The authoritarian assault on liberty and the Constitution

Jason Hill: ...To begin with, you paint a dismal picture of the Biden administration in leading us down a seemingly inevitable road toward socialism. You simultaneously point to illiberal and authoritarian groups such as Black Lives Matter, ANTIFA, and sundry white supremacist groups that are aiding and abetting the move away from individual rights to an egregious form of collectivism.

Jonathan Emord: To win the presidency, Biden sold his soul to the socialists. Biden is a Democrat Party weather vane. He is buffeted about by liberal winds, shifting this way and that to remain true to the direction of party activists. He has no core beliefs, no principles. No one of principle who loved liberty and the Constitution could have ever embraced socialism as Biden has. A combination of ignorance and no principle leads Biden to bring about legislative changes through executive fiat in violation of the separation of powers. Without any attempt to obtain public or congressional support for changing the law, Biden has rewritten the law unilaterally, to abandon President Trump’s America First agenda, to terminate President Trump’s successful border policies, to open the Southern border to unlimited immigration yet disallow refugee status to Cubans fleeing communist persecution, and to end opposition to Putin's Nord Stream 2 pipeline to Europe while shutting down the Keystone XL pipeline and fossil fuel leases on federal lands and waters. He is hollowing out the Republic and replacing it with an entirely authoritarian regime.

No one should think Biden’s lack of spatial and temporal awareness evidence of his harmlessness. He invites destruction of our nation from within and without, stoking Marxist rioting and revolution at home and communist adventurism abroad....

Hill: Not many people know about the collapse of classical liberalism in the United States and its relationship to 18th century German philosophy, especially the philosophy of George Wilhem Hegel....

Emord: Classical liberalism first came under assault in the antebellum South. Stung by abolitionist criticism, Southerners nevertheless would not give up on slavery due to its social and economic allures....

To keep people in bondage, they had to condemn the Declaration, but they needed a replacement for it. In 1821, the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel introduced the world to collectivism, defining the worth of the individual not based on his or her own merit but on his or her contribution to a “collective good,” a good Hegelians believed best established by highly-educated experts given license to command the state and compel public allegiance to their dictates.

To the delight of slavery’s apologists, Hegel defended slavery as inevitable and helpful in the evolution of “superior races.” Hegel was a racist (as was his student Karl Marx), believing Europeans superior and Africans inferior....

Progressives between the 1860s and 1930s used Hegelian doctrine to justify the creation of another authoritarian model, the extra-constitutional administrative state....

I do not subscribe to the view that the infection of socialism is a terminal illness. To the contrary, I view it as a disease we will eradicate, and I remain optimistic that individual liberty will ultimately triumph over socialism because individual liberty is the only condition consistent with the very nature of humanity. Invariably, socialism is a bankrupt ideology. To paraphrase Margaret Thatcher, the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money. Socialism (slavery to the state) is inherently destructive, while capitalism (liberty in a free market) is inherently constructive....

Emord: ...The Preamble is the origin of the United States. It is the nation’s lodestone. It defines self-evident truths that were often honored, always aspirational, and sometimes violated, but armed those denied rights with the foundational authority necessary to ensure over time rights protection. This wisdom did not escape Martin Luther King, Jr. He did not condemn America for racial discrimination. He appealed to the nation to honor its fundamental charters, the Declaration and the Constitution...

BLM and the 1619 Project selectively rewrite history to present a false, propagandistic view that condemns America as systemically racist. They state the origin of our country is not the Preamble in 1776 but the arrival of about 20 black slaves to the Jamestown Colony in 1619. What you are not told is that four months before the 20 blacks arrived in Jamestown, 100 white slaves arrived. What you are not told is that the arrival of 20 blacks was a one-off event because for years thereafter whites both young and old were delivered to Jamestown as slaves.

What you are not told is that by 1830, some 3000 manumitted blacks became slave owners themselves, some owning dozens of slaves. What you are not told is that the Founding Fathers condemned the Crown for bringing slavery to the colonies, considered slavery an execrable trade, and wished to extinguish it through a political solution that would have freed all slaves at once. What you are not told is that Jefferson who wrote the words: “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” also wrote at the very same time a 168-word paragraph in the Declaration that made clear he understood rights to be universal bequests from God to humankind (not limited to white males). That provision was deleted from the Declaration, as Jefferson explains in his autobiography, “in compliance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves...” because the support of both was essential to waging the war for independence with Great Britain.

Rather than condemn America for “systemic racism,” a collectivist concept that is but a Trojan horse for socialism, we ought to celebrate America for establishing an ideal so noble, so consistent with human nature, so just, and so empowering that it could not be denied despite jealous grasps by those who advocate for a single race or a single gender. The self-evident truths of the Preamble transcend all....