Why Conservatives Are Dangerous

The late Senator Everett Dirksen once said “there’s not a dimes worth of difference” between the Democrats and Republicans in Congress.  The subsequent four decades since he made that remark have certainly proven his prescience.  The current “Paul Ryan budget,” which seems to have been written, line by line, by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, is slam-dunk proof of Senator Dirksen’s observation.

Thomas Mullen has just published a new book, Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From?, that goes a long way toward explaining why this is.  Mullen traces the philosophical underpinnings of conservatism and “liberalism” (in the American sense of the word) and shows that they both contradict the true American creed, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence and other founding documents, that the sole purpose of government is to protect our natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

“inequality” is what animates all “liberals.”  Whereas socialists “seek to abolish private property,” liberals want to “heavily regulate and redistribute it.”  The latter are fascists, in other words, no different from conservatives, really.

The denial of the thousands of natural human differences, and their compulsion to have the state force “equality” on everyone, explains modern “liberals.”  It even explains, says Mullen, why liberals even “insist on positive laws that prohibit anyone from refusing to associate with homosexuals.”  He cites the case of the Christian couple who owned a bakery and refused to bake a wedding cake for a homosexual couple. Liberals naturally sought legal penalties.

Rousseau, the intellectual father of communism as much as Marx, was a fountain of horrible ideas.  He was also the intellectual inspiration for the French Revolution, and whose ideas are also now the Official American Creed, as announced by President Barack Obama in the aftermath of the terrorist attack in Paris this year.  (Obama claimed that “we” also believe in the French Revolutionary slogan of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”).  Among Rousseau’s main ideas, as embraced by Obama, the leader of American liberalism, are: man must give up all of his natural rights to the sovereign power; government will grant us whatever civil rights we are to have; the sovereign power must be absolute, indivisible, and inalienable; government should prohibit economic inequality, no matter what its source; being a “virtuous citizen”means having absolute loyalty to the state; children should be indoctrinated into this statist idolatry as early as possible; the state should replace the parents with regard to education; governmental power should be centralized in the executive branch; we should pretend that all government action is the result of carrying out the wishes of “the whole people”; and “truth” is determined by “the majority will,” as defined by a political elite.  Marx agreed with all of this, and “departs from Rousseau merely in his ideas about what political action is necessary to resolve the problems caused by private property.”

Mullen also provides a concise overview of the dramatically-different philosophy of natural rights that informs the true American creed, beginning with the ideas of John Locke.  He explains how “Locke’s view of man in nature departs from both conservatives and liberals on every substantive point.”  The latter chapters of the book are more historical than philosophical, describing how America was transformed by the late nineteenth century from a more-or-less Lockean/libertarian society with minimal government, to a centralized, conservative/mercantilist empire in the spirit of Hobbes and Burke, with the “Civil War” as the great turning point.  In a promised sequel, Mullen will write about how the centralized mercantilist empire of Lincoln was eventually infiltrated if not replaced by the socialist/egalitarian ideas of Marx and Rousseau.  Both sets of ideas reject the fundamental American creed that individuals have natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that it is the sole purpose of government to secure these rights.

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