But far more important is liberal culture

From Rites About Rights by Jonah Goldberg.  He is also reacting to Biden's Tuesday speech.

Remember that old joke about the academic who says, “Sure it works in practice, but does it work in theory?” The problem for the Biden administration is that they come up with theories about what to do that don’t actually work unless you’re drunk on the Kool-Aid and they work even less in reality. From Afghanistan to Build Back Better to COVID to inflation to this voting rights debacle, it’s like the White House just says “Let’s just do it and be legends.”

There’s a lot of talk in Washington about how Biden isn’t really running the show. That may be true on one issue or another, but on the broad direction of his presidency, I think this is wrong. Biden has a very long history of being unjustifiably confident about how the world works and being proven wrong. If that’s the theme of his life in politics—and I think it is—it would be kind of weird to exonerate him from the charge when he’s actually the president of the United States and his presidency has displayed exactly that: invincible confidence in the rightness of what he’s doing even as he walks from one smack in the face to another like Sideshow Bob stepping on rakes. 

Don’t worry, I’m not going to run through all of that here because, frankly, I’m exhausted with punditry right now. Instead, I’d like to focus on something he was wrong about in his speech that an enormous number of other people are also wrong about. 

And he does switch to an interesting discussion which never quite goes in the direction I think it will.  

Biden said that “the fundamental right to vote is the right from which all other rights flow.” This is a common view, and one that Biden has subscribed to for a while. As vice president in 2015, he issued a statement on the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act: “Voting is the engine that drives all civil rights, all human rights, and all economic rights in this country. It’s the right from which all other rights flow.” Robert Kennedy said the same thing a half-century ago.

Now, I think voting is very, very important. What has two thumbs and likes democracy? This guy.

But neither the right to vote, nor democracy itself, are the source of all of our other rights.

This isn’t a pedantic point.

Let’s start with the subject of Jim Crow. Extending voting rights to blacks in the South was important, morally necessary, and just. But Jim Crow didn’t end in the South because blacks got the vote. A full 10 years before the Voting Rights Act 1964 was passed, the Supreme Court—not exactly a very democratic institution—ruled that racial segregation in schools was unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education. More to the point, in at least some Southern states, if segregation had been put up for a vote it would have been sustained by a majority of the voters—even if blacks could vote. The process of desegregation began at gunpoint by federal troops enforcing the Supreme Court’s rulings.

There is nothing inherent to democratic theory that says the people can be counted upon to vote in favor of sustaining their rights, never mind the rights of other people. That’s why the Constitution protects our rights from democracy. The Bill of Rights explicitly makes it hard for government to infringe on our rights because our rights are considered prior to or above the whims of the voters. In a pure democracy, 50.1 percent of the people can pee in the cornflakes of 49.9 percent of the people.

Agree!  Pundits, usually political operatives rather than actual intellectuals are always championing minority rights of one sort or another in the same breath that they advocate abolishment of the Electoral College or the filibuster or any of the other structures built into our constitution by the Founding Fathers in order to protect minority opinions.  Reading the Federalist Papers, it is manifestly clear that they both embraced democracy, were leery of the mob and were aware of how short-lived and unstable democracies usually were.

They were building for the future balancing the consent of the governed (democratic voting) with the fact that the populace can be irrational and unduly exuberant/vindictive.  

One of the central insights of both liberalism and conservatism, rightly understood, is that sometimes the people can be wrong. That’s why the Founders made it hard to change the Constitution. That’s why they envisioned the Senate as a “cooling saucer” that tempers the passions of the House. And that’s why this country has elections all the time. Because the Founders understood that sometimes the people can get riled up, angry, confused, misinformed, petulant, or vengeful. Having lots of elections allows the voters to recognize that maybe they went too far in the previous election. It’s part of the process of democratic self-correction and renewal. There have been plenty of times in American history when the people were in a bad enough mood to vote away various rights if they had the power to do it. Making it hard for those temper tantrums to do lasting damage is one of the great things about our system. (I suspect that if you put free speech rights up for a vote today, we would have fewer free speech rights tomorrow.) 

Politicians who want to get rid of the Electoral College, abolish the filibuster, super-size the Supreme Court, etc. are mere children throwing a temper tantrum because they have not gotten their way.  Which is exactly what the Founding Fathers designed for.  They wanted to make it hard for mobs to overturn rights, for demagogues to do stupid things, and for citizens to ignorantly get rid of the safety rails of our democracy which are there for a purpose.

Goldberg then heads into different territory.

What is the singular right that makes all other rights possible? I think this is a problematic question, but let’s take a stab at it. There are a lot of answers to this question. They largely fall into two broad categories I’ll call philosophical and anthropological, though there’s a lot of overlap between the two.

It is an interesting discussion but I would make a slightly different argument.  It's right there in the Declaration of Independence.

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

As Goldberg points out, the Founders were men of the Age of Enlightenment.  They sought to understand the world and its laws.  There was a hunger to find natural laws of governance that underpinned civil society just as natural laws underpinned science.  

They came up with a deistic God and associated Laws of Nature.  You can accept their predicate beliefs or not but there is no denying the elegance of their solution flowing from those beliefs and the prosperity and innovation showered upon mankind from those beliefs.

Goldberg reaches his conclusion by a different but no less interesting or valid pathway.

And that brings me back to where I began. The government works for us, but part of its job is to protect our rights for posterity, even when a temporary majority wants to abandon them. This is where the anthropological and the philosophical visions merge into a cultural synthesis. Contrary to a lot of prattle from “post-liberals,” progressive technocrats, and populist grifters of the right and left, we live in a liberal culture. That’s why I think the question of “What right makes other rights possible?” is so problematic. It works on the assumption that Americans love and enjoy their rights based on some commitment to abstract liberal theory alone. Liberal theory is important. But far more important is liberal culture. Americans like our freedoms because we’re Americans, damn it. So sure, sometimes voting is the great protector of our rights, and sometimes it’s not. In other words, it’s complicated because culture is complicated.

Which leads to the final conclusion.

I am open to the idea that our rights don’t come from God, but I thank God every day I live in a culture that operationally believes they do. Because that is the best bulwark against the machinations of populists and politicians who set out to inflame passions for short-term gain at the long-term expense of our rights.

And such leaders are all around us. For example, Joe Biden said this week that all of our rights come from voting and that people who disagree are on the side of racists and segregationists. He did this, I believe, solely so he could push through a political agenda and placate the passions of his partisan base. If you think that’s not the case, fine. But maybe you can explain how, just eight months ago, Biden had a completely different philosophical explanation for where our rights come from?

On May 28, he told American service members: “None of you get your rights from your government; you get your rights merely because you’re a child of God. The government is there to protect those God-given rights. No other government has been based on that notion. No one can defeat us except us.”

He was right then. And his abandonment of that view for political expediency this week was worse than a defeat, it was a surrender to the sorts of petty political corruptions our system was created to protect us against. 

We have seen a lot of authoritarianism in the past few years, first with the Woke mob (Critical Race Theory, Social Justice Theory, Feminist Theory, etc.) and now with the Covid response.  It reminds me of Ray Bradbury's coda to the 1979 edition of Fahrenheit 451.

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women's Lib/Republican, Mattachine/FourSquareGospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.