The experiment of America, as an aristocracy of merit, challenges us all. To take the idea of citizenship seriously is to approach the best understanding of individuality and the rights of man. I think that requires of us a great deal. There is only so far the offices of government should go in recognizing us as we necessarily think ourselves to be.
Many years ago, I held the somewhat common notion that the Declaration of Independence might have listed complaints against the deprivations of racial offense and become the basis of an anti-racist Constitution. The fact that it didn't suggested to me some original flaw in the founding of the nation, which a proper evolution of thought would correct. But I did all that for the purposes of the anti-racist promise, without much regard for the substance of the original complaint.
So I believe this is a common error of any class of people who regard themselves as so separate as to not identify in common with the pains suffered by those with more to lose. Or more plainly said, what would I care about the King quartering his troops on my property if I have no property? Shouldn't the Declaration talk about *my* peeves?
It is this kind of error that I believe is at fault in the mischaracterization of contemporary political complaints as matters of rights. And the popularity of this sort of overproduction ultimately dilutes the polity's ability to preserve and defend those self-evident rights the Founders had in mind. And so we have lost focus as a nation and wasted our political energies on frivolous matters thinking them to be literally righteous.
How can we come to believe that America is incapable of defending the dignity of a 13 year old girl from improper search and seizure? It must be because we believe people like Ginsburg must strident instruct people unlike Ginsburg in such basic matters of human dignity.
How can we come to believe that some certain people must in their struggles to achieve freedom act from a playbook of radical reinterpretations of human history? It must be because we believe people like Fanon must stridently instruct people unlike Fanon in such basic matters of human freedom.
And so each group has their unique message to the world and each must find, independently, their own separate path to dignity and freedom. Well, whats' the difference between that idea and any of Hitler's ideas? Nothing.
I find it difficult to presume to lead some fraction of the people or to defend some fraction of humanity as a worthy political aim. I am greatly convinced that the human animal does not vary so much that he can be served well by a wide variety of principles. There are a simple few and the paths towards attaining and defending them are few. But having found those paths, we must find our human center of gravity, each individual conforming at their core, and place that center on those paths. Instead we have put our sex lives and skin colors as our cores and we have made mountains of the discomforts such fetishes have brought us. And in our every personality trait, thinking moderation and conformity itself a sin, we have expanded our appetite for taking our every difference as deep and fundamental. We have monetized the long tail of arcane whim and now ply it as political currency. We passionately attend the details of vegetarianism as if they were matters of war and peace and we run our state treasuries into ruin for the sake of propping up a million subsidies of such trivial import. All such foolishness is done at the peril of our common good because we have determined that our diversity is the most important feature we possess.
This is the evidence of a crisis in confidence in our underlying principle. We Americans are invested in a globalist, multicultural hedge against the sort of common sense Thomas Paine had. We pretend that we are of a different strain than he and that our expanse and our eclectic humanity, our advanced sensitivities to the great variety of human experience makes us wiser. The great variety of human experience can all be cruelly ended with a pike through the heart, and the heart in every human lies in the same place. It doesn't matter how much we value what our tongues have tasted or where our feet have trod, our heart remains our core.
So we must resolve to understand and hue to what is essential to our individual humanity and to reassert its common core. We must recognize the minimal yet essential role of government's defense of simple liberty and not attempt to gainsay it by attempting to guarantee too much. We can only be a nation with liberty and justice for all if all are for the nation correctly focused on its principles and not our own differences. When we seek to be too many things as a people we lose sight of the common purpose of nationhood, and we belabor our citizenship with freight it cannot bear; we turn our politics into a fleamarket and dilute society with a million complaints.
The most important things in life are as they ever were, and no greater ideas will be invented than liberty. So let that be our focus on this day.
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