maybe an asst. professor at some second tier university, teaching philosophy to a bunch of bored kids taking the course because they had to.
I sense jealousy and anger. You can’t get into the club, can you. After all, even Dr. Jill has a PhD. albeit in education.
You would be one to be impressed by CREDENTIALISM. Authoritarianism and obedience are the essence of religious morality and the religious mind.
Credentialism? Really? I am the one impressed by it? Sorry, I went to university and got my advanced degree. I did the tough work. It seems you are the one who is embittered because you couldn’t get in the club. Are you just making stuff up now to hide your obvious insecurities and inability to accomplish anything.
The jealousy and anger in you drips like stale cheese at the Objectivist convention hamburger stand, where the cream of the uncredentialed meet to whine about how no one takes them seriously as academics and intellectuals. You will always be on the outside looking in. You and Lenny, Carol and Bernstein and the rest of the freaks you hand to us for homework assignments.
I wonder, are there any PhDs even being handed out for Objectivism? If so, why aren’t you a candidate, smart guy?
You will always be a wannabe.
“The tribal notion of “the common good” has served as the moral justification of most social systems—and of all tyrannies—in history. The degree of a society’s enslavement or freedom corresponded to the degree to which that tribal slogan was invoked or ignored.
“The common good” (or “the public interest”) is an undefined and undefinable concept: there is no such entity as “the tribe” or “the public”; the tribe (or the public or society) is only a number of individual men. Nothing can be good for the tribe as such; “good” and “value” pertain only to a living organism—to an individual living organism—not to a disembodied aggregate of relationships.
“The common good” is a meaningless concept, unless taken literally, in which case its only possible meaning is: the sum of the good of all the individual men involved. But in that case, the concept is meaningless as a moral criterion: it leaves open the question of what is the good of individual men and how does one determine it?…. continued….
I noticed that you didn’t make a single criticism of the Islamic terror in Daniel Greenfield’s article but you attack peaceful Christianity.
You are a leftist stooge.
There are no Muslims here at FPM arguing that Islam is a religion of freedom, liberty, and capitalism. If there were I would criticize them just like I do the Judeo-Christian conservatives here at FPM that from philosophical and historical ignorance, or dishonesty, declare that Judaism and Christianity are religions of peace, freedom, liberty, and the personal pursuit of happiness.
They are NOT.
C’mon T.
You wouldn’t criticize Islam because you are a coward looking to save his own head.
Come to think of it I can’t think of any Christians here at FPM who are claiming that Judaism and Christianity are religions of peace, freedom, liberty, and the personal pursuit of happiness. either.
That’s simply you showing us your endless religious bigotry. I can only imagine the reign of terror that would occur should your kind ever get your way. I can see it in the words you use.
… It is not, however, in its literal meaning that that concept is generally used. It is accepted precisely for its elastic, undefinable, mystical character which serves, not as a moral guide, but as an escape from morality. Since the good is not applicable to the disembodied, it becomes a moral blank check for those who attempt to embody it.
When “the common good” of a society is regarded as something apart from and superior to the individual good of its members, it means that the good of some men takes precedence over the good of others, with those others consigned to the status of sacrificial animals. It is tacitly assumed, in such cases, that “the common good” means “the good of the majority” as against the minority or the individual. Observe the significant fact that that assumption is tacit: even the most collectivized mentalities seem to sense the impossibility of justifying it morally. But “the good of the majority,” too, is only a pretense and a delusion: since, in fact, the violation of an individual’s rights means the abrogation of all rights, it delivers the helpless majority into the power of any gang that proclaims itself to be “the voice of society” and proceeds to rule by means of physical force, until deposed by another gang employing the same means.
If one begins by defining the good of individual men, one will accept as proper only a society in which that good is achieved and achievable. But if one begins by accepting “the common good” as an axiom and regarding individual good as its possible but not necessary consequence (not necessary in any particular case), one ends up with such a gruesome absurdity as Soviet Russia, a country professedly dedicated to “the common good,” where, with the exception of a minuscule clique of rulers, the entire population has existed in subhuman misery for over two generations.” – Ayn Rand
THX: “…When “the common good” of a society is regarded as something apart from and superior to the individual good of its members, it means that the good of some men takes precedence over the good of others….”
This is exactly wrong, and Ayn Rand is not to be trusted as expert in Christian doctrine. Christians believe that the common good is best achieved when its individual members experience individual freedom and good. Christianity ALONE among religions believes no man’s good takes precedence over the good of others.
In your religion, I think it is unavoidable that people like me would be deemed insufficiently “reasonable” and suffer greatly so that other “more reasonable” people could have precedence.
Objectivism is not a mystical, supernatural, religion; it is a secular philosophy that deals with reality not supernatural fantasies.
Ayn Rand is not addressing the concept of the “common good” simply and only as a Christian doctrine, communism is also based on the tribal, collectivist, ALTRUIST notion of the common good. But then again communism comes from Judeo-Christianity.
In a society where Objectivism were the dominant philosophy guiding that society every Christian would be left in peace to follow their irrational belief-system, so long as they did not initiate force against others or commit fraud.
About the only Christian practices in America today that I can think of that violate objective law are circumcision, prohibiting abortion, and the faith healing of children that prohibits the application of scientific medicine too, and only a very tiny minority of Christians in America are still that superstitious. If an adult with a fully functioning brain wants to rely on superstitious mysticism to cure his illness and wants to rely exclusively on faith healing that is his right but you cannot force that on children.
“The basic political principle of the Objectivist ethics is: no man may initiate the use of physical force against others. No man—or group or society or government—has the right to assume the role of a criminal and initiate the use of physical compulsion against any man. Men have the right to use physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use.” – Ayn Rand
What would happen if they did initiate force. Objectivists are such pacificists.
Are you really saying Objectivists are such angels, 100% of the time. You certainly aren’t.
THX: “About the only Christian practices in America today that I can think of that violate objective law are circumcision, prohibiting abortion, and the faith healing of children…”
These practices are not associated with Christianity.
We do not, like the Jews, have mandatory circumcision of the flesh. We cannot circumcise our hearts – only God can do that. But physical circumcision has health benefits, especially for the wives of circumcised men.
There is no “Thou shalt prohibit abortion…” in Christianity. The sixth commandment forbids murder. The unborn child is a person who must not be murdered.
There is no “Thou shalt practice faith healing” in the bible. In fact, God has given us both doctors and medicine for our earthly healing, and and Scripture confirms this.
Christianity forbids the use of force against another except for purposes of warfare or defense.
Your objectivism is an example of mystical religion. Your faith is that matter and energy are eternal and somehow produced everything. This is faith both without evidence and “against science.”
If I am wrong, then give evidence or reason. You have been making progress, THX.
THX: “Objectivism is not a mystical, supernatural, religion; it is a secular philosophy that deals with reality not supernatural fantasies.”
Absolutely wrong, for these are your core beliefs which you do not deny:
1. Reason is man’s mind.
2. Man’s mind produces Truth (as opposed to describing / discovering it). Therefore, Reason is transcendent, not Truth.
3. Existence precedes consciousness. If Reason is a “conscious process,” then reason is not transcendent.
4. Matter and energy co-exist as eternal “super existence.” One or both is / are transcendent, removing Beauty, Truth, and Goodness.
5. Man’s mind judges all existence by itself and calls it “Reason.”
These core tenets can be nothing more or less than supernatural mysticism. Anyone whose foundational postulate is “Existence exists by the grace of existence” is definitely not rational, reasonable or governed by philosophical logic. Your faith truly is without and against all evidence.
“The common good” means the good men hold in common. It never means “the majority good.” It is a term describing the “good” that men living together create for themselves by agreement and custom / culture.
“Only on the basis of individual rights can any good—private or public—be defined and achieved. Only when each man is free to exist for his own sake—neither sacrificing others to himself nor being sacrificed to others—only then is every man free to work for the greatest good he can achieve for himself by his own choice and by his own effort. And the sum total of such individual efforts is the only kind of general, social good possible.” – Ayn Rand
So what would happen to the people whose minds are less reasonable? What would happen to the people whose minds become destroyed by disease or accident? They have become, in the words of Ayn Rand, “no better than animals.”
“What would happen to the people whose minds become destroyed by disease or accident?”
Have you ever heard of benevolence, compassion, generosity, and charity? Only free men, to the degree that they are free, are free to produce abundance and prosperity. Enough abundance and prosperity to make compassion and charity possible.
Mother Teresa produced NOTHING. She depended on those that did produce wealth for donations. Before you can give a hungry person a free loaf of bread to eat you must first produce enough for yourself and then an extra loaf for the person who cannot feed himself. That is why Objectivism considers production the highest virtue and charity a minor virtue. Charity is completely dependent upon the producers. Production requires freedom, it requires rational selfishness and self-preservation first, as the first moral principle. If you’re dead you can’t produce anything and you can’t help anyone anyhow.
Or do you actually believe that men are so depraved that only coercion, physical force, and a whip can make them compassionate and charitable? Even today when taxes and inflation are crushing the average American’s earnings voluntary charity websites like “Go Fund Me” do not lack donations. Imagine how much more productive and wealthier, compassionate and charitable, Americans would be if they actually lived in a Laissez-Faire Capitalist America.
Serfs don’t produce nearly as much wealth as free men do and serfs look upon other serfs with suspicion and fear that other serfs may take from them what little they have by force.
Altruism requires and demand physical force, coercion, violence, it requires the whip, the gun, the concentration camp. It elevates sacrifice, pain, and suffering to the status of virtue and duty. It makes men hate and resent each other because under altruism each man becomes an existential threat to the other.
“It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering, for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.” ― W. Somerset Maugham
As I remember, we had abundance and prosperity…..under Trump and Reagan. Under Democrats we had misery especially under Carter, Obama, and now Biden.
I wonder what government we would have if it were run by anarchical Objectivists….all for none and none for all.
It is obvious why you can’t function in the real world.
Mother Teresa produced NOTHING.
Your value is limited to production of goods and services – no transcendence at all.
Mother Teresa demonstrated the sanctity of life and devoted herself to the relief of suffering. Is that really nothing?
I hope you never experience the abject horror of being without strength, in constant pain and confined to a place devoid of Christian charity.
You’re misinterpreting the Objectivist ethics of rational selfishness. That’s understandable because Ayn Rand’s moral concept of rational selfishness is brand new in the history of ethics. It is a radical, revolutionary, departure from and rejection of self-sacrifice and altruism.
“In the history of mankind, it is sooner than we think” – Ayn Rand
According to Objectivism there is nothing morally wrong with charity, so long as the charity is not harmful to the giver or the receiver. So long as the charity is spiritually deserved and earned by the receiver. And so long as you do not make charity the moral justification and central purpose of your life. Charity done the right way can be a minor virtue but charity done the wrong way is a harmful, even a destructive evil.
For example, donating money to Joe and Hunter Biden (the Biden Family live as charity receiving parasites and looters of the producers) is charity, but it is evil charity. But according to altruism it doesn’t matter that you are charitable to the Bidens, so long as you are sacrificing yourself, harming yourself, destroying yourself, your charity, according to altruism, is virtuous.
According to altruism if you receive any spiritual, emotional, or material reward or benefit in return for your charity it is NOT a sacrifice. According to altruism you must never receive any kind of benefit or reward, spiritual, emotional, or material, for your sacrifice, if you do it is NOT a sacrifice and therefore NOT a virtue.
Remember that if you help another man to live, the material, emotional, and spiritual reward you are receiving in return for your charity is seeing that man survive, live, and thrive. Altruism would hold your expectation of that gain and reward against you, because such an expectation is SELFISH.
You fail to see that if charity were a fundamental and major virtue that would mean that we would be living in a nightmare universe where human life was always in peril and human happiness impossible. The human species would have long ago gone extinct in such a nightmare universe.
You don’t have to be a Christian or a Jew to believe in and practice charity. Objectivists practice charity too but when we decide to help someone else we do it rationally, we don’t practice charity as empty virtue signaling or obedience to the supernatural. I practice charity SELFISHLY which means non-sacrificially. When I practice charity, I try to make sure I’m not harming myself or the recipient of my charity.
The devil is in the details. You really need to do some research into Mother Teresa’s actual practices in her hospices. Mary Teresa Bojaxhiu was a Catholic who believed in and practiced a MEDIEVAL, Augustinian, Catholic theology. She was a truly serious Augustinian Christian. Her actual practices in her hospices were not designed to alleviate pain and suffering, or possibly cure someone from illness if it was possible.
90% or more of the money that was donated to her did NOT go to make conditions safer, cleaner, and better in her hospices, they went to the Vatican Bank! She knowingly received stolen money from crooks and refused to return the stolen moneys. She was a horrible sadist with a twisted, evil, theology.
Her practices by a modern rational standard were medieval sadism and nihilism. She wanted to maximize the pain and suffering of her victims to cleanse their souls and prepare them to meet her “Savior”. For Mary Teresa pain and suffering were virtues. Do the research, the medieval theology she believed in was evil.
“My views on charity are very simple. I do not consider it a major virtue and, above all, I do not consider it a moral duty. There is nothing wrong in helping other people, if and when they are worthy of the help and you can afford to help them. I regard charity as a marginal issue. What I am fighting is the idea that charity is a moral duty and a primary virtue.” – Ayn Rand
“They have become, in the words of Ayn Rand, “no better than animals.”
My how you love to misrepresent, misunderstand, misinterpret, and misquote the actual quote where you got those words from. Here is the actual and full quote (I cannot force you to understand what Ms. Rand means, a mind cannot be forced):
“I have said that faith and force are corollaries, and that mysticism will always lead to the rule of brutality. The cause of it is contained in the very nature of mysticism. Reason is the only objective means of communication and of understanding among men; when men deal with one another by means of reason, reality is their objective standard and frame of reference. But when men claim to possess supernatural means of knowledge, no persuasion, communication or understanding are possible. Why do we kill wild animals in the jungle? Because no other way of dealing with them is open to us. And that is the state to which mysticism reduces mankind—a state where, in case of disagreement, men have no recourse except to physical violence. And more: no man or mystical elite can hold a whole society subjugated to their arbitrary assertions, edicts and whims, without the use of force. Anyone who resorts to the formula: “It’s so, because I say so,” will have to reach for a gun, sooner or later. Communists, like all materialists, are neo-mystics: it does not matter whether one rejects the mind in favor of revelations or in favor of conditioned reflexes. The basic premise and the results are the same.”
I wonder whether you will have the stones to reach for a gun.
You and Rand mischaracterize Christianity as mysticism. It is NOT a mystery religion and mysticism is condemned by Christianity.
Christians do not “claim to possess supernatural means of knowledge.” Christians claim the Supernatural testifies in both nature (general revelation) and the Bible (specific revelation). Those testimonies are unified and without conflict. Can you see the BIG difference?
Your problem is not that Christians “claim to possess supernatural means of knowledge.” That is an invention to help you with your REAL problem: you must deny the supernatural to eliminate God, while simultaneously uttering inanities like “Existence exists by the grace of existence.”
He thinks you and I are no better than animals.
I am chipping away whenever I have time and inclination. He made the mistake of trying to teach me, but I really love to discover the hearts and minds of others and paid close attention.
Now I am pushing his non-negotiables to get him to come to a decision. He is deep into his cultish thinking and will have trouble dealing with reality as it really is – but, who knows what God might do?
Pray for me, Intrepid. I do not want to beat him up and feel triumphant, and neither do I wish to blaspheme.
He is trying to teach all of us….of what I have no idea. And getting nowhere obviously.
He hates accomplishment in others. He just admitted today that he thinks a PhD is German-Prussian pretentious invention.
I used to think he was a now retired professor at some second rate university. Now I think he is a failed PhD student who is jealous of his intellectual betters. Hence the anger. So he bags on Jason Hill and Prager and other conservatives, while quoting EJ Dionne and Obama leftist Cass Sunstein, further burnishing his leftist bona fides. The guy is a stone cold leftist and a fraud who hides behind Rand’s skirts.
I like that you challenge him and show him up, because other than his usual screeds he can’t really answer you.
There is nothing wrong with beating him up and feeling triumphant. And remember, you can’t really blaspheme an atheist.
I will pray for you….that you are always victorious. Other than that, you really don’t need my help.
Intrepid, I have to reply to myself to answer you.
I agree with you, that THX has issues with his self-worth and his consistent desire to be “better” than others spending so much time berating and criticizing them betrays a deep insecurity. He pulls himself up by pulling others down. What kind of weanie man does that?
I could easily endure his criticism of Christianity if he actually said something true about it – but he literal NEVER does. And, this being a forum where many do not know Christianity, I confront and challenge him.
Patrick Deneen, at heart, is a Catholic theocrat. And he’s aggressively explicit about it. His critique of the Left is generally sound, but his alternative would be an invitation to a despotism. An open, skeptical mind is still the best defense against tyranny. If saying that makes me one of his dreaded classical liberals, too bad.
The best and only defense against tyranny and for liberty is CERTAINTY and PROOF. The certainty and proof that rights exist in reality, that they are necessary, inescapable, and unalienable if men want to live, prosper, and achieve happiness.
Why do you think freedom, liberty, and rights (real rights; political rights) are being ignored, evaded, and violated by the American government? Because of altruism, skepticism, subjectivism, and cynicism.
“Although the notion that rights come from God served to establish America, it has not served and cannot serve to sustain America. This is because no matter how many people believe that rights come from God, there is no evidence for such a being, much less evidence that rights somehow emanate from his will.
Since the founding of America, positivists, utilitarians, and “progressives” have taken advantage of this fact. They’ve argued that the idea of “rights anterior to the establishment of government” is “nonsense upon stilts” (Jeremy Bentham), and that the idea of absolute, inalienable rights is “one with witches and unicorns” (Alasdair MacIntyre). Why? Because, they say, there is no evidence to support such rights. Accordingly, they profess, rights do not precede political laws but follow from them: Governments create laws, and the laws, in turn, dictate the rights and non-rights of the people who live under those governments. “Absent a government,” writes E. J. Dionne, “there are no rights.” Insofar as rights exist at all, say Stephen Holmes and Cass Sunstein, they are “granted by the political community” and they exist only to the extent that the legal system protects them.
To defend inalienable rights against the left’s relentless assault, we need an evidence-based, demonstrably true conception of rights. Never has this been clearer than it is today….
Fortunately for conservatives who truly want to defend rights, proof of their existence exists. And although the proof is complex and was difficult to originate (thanks Ayn Rand for providing that), it is not difficult to understand.” – Objectivist philosopher Craig Biddle, “Why Religious Conservatives Should Embrace Secular Rights”
https://theobjectivestandard.com/2016/04/why-religious-conservatives-should-embrace-secular-rights/
We have the certainty and proof. It’s called the Constitution. We currently have a corrupt government in the hands of corrupt men. That is why no one can prosecute the crooks at this time.
I’m wondering which objectivist document, that is readable, sets up the framework for a government that provides certainty and proof against tyranny.
I am not surprised you choose to quote atheist Obama holdover Cass Sunstein who states “Insofar as rights exist at all, they are “granted by the political community” and they exist only to the extent that the legal system protects them.”
Of course Sunstein is wrong. He is a reprobate. Our rights come from God as stated by the Founders.
Thank God he is back at Harvard with the rest of the Communists. So when the legal system chooses to abrogate our rights we simply lose them. I then have no right to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And neither do you.
It is no wonder you are so virulently pro-abortion. And you flippantly talk of Jesus being anti-man.
THX: “The best and only defense against tyranny and for liberty is CERTAINTY and PROOF…that rights exist in reality….”
Your reality is that matter and energy produced everything that exists. How do we get from matter and energy to human rights? Especially when the testimony of history bears witness that we are everywhere enslaved by others with more power?
From whence doth thy rights have their birth?
THX: “Why do you think freedom, liberty, and rights (real rights; political rights) are being ignored, evaded, and violated by the American government? Because of altruism, skepticism, subjectivism, and cynicism.”
I would say the answer more simply: Power. It is now possible to rule over the United States by corrupt means without fear.
The overarching reality is the power corrupts. The thing you cannot accept is the powerful are using very intelligent and coordinated strategies to accomplish this. These coordinated and intelligent strategies are using the tool of reason to accomplish their evil purpose. Reason is not, as you claim, a transcendental.
This is utopian nonsense, and no better than the dictatorship the WEF would like to inflict on us. Religion moreover, is a form of social control – which in common with government, seeks to enslave the individual.
Aquinas was at best, misguided. Ayn Rand was not.
Deneen’s argument is clearly flawed. He is sophomoric, i.e., pompous, wise fool.
Another eloquent — and amusing — article from Ms. Goska, thoroughly anatomizing Deneen’s views.
They’re Christian views thoroughly suffused in the essence of the philosophical fundamentals of Christianity.
The error is not Mr. Deneen’s, the error is every Christian on the Right who makes the tragic and fatal mistake of assuming that Christianity is a religion that defends freedom, liberty, and capitalism. Christianity does NOT.
…….. every Christian on the Right who makes the tragic and fatal mistake of assuming that Christianity is a religion that defends freedom, liberty, and capitalism.
That’s what I believe and, somehow, I am still alive. So believing in that is obviously not fatal.
But your childish hyberbole is always amusing.
“The harm principle was described by eighteenth-century liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill.”
1800s, but 19th Century, I’m a bit that way myself. Dyslexic, I mean.
Henry (Brooks) Adams was fond of calling himself an eighteenth-century man, although not born until 1838, so you’re in good company, Danusha.
“In the America Deneen would like to see, Christian values will be supported by the state.”
Well, most of us feel that way, don’t we? But speaking as one born in a jurisdiction (not far from New Jersey) where the government, in practice, used to subordinate itself to the wishes of the Catholic Church, I think integralism is a bad idea. I say this as a Catholic distressed by the drift of the present Pontificate, but also as one who has seen what effect a powerful episcopate had on the faith of what used to be the Catholic majority in the place where I was born.
I always enjoy reading Dr. Goska’s thought-provoking articles. But I thought this was about the best thing of hers I’ve read. Well-written as well as well-reasoned. If the piece contributes to the discrediting of “common good conservatism,” Dr. Goska will have done a great service to humanity.