The Fourth of July is not just a time to grill hot dogs and shoot off fireworks. It’s a time to think about what it means to be American. When the Declaration of Independence was signed, the Founders already had a clear sense of themselves as a people, with rights, duties, and an identity of their own. In the fourth episode of “Modern Age with Dan McCarthy,” our editor-in-chief explains why it’s vital to cultivate a vision of citizenship as an active principle, not merely a matter of passive rights.
Selections from the podcast are excerpted below:
This is a moment of philosophical, legal, and constitutional crisis for America because we’ve had a generation or more of miseducation about how our rights actually connect to our condition as a people, our nation, and therefore how a nation is able to create a state and a government that represents the people. There’s not meant to be a conflict between individuals, the nation-state, and the national government.
Now, of course, in reality, there can be conflicts, but that’s why we have a constitution which creates a divided form of government. It has a Bill of Rights. We have within our own national framework the necessary protections for individuals vis-à-vis community and vis-à-vis the national government. We do not need the United Nations. We do not need international lawyers. And we do not need a new cadre of human rights lawyers and constitutional lawyers here in America who are going to invent new rights for the highest levels of government to wield as weapons against the community and the people that are actually meant to be the bearers of their own liberties.
It’s a contrast, basically, between a principle of active citizenship—which is what the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence envision—and a vision of passive citizenship, which in fact you might even say that under this more paternalistic system envisioned by the UN, you don’t even have passive citizens. What you really have once again are subjects.
But unfortunately, these are not subjects of a traditional kind of monarchy. They are instead subjects of a self-perpetuating administrative class—again, of experts, human rights lawyers, philosophers, academics—people who consider themselves enlightened and heirs to the Enlightenment, who are going to revolutionize society for the sake of the values and the newly invented or newly discovered rights that they claim to be most important.
This revolution that they are going to carry out is kind of an anti-American revolution. It’s a revolution that overthrows the Declaration of Independence. It’s a revolution that overthrows our own Constitution and that instead creates an order in which America is just an administrative unit within a much larger notion of a universal web of laws which are derived directly from these newly discovered human rights. This is at the taproot of so many of the problems that we see and the conflicts and controversies that we see in America today.
Watch the rest here:
The Declaration was made for active citizens, not passive subjects.Read More
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