Founding Fathers — VOICES for REASON

One of the great dangers today is that political concepts such as “freedom” and “liberty” have been virtually emptied of meaning, save for some positive emotional residue left over from this country’s founding. This allows them to be co-opted by those seeking to use their positive connotations to push an anti-freedom agenda.

Exhibit A: Thomas Frank, the Wall Street Journal opinion section’s token liberal, penned a column this week urging the left to reclaim the word “freedom” from the opponents of government intervention. This is no mere academic issue, Frank assures us: the unpopularity of Obama’s health care plan, he suggests, is at least partially the result of allowing critics to portray ObamaCare as an attack on freedom (which it is).

Curiously, in a column about the proper meaning of the word “freedom,” Frank never deigns to define it. Read the rest of this entry »

In my last post, I pointed out how today’s opponents of free speech would do well to consider the arguments made by the greatest champions of that freedom: America’s Founding Fathers. There I discussed their arguments against restricting “blatantly false” ideas. Today I want to look at how the Founders addressed the second restriction on free speech advocated by citisven at the Daily Kos: the suppression of ideas that supposedly “incite violence.”

The Founders argued that although it’s true the government can stop people from “inciting violence,” ideas per se cannot incite violence. To be charged with inciting violence, one had to commit what they called an overt act.

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A few weeks back, I had the pleasure of visiting Montpelier, the former home of James Madison. There were conspicuously few visitors–and none of the others appeared to be under 70 years of age. It was emblematic, I think, of how little awareness there is of the Founding Fathers today. Sure, we still invoke them regularly, but how many Americans actually study their writings?

Contrary to conservatives, the primary value of studying the Founders is not to learn about our “great traditions.” It’s to discover great minds wrestling with important ideas. And if you think their arguments aren’t relevant to today, think again.

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Frustrated Americans around the country are gearing up for another round of grassroots “tea parties” on Tax Day, April 15. Up to this point, it is unclear whether the loosely-connected protests will amount to anything other than a fleeting backlash against an onslaught of government intervention. What unites the protesters is not a consistent intellectual outlook–they appear to hold a hodgepodge of viewpoints–but rather their anger at the alarming expansion of our government. To have real impact, they’ll need a consistent intellectual framework.

Although the Tea Party name adopted by the protesters evokes images of the American Revolution, there is, at present, no basis for comparison. The American Revolution was fundamentally an intellectual movement–a revolt against the anti-freedom ideas motivating Britain’s treatment of the colonists, and, most importantly, a revolt for the idea of individual rights. These radical new ideas about what government should and should not consist of were enshrined by America’s Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence, and were the motivating force behind the revolt.

If today’s tea party protesters intend to spark any significant change, they need to understand that ideas drive change, and they need to advocate the right ideas. Both of these points are addressed in Onkar Ghate’s video presentation, “Atlas Shrugged: America’s Second Declaration of Independence.”