Revolution in Rights
Quintus Horatio Flaccus
June 12, 2025
There is a revolution underway in our streets. At this writing, President Trump has called out the Marines and nationalized the California National Guard to quell the violence directed at officers enforcing our nation’s immigration laws. Adding to this there are “protests” planned in Chicago, Atlanta, Seattle, Denver, Portland, and New York. While the proximate cause of this unrest is the enforcement of immigration laws, we all know that what is at stake is far deeper than that. In reality, the progressive Left, having fallen victim to its contempt for all things family-oriented, must now rely on massive illegal immigration to replace the voters that will never proceed from their sterile policies. The fact that those same illegal immigrants largely recoil in horror when they learn the tenets of progressivism is beside the point, and anyway, far be it from me to counsel the Left on winning political strategies. The Left needs the coercive authority of the state to enforce their nihilistic and voluntarist vision of “rights.”
For the purposes of simplicity, the classic American vision of civil or human rights proceeds from Roman Stoicism, though much developed through the centuries. The same belief that man’s ability to reason endowed him with a certain dignity, and this dignity demanded fundamental rights, that in turn became the basis for the Roman Republic became the basis for our modern sense of the dignity of man and fundamental rights. The growth of the power of the English Parliament vis a vis the monarchy tracks the growth of stoicism through the Renaissance. I argue that the Magna Carta itself - signed on June 15, 1215 - was an early marker of the return of Stoicism, though most historians would say I am off by about 150 years. Our American Founding Fathers clearly modeled our own government after the institutions of the Roman Republic. Simply put, Stoicism gave us dignity, equality, and fundamental or natural rights as a means to empower the individual to come to his full potential, or in the terms of Aristotle, εὐδαιμονία (happiness). It is critical for the most part that what makes us “happy” follows along the contours of nature, so freedom is defined in terms of what enables us to flourish, and come to our full potential as human beings. This accounts for the still strong sense of family values on the Right, as mankind is no different from any other species in the natural imperative to renew life through offspring.
The Father of Western Liberalism, John Locke (1632 - 1704), channeling the Stoics, discerned three rights: life, liberty and property. These became the basis for our own Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and our Constitution, though we discern Locke’s rights in the Constitution as the means to create a government that would protect fundamental rights. These rights are simple and straightforward. The right to life speaks to the government’s duty to protect the physical person, so no extrajudicial killings, torture, or arbitrary arrests or detentions. The right of liberty speaks to the duty of the government to protect the ability of the individual to engage in the life of the polis including the freedoms of speech, assembly, press and in all public forums. The right of property is just like it sounds, although in Locke’s time, since the right to vote was tied to property ownership, it includes that right as well. It is noteworthy that Adam Smith took this last right as a basis for his work The Wealth of Nations. The classic American theory of rights establishes the role of government to protect and foster these rights that enable the individual to flourish. However, it should be noted that this theory does not in any way establish a duty for the government to protect things that the natural law does not dictate. Herein there is a harmony between natural rights, nature, and happiness.
I add that the right of the individual to the freedom of the pursuit of happiness, or εὐδαιμονία, that Jefferson added to our Declaration in some ways sums up all these rights.
The understanding of the pursuit of happiness is actually the fault line over which we are now fighting the progressive Left, and is the eminence grise behind the riots in Los Angeles, if not the “mostly peaceful” protests elsewhere.
The classic American sensibility for rights anticipates the duty of the government to enable the individual to flourish as a member of society. The progressive Left’s vision is voluntarist - that the government should enable any act of the will to the maximum extent possible, even if doing so means quashing what we consider fundamental freedoms in others. Thus if an Evangelical preacher should preach on the biblical teachings concerning marriage, the Left would argue that the preacher should be silenced since he undermines the ability of some individuals to enjoy their lifestyles that may not match that description.
The progressive Left champions the freedom of the individual to pursue any end whatsoever so long as it does not violate the will of another. At the onset, this vision is flawed in as much as man is a social being (or a political animal returning to Aristotle), so anything one man does necessarily impacts every person on the planet. Freedom is defined in terms of the least restriction to any exercise of the will, and boundaries only restrained by a false sense of libertine excess, not nature itself. So for example, if heroin is your thing, fine so long as you don’t violate other people’s rights in pursuit of your powdered happiness. May I ask my readers, do heroin addicts in any way appear free, or flourishing as human beings? On the contrary, do their tragic choices severely undermine their freedom? The government rightly attempts to protect their rights, here in particular their right to life inasmuch as heroin devastates the body, by restricting the illicit trafficking of narcotics.
But let’s cut to the chase. The basket of issues that has really gotten people onto the streets are those we classify as Sexual Orientation Gender Identity issues. This includes the “classic” LGBT rights, and increasingly the right of the individual to determine his gender. No issue illustrates the complete bankruptcy of the intellectual reserve of the Left than this last one. It is not enough that an individual be accorded the right to pretend that they can change the sex now easily discernable even from conception. As in The Emperor’s New Clothes, according to the dictates of the Left, we must now all play along with that individual’s fantasy or risk social cancellation, financial ruin, physical danger to our bodies, or worse.
The only real basis I can find for this championing of the will over nature is Fredrick Nietzsche. I am no fan of Nietzsche, but I largely agree that the Nazi Party misinterpreted his works as a basis for their own grotesque ideology (just watch Triumph of the Will again, if you haven’t already). That said, there are a lot of common threads between the Nazi ideology championing the will, and its triumph over nature and the progressive Left. For one thing, where there is a harmony between natural rights and nature in the classic American sense of rights, there is an enmity in progressivism with nature, and a sense that the human will can and should overcome nature. This is one outgrowth of the Modernism of the 1920s and 1930s where there was a strong sense that technology would lift man out of his miserable state. Some markers of this period were the use of eugenics to create a better man, castration for criminals, and a sense that all those factories cranking out tractors, washing machines, and air conditioners held the key to happiness. Full disclosure, in the near 100 percent humidity of Washington DC in the summer, I am in no way inspired to follow this thesis to its logical conclusion and jettison my air conditioner. There is a balance. Another key parallel is the sense in the Left that the coercive authority of the state exists to compel miscreants like myself to fall in line. Instead of protecting my freedom to write such shocking screed like sex is assigned by nature at conception and is forevermore immutable, for them the role of government is to prevent me from saying such things. In some European countries, this statement, publicly made, now means jail time for “hate speech.”
The fact that the Left believes to its marrow that in order to shape their vision, they must compel and silence all challengers is frightening. This also explains why an issue such as immigration, connected as it is to their ability to control an electorate, which would in turn empower them to enact and enforce their dystopian agenda, is such a flash point. The American political system was engineered to protect fundamental rights. At its best, our system relies on the fundamental freedoms of speech, press, and so on to shape the opinions of individuals through persuasion and reason, which translates into hopefully better electoral decisions through the democratic process. That system to the extent that it enables these fundamental freedoms is itself a threat to the Left, or at best is a mere means to an end to enact their agenda, rather than an imperative itself as the logical political consequence of fundamental rights. If anything, since they see the democratic process as the political system that perpetuates the very system of rights they have determined stand in the way of their own triumph of the will, it needs to be either co-opted or ended.
If you doubt the seriousness of this clash, and its potential for further violence, just consider that the denial of the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were the opening salvo that Jefferson noted in our Declaration as the casus belli for our own American Revolution. If we thought those rights were worth fighting for then, then you can bet the Left is willing to fight over their own perverse view.
I commend President Trump’s decisive action to protect the officers enforcing our immigration laws in Los Angeles and elsewhere, and like President Trump, I understand that what is at stake is far deeper than what meets the eye.
May God help President Trump make America great again, and may He continue to bless our great country.
