The Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution are the Crown Jewels of Western Civilization. The more I read of the vacuity of Western political thought even the more wonderous it becomes that a bunch of colonial farmers were able to cobble together a kind of polity never before seen in human history.
The essential organizing principle of the Republic is from the Declaration of Independence:
“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.” George Washington in his First Inaugural defined the meaning of the Pursuit of Happiness – “there is no truth more thoroughly established than that there exists in the economy and course of nature an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness…”
If you expect the Republican Party or even the so called Conservative movement to actually uphold the essential principle or to provide anything other than press-worthy platitudes regarding its existence, you’re spitting in the wind.
Justice Antonin Scalia, who we would all consider a “conservative” Justice, said in 1996:
“It seems to me incompatible with democratic theory that it is good and right for the state to do something that the majority of the people do not want done. Once you adopt democratic theory, it seems to me, you accept that proposition. If the people do not want it, the state should be able to prohibit it (or grant it – italics mine).”
Justice Scalia, a paen of conservatism and an interpreter of the Constitution, says flat out that unalienable Rights don’t mean squat in the American system. How do we square that with the Essential Principle?
There will be no preservation of the Constitution by politics without a prior cultural upheaval whereby the commons defines happiness in terms of virtue and not by novel forms of genital stimulation. The 3rd birth of freedom, if it is to come at all, will be birthed from our social and religious connections.
