Advancing life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—that is the end. I, like many conservatives, believe that for the most part those ends are best advanced by working within the constitutional framework.
Like many liberals, I also believe that slavery and Jim Crow were such abominations that, if the choices were to strictly construe the constitution or to free the slaves and end Jim Crow, to hell with originalist notions of states rights.
What does that have to do with McCarthy's argument? He is too enamored of the heuristic that what's constitutional is liberty-enhancing and what's unconstitutional is liberty-destroying. It's a good heuristic, but it doesn't always hold.
Arguing with him, I normally point out why I think that his expansive views of executive power betray Madison's vision. Today let's imagine, for the sake of argument, that he has been right all along: that strict adherence to the Constitution really does permit secret kill lists, torture, massive surveillance, and indefinite detention; and it really does prohibit, say, Social Security and Medicare.
Even if that were true, it would not change the fact that the national-security state and its open-ended concentration of unaccountable power poses a far greater threat to liberty than federally bankrolled social-welfare spending even if you think, as I do, that the spending could be improved upon.
That McCarthy is extrapolating from ideology rather than observing fact is illustrated by that line about how "Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare are prosperity killers—and inevitably so.
Inevitably so? It's possible America would be more prosperous today if Social Security had never passed. It's impossible to disprove the counterfactual. But this we can say with certainty: Social Security did not kill American prosperity. A nation in the middle of a Great Depression actually did pass Social Security America from the New Deal to the present is, on the whole, a success story. We're richer, less unjust, and offer more freedom to our more numerous citizens.
The unprecedented War on Terror poses a bigger threat to that than decades old programs. A social safety net administered at the federal level may or may not be better than efforts administered by the states. But it is not a fraud by design, it need not be incompatible with a prosperous society, and it need not destroy our liberty.
A primary purpose of government in the United States and other constitutional democracies is to protect and promote the liberty of individuals. The Preamble to the U.
The U. These freedoms are called civil liberties because individuals enjoy them only within the context of civil society and constitutional government.
Civil liberty in a constitutional democracy means liberty under laws enacted by the elected representatives of the people. Rights to civil liberty are exercised, constrained, and protected by laws made through the free and fair procedures of democracy.
When conservative politicians like Rand Paul and advocacy groups FreedomWorks or the Federalist Society talk about their love of liberty, they usually mean something very different from civil rights activists like John Lewis—and from the revolutionaries, abolitionists and feminists in whose footsteps Lewis walked. Instead, they are channeling 19th century conservatives like Francis Parkman and William Graham Sumner, who believed that freedom is about protecting property rights—if need be, by obstructing democracy.
Hundreds of years later, those two competing views of freedom remain largely unreconcilable. Contact us at letters time. By Annelien de Dijn. Related Stories. The 25 Defining Works of the Black Renaissance. Already a print subscriber? Go here to link your subscription. Need help?
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