April 27, 2016
Social Justice and Its Discontents
By Philip Ahlrich
“You taught me language,” said the evil Caliban to Prospero, “and my profit on’t is -- I know how to curse!” How fitting it is that after 400 years of spite and profanity, Caliban should leap from the stage and turn progressive in his creed, for having acquired a Harvard education, the latter-day liberal now hunts only for reasons to curse the nation that taught him freedom. There is no quality in the beast; and the civilizing power of intelligence now confronts an organized and brutish determination.
We have travelled far from the founding hope of our nation. Whatever liberalism was, it no longer is. It is a curse upon our times that children who insult the freedom they have should be trusted with power over the freedom of others. As Madison said, wise leaders will not always be at the helm. America's Constitution holds the nation straight as the character of its leadership weakens and fails, but it cannot hold forever. “Power over a man's subsistence is power over his will," wrote Alexander Hamilton, an advocate of strong centralized government. Social justice is a consequence of this political instruction to modern liberal activists who are intent on securing control over large voting populations; and for this reason, we have come to understand that the liberal has forsworn his democratic task of self-government.
We have entered an era of political deviancy. America has resisted the fate of nations -- a statement of the people's enduring trust in their Constitution. There should be many Americas, for this nation, tested now by political interests unfriendly to the cause of self-government, remains yet a sanctuary. Immigrants, coming to America, are not voting against her opportunity, her protection, or her freedom; but liberal demagogues may yet persuade them to vote against the party guarding the conservative principles that offer these inducements to all who seek a better life. The world comes here in order to escape the authoritarian inevitability of socialist style governments, whose leaders promise an unlimited provision -- but government cannot provide!
In order for government to give to the people, it must first take from the people. Comprehending the Western European socialist model, liberal government can allocate but cannot create wealth. It can sustain a people, but it cannot make them prosperous. It can decree equality for everyone, but it is an equality of need, not of opportunity. It can promise more of everything to targeted constituencies only by appropriating, through burdensome taxation and regulatory force, the earned income of successful enterprise. The new liberal orthodoxy deems this end for the United States, and its apologists call it "social justice" -- as if to legitimize theft by the dictionary.
Social justice is a product of theory and myth. The entire liberal enterprise has now become a story full of grievances and political promises. It has become at last a refuge for unfinished minds. It is a cult of justice for those who do not know how to be free. When we open the handbooks of social justice, we do not find a place for freedom written there. If we follow Rawls (A Theory of Justice, 1971), we find the premise that social justice is possible under democratic socialism, but it is possible only through the coercive powers invested in the State. Human nature bends easily over the academic templates of social theory, but in the world of real events, human nature is not made of words. When people become habituated to preferential justice, then equal justice under law seems the very action of prejudice.
We cannot assume a virtuous opinion among mankind. Bad government creates an uncivil society. Its politics changes our ethics. The liberal speaks in a political language that makes injustice possible; and Americans should condemn this language upon every platform available to common sense. He has created a distempered public atmosphere in which the ability to lie and to escape the consequences of dishonesty are now considered positive virtues of political gamesmanship -- to be cultivated and improved through the press, through propaganda, entertainment, and social media. The lie is a measure of disrespect for the American people; but in the dust raised of our national politics, that so many of us have come to accept and even to anticipate or embrace the lies that liberals tell us is also a perfect measure of how far the nation has fallen into a condition of stasis.
If there were space enough on this earth for a second America, the world's lovers of freedom would have crowded its continent long ago; and its citizens would have formed a truly international society: open, enlightened, prosperous, protective of the correlative principles of equality and freedom, and thus able to govern themselves through an unimpaired knowledge of justice -- until hostile authoritarian interests found in its democratic vulnerability the opportunity for interference and overthrow. And the inheritors of this land, reduced by stasis, and no longer confident of holding up their original promise to the world, would come to agree with the new despotic order because they were made ashamed of their autonomy and forced to believe that their freedom was the cause of social injustices in the world.
There is, however, but one America, and that is the world’s misfortune. The worst mistake that any democratic society can make is to allow self-interested political authority to corrupt its understanding of justice, ethics, or law, for this, historically, has proven the means by which governments have been able to secure unlimited control over their peoples. Alexis de Tocqueville, taking in the broad vantage of European experience, remarked in his comprehensive examination of American democracy that the only consequence of revolution and war on the Continent was the centralization of power, and that every attempt at usurpation by activist forces brought only greater economic hardship, oppression, and obsolescence to their peoples. Revolutionaries cannot become kings, but they can become in their passion and will to power more horrible than the injustices they thought they had overthrown. Tocqueville’s hope for America was that her leaders would heed the lessons written in the fallen glory of Europe; but the modern liberal preoccupation with social justice embodies the same urge towards coercive, centralized power that brings unnecessary intrusion upon autonomous, well-ordered societies and defeat upon every experiment in democracy.
No sooner do we elect with our hopes but we judge with our regrets. It is true that elections are about moving forward, but we cannot confuse the rhetoric of social justice with its inevitable and foreseeable consequences; and we cannot ignore the wrongs committed against the original idea of America by progressive interests. The corrosive effects of political activism destroy consensus and our fundamental reliance on constitutional order; and when the liberal has dissolved these moral elements in his acid bath, all that remains of government is the political disease, dysfunction, and bitter enmity of stasis -- and that is our present situation.
Read more:
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/04/social_justice_and_its_discontents.html#ixzz471E7prewFollow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter | AmericanThinker on Facebook
