Cass Sunstein attempts to define and justify liberalism in “Why I Am a Liberal” (The New York Times, November 20, 2023). Sunstein makes 34 claims about liberalism, most of them complicated and nuanced. The result can be described (charitably) as a dog’s breakfast. Take the first sentence of Sunstein’s first claim:
1. Liberals believe in six things: freedom, human rights, pluralism, security, the rule of law and democracy.
What’s not to like? Well, those six things sound nice, but not when some hard questions are asked about them.
Is freedom unbounded? If not, how and by whom are the bounds to be determined? By bureaucrats whom democratically elected officials have empowered to dictate the minutiae of the citizenry’s existence, including but far from limited to the kinds of products and services they may buy and how those products and services may be made?
If freedom is unbounded, do human rights include the right to kill other persons randomly, including unborn persons? If freedom is bounded, do human rights include the right (for example) to take the income and wealth of some persons and give it to others? Who makes and enforces the rules that allow that to happen? Are they democratically elected officials and their bureaucratic surrogates who make laws for the benefit of their favored constituencies or in the service of an illiberal ideology that looks askance at wealth and property ownership?
Does pluralism contemplate the right of persons to invade another country, commit crimes against the inhabitants of that country, burden the taxpayers of that country by accepting, for example, “free” housing and education, and eventually to be proclaimed citizens of that country in order to perpetuate that kind of pluralism and its consequences (see the preceding and following paragraphs).
Does security include the right to retain the fruits of one’s labor and capital, or are such decisions made to democratically elected officials (and designated bureaucrats) who favor certain constituencies and ideologies? Does security include the right to be safe in one’s own home or while peacefully going about one’s own business when pluralism leads to an influx of criminal non-citizens and to the freeing of dangerous felons because they are considered “victims” of a system that (oddly enough) strives to punish wrongdoing.
My questions suggest that democracy and the rule of law aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. The value of democracy and the rule of law depend very much on who is making and enforcing the laws, and for whose benefit they are making and enforcing those laws.
What matters isn’t whether a people seeks freedom, human rights, pluralism, security, the rule of law and democracy. What matters is whether a people can cohere in voluntary, peaceful, and mutually beneficial coexistence.
Freedom and all of those other nice-sounding things are meaningless shibboleths absent a common culture grounded in traditional morality and shared by a people bound in genetic kinship.
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