After having established that we have Second Amendment rights and that there is nothing that President Obama is doing that will affect those rights, but that there are certain categories of people who we decide are not entitled to those rights – the mentally ill, felons – at about the 30s mark in the video (h/t Breitbart TV), Attorney General Eric Holder advises us that President Obama has asked him to look at the list of those not entitled to Second Amendment rights and to see if that list needs to be expanded.
Thus, we all have Second Amendment rights, except for those categories of people which President Obama and Eric Holder determine are not entitled to such rights.
You see, I trust, the logical problem: if one becomes entitled to rights by the decision of a ruling authority, they are no longer rights in any meaningful sense of the term; they are, instead, privileges granted to the recipients by that authority.
I am particularly interested in hearing from our legalistic MI (or, for that matter, our lawyer Wired Sisters) on this logical collision, and I personally am more interested in hearing from MI in a particular manner: more than any clerical collection of legal citations, I would like his own reasoned opinion of how this collision comes to be accepted as logical within the legal mind. I don’t dispute that we do live in a situation where ostensible rights can nonetheless be administratively apportioned, I am more curious as to how those who deal in this contradictory logic as nevertheless accomplished law have come to accept it as logical and meaningful.
It is also no leap to the obvious: this peculiarity can equally be applied to any rights and determinations of entitlement to them at all: the right not to be a chattel, the right to reproduce, and so forth.
Others are of course welcome to address this collision of meanings as well.
Update: Allow me to broaden the contextual field a bit to facilitate perception and discussion.
It is logically impossible for rights qua rights to be bestowed externally or incrementally; that is the definition of a privilege, not a right.
However, it is logically possible to remove a citizen, physically or otherwise, wholesale from the social universe in which rights remain as rights for all; in this case, rights themselves have not been denatured into privilege, it is the unfortunate individual alone who has been denatured into a creature for whom, for however long, rights no longer obtain – but this would also imply a wholesale, not a selective, removal of the individual from the realm of rights.
It is also possible for a society to speak boldly and idealistically of rights wholesale and then as a matter of less taxing behavior immediate settle wholesale more comfortably into a lesser, more attenuated condition. One can, for example, easily imagine a society in which everyone nobly claims that a woman has an absolute right to say “No” to sex she does not want and then promptly shrugs off all but the more egregious transgressions. This is the social hypocrisy of societies whose idealistic reach exceeds their grasp, but it does not necessarily have to obtain universally from inception.
Instead, it is possible for there to be societies where rights originally really do exist as rights universally but where repeated, tiny, discrete incremental compromises in law year after year in collective sum allow the concept of rights to mutate degeneratively into the concept of privilege, no differently than successive micro incremental gene changes allow the transformation of one organism into an entirely different one. In the end, the citizens still point proudly to their attenuated privileges and call them rights, and they are happy with them; for them, they are rights.
Thus, we can find ourselves in our times feeling quite naturally that our contemporary concept of rights as privilege is perfectly natural, more progressively evolved, and that by comparison a society which actually believed in rights qua rights and strictly ordered itself accordingly must appear to us by contrast not to be an unmutated state of original health but rather a rough, brutish, atavistic, primitive precursor to civilization.
To my mind, this is what the evolution/devolution of an 18th Century political democratic republic into a 21st Century apolitical mass society would resemble.
Can a 300 million person mass of humans even be a democratic republic? Or must it necessarily become a different thing entirely?
Again, your thoughts, within this context more broadly cast beyond just Eric Holder and the Second Amendment.
Update 2: I’m sorry, that fucking autoplay advertisement leading the Breitbart video was driving me nuts and had to go. Follow the link this time.
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
H.M.: You’ve posed a couple of great questions. I’m interested in hearing what the scholars and lawyers among us have to say on the first question (rights or privileges). I do appreciate how you broadened the topic so that we don’t just argue about Obama/Holder; and your closing question–”Can a 300 million person mass of humans even be a democratic republic? Or must it necessarily become a different thing entirely?”–seems to me insightful and pertinent. One of my favorite books is HUMAN SCALE, by Kirkpatrick Sale (unrepentant leftist, sorry), and I tend to keep that phrase(“human scale”)in mind when thinking about a lot of our social/cultural/political dilemmas. Frankly, I think we might be better off if the United States was (were?) split into three or four independent nations (just as, frankly, I think that Lincoln might have been better advised to let the southern states secede–but that’s a different issue). Size, as I’ve been told in other contexts, matters. So my brief answer to your closing question is, “It must necessarily become a different thing entirely, masquerading as what it used to be even as it attempts sincerely to remain, as much as possible, what it used to be.”
On your original, larger question–do we have “rights” or “privileges”?–I’d say that we continue, formally and in theory, to have rights, but because in practice those rights get defined (and redefined), interpreted (and reinterpreted), qualified, limited, and adjudicated by all the various levels and branches of government: in practice, we have whatever rights we can effectively assert and retain via the political process (or we can take our stand in a bunker or a fortress somewhere, I guess). “Rights” are neither self-enforcing nor self-sustaining, even if written into a revered document like the Constitution; for better or worse, you can’t just wave around a piece of parchment and say “But it says so right here!” It didn’t work that way for African-Americans during the Jim Crow era, and it won’t work that way for the rest of us either.
This sounds a whole lot like the original definition of Catch-22, in the novel by that name: “they have the right to do anything to you that you can’t stop them from doing.”
My particular angle on this issue stems from having a godson with Down Syndrome. He voted in the last election. Did he have the right to? (Let’s leave guns out of this for now, in the interest of keeping our civility.) Would he have the right, if so inclined, to get married? I know for a fact that he can’t enter into a legally binding contract.
Similarly, I have a client who is under guardianship because he has a mental illness. He has the right to vote (it’s specified in the court order for guardianship), but no such inclination, and as a practical matter no legal residence anyway.
The Founders, I’m pretty sure, presumed that the rights of people with mental illness or mental retardation could properly be limited by law. See also Buck vs. Bell, the infamous Oliver Wendell Holmes “three generations of imbeciles are enough” decision. More recent decisions (Relf vs. Mississippi, I think, is the most solid precedent) have gnawed away at these limitations, but many of the inroads they have made were based on the fact that Buck vs. Bell and many of the other decisions in that vein (and many of the statutes adjudicated therein) were based on really bad science (eg ideas such as that epilepsy is hereditary, and that bearing an illegitimate child is proof of hereditary mental retardation.) The point is that most of the limitations on people with mental illness and mental retardation bear on the constitutionally guaranteed rights of liberty and the pursuit of happiness. How is that any less serious than the Second Amendment?
I’m neither a scholar nor a lawyer, but…. I subscribe to the idea of “certain unalienable rights,” Whether or not those rights will be allowed or tolerated by a society is always up for debate. Obviously, we lack a consensus on which rights are unalienable.
While it’s understandable that certain persons lose or forfeit their rights by committing certain crimes, or that others might have their rights curtailed due to mental incapacity, it’s ground that needs to be tread carefully. Three Felonies a Day outlines how prosecutors can and do abuse the legal system. Many think the suicide of Aaron Swartz was due to grossly over zealous prosecution. Government now routinely denies due process via asset forfeiture for the slightest reason.
Defining mental illness provides no less of a challenge and more room for abuse. Mental health professionals disagree on what constitutes mental illness. Professional mental health organizations carry political agendas. The American Psychological Association carries water for many liberal causes.
As for 300 million people forming a democratic republic, resorting to federalism of the “a system of government in which sovereignty is constitutionally divided between a central governing authority and constituent political units (such as states or provinces)” provides a workable system. However, today’s line of thought dictates that every oine every where should be under the vanilla control of the fedearl government. That peple in Montana should conform to all the same rules as people in New York city. But, we have New Yorker megalomaniac Michael Bloomberg trying to force everyone to his standards. For a belief system that talks so much about diversity, liberalism certainly tries to do the opposite and impose conformity of thought and action.
Lastly, I’m glad Holder had a microphone in his hand and not something else.
While it’s understandable that certain persons lose or forfeit their rights by committing certain crimes, or that others might have their rights curtailed due to mental incapacity, it’s ground that needs to be tread carefully.
My good DAD,
Here is the logical problem with your statement. We can place a person entirely outside the realm where rights are understood and articulated as rights. We do this routinely with say, desks or philodendrons: rights simply do not apply to them. This is the classical concept of outlawry: the individual is no longer within the human realm of rights and laws; with respect to society, he has become indistinguishable from desks or philodendrons.
But to say that rights apply to all, then to say that they may be selectively abrogated – for felons, for the mentally ill, for whomever or whatever class of whomevers Eric Holder deems appropriate next – is to betray that what we were referring to were really never rights to begin with, only conditional privileges.
My contention is that it was in the incremental transition from wholesale outlawry to something emotionally and psychologically less harsh socially (“Does he have to lose all his rights? That seems so mean. What if we just take away one, or even just a little bit of one?”) that the entire concept of rights itself came to be displaced by something entirely different – in the manner in which a robin can unwittingly end up hatching the egg of a cowbird – something that Eric Holder can apparently bestow or withdraw unilaterally.
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
I can’t say I have an adequate response. I see rights as something you are entitled to simply by fate of birth. (But, then, there are those who don’t think you are entitled to birth.) In a comment a week or two ago, I believe Steve stated that rights were what you are describing, i.e. privileges mutually agreed upon by a large enough group in society.
The greatest problem with rights seems to be balancing the rights of one person against another’s or the rights of the whole. This is were the rub comes in. If you violate the rights of someone else seriously enough should you lose your rights, or some of them? Should a mentally incompetent person, who may quite likely violate the rights of other due to mental infirmity, have restrictions on his rights? If the answer to either one of these questions is “yes,” does that change our “rights” to “privileges.”
In our present culture, people largely misunderstand rights. Equality is seen as a right. Equality under the law is a right, equality is a state of being. Many people think you have a constitutionally guaranteed right to drive, but you don’t.
As for Holder, for him to bestow or withdraw rights at his whimsy absolutely destroys the idea of rights. I’d rather live in a riskier world than have my “rights” decided by the likes of Holder, et al. In the cases of violent crimes, I think it is reasonable to limit a person’s right/privileges. In the cases of mental illness, i’m not so sure. In Eric Holder’s case, I doubt he cares much about our rights.
H.M.: What would be the alternative to the “incremental transition from wholesale outlawry” that you describe? Would we have to either mandate the death penalty for every criminal offense, or send all criminals into permanent exile on some remote island–completely outside, as you say, “the human realm of rights and laws”? And would it be a good thing for us to treat certain people as if they were desks or philodendrons? I don’t say that facetiously; I see the problem you describe–paradoxically, by trying to preserve some rights for offenders, we make all rights less secure for everyone–but I don’t see how it can be avoided, and I’m interested in your take on that.
My good Jack,
The death penalty and imprisonment are the closest modern equivalent to banishment from the tribe; there is, of course, no “outside” anymore. By contrast, parsing rights out individually or incrementally by social caste – the executive, the LEO, the felon, the hunter, the average homeowner, the next category Eric Holder may arrive at – leaves us effectively with the architecture of privilege of an aristocracy or of a hive.
I am not sure what you are seeking in your question “would it be a good thing for us to treat certain people as if they were desks or philodendrons?”. While we go through any number of rituals to make ourselves feel better while doing so, at the end of an execution we have deliberately converted a formerly living human being into a now decaying mass of meat.
Ultimately the question seems to be whether we have what would appear by contrast to be the atavistically cruel social will to maintain a polity wherein rights remain rights rather than are always imminently in peril of decaying into something lesser but which something lesser leaves us feeling better about ourselves emotionally and psychologically.
Why should we be so hard on ourselves as to maintain a realm of rights?
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
H.M.: Thanks for your follow-up. I agree with you about the dehumanizing reality of the death penalty. I guess I’m still not clear about our options, though: how could we have avoided this “incremental” slippery slope on which rights gradually become privileges, and how can we get off it now? In a larger sense, aren’t our rights always “in peril,” either from whatever government exists, or from other people in the absence of government? (BTW, I’m beginning to think you really don’t like Eric Holder…)
My good Jack,
To an undeterminible extent, the purest definition of rights I am abstractly describing precedes our founding; the decay was already in process and thus baked in at the beginning. That said, what could have been done since, previously to maintain the values founded is not to have incrementally compromised, ever, but we were either ignorant or short-sighted about the ultimate consequences of compromise or we preferred the comfort of compromise to the discomfort of not compromising, probably some of both. Here is an extreme example: a very large number of Africans, seldom if ever heralded, never compromised with the concept of becoming enslaved. Ironically, because in most cases they held the value of their freedom higher than they held the value of their lives, most or many of them did not reproduce and pass those values down.
At this point there is no way out: there is not a population sufficiently large that values rights as rights over the costs of maintaining them as such to effect a change of course.
In a larger sense, you are talking about something entirely diffent: you are talking about people taking away rights. I am talking about people voluntarily acceding to the dilution of their own concept of rights.
Re: Holder: Replace his name with the name of anyone you wish who speaks of rights the way Holder does in the video. Holder is only important insofar as he is on deck now.
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
H.M.: I’m always saddened to hear that “at this point, there may be no way out.” Your suggestion that the incremental surrender/erosion of rights was “baked in at the beginning” reminds me of what I’ve often heard people say about Christianity–that as soon as it was written down, things started to go wrong. In any case, you’re right about the distinction between rights being taken away and rights being voluntarily (if sometimes unwittingly) ceded; I should have said that “rights are always in peril either from government, from other people, or from ourselves.” Is this another instance where we can quote Pogo and let it go at that?
Just exactly how was Holder going to bestow, alter or take away rights?
Steve
As far as I can tell, he’s going to make a list, he and Obama are going to check it twice and then decide who’s naughty or nice.
Let me see if, while oversimplifying, I can make things more starkly clear.
Let us say that one has an established right to keep and bear arms, but that we have also established that we are willing to banish duly adjudicated felons from our realm of rights.
What then, are our choices with respect to the felon’s prior and post right to keep and bear arms?
1) We can execute him, thus permanently removing him from our realm of rights.
2) We can imprison him for life. While a felon on detour from the realm of rights by being imprisoned, we are not obligated to furnish his world with arms.
3) If and when he completes his sentence, though, he is no longer a felon. He has been returned to the realm of rights. Thus he regains the right to keep and bear arms, no matter that his first act might be to murder a random child -your child – with one.
Choose one of those three, nothing else. Such a Sophie’s Choice becomes too difficult for most moderns. Thus
4) We can amend our understanding of rights for all to now instead mean rights for most, depending, leaving open which people will be included in “most” and which, as Holder articulates, may or may become excluded categories.
Again, run this exercise with any clearly articulated fundamental right: sadly, rights always ultimately seem to become too heavy a burden to bear relative to alternative world of perceived comfort.
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
- For an excellent portrayal of an uncompromised perception of rights, see the performance of the African actor Ade Sapara in the 1988 film Crusoe.
All rights have limits and modifications. Free speech doesnt mean you get to cry fire in a crowded building when there is no fire. You lose your liberty when convicted of a crime.
” If and when he completes his sentence, though, he is no longer a felon.”
I dont see any reason we cant have an extended parole, which could be a 4th option.
Steve
My good Steve,
You do not understand rights. Rights which are rights, not privileges, cannot have “limits and modifications”: the “limits and modifications” either are the originals of the rights themselves, or they are abrogations of those original rights. To put it in your universe of terms, there are as many limited and modified rights as there are limited and modified pregnancies.
The right of free speech an example where the limit and modification is actually the whole of the right itself, the right to voice one’s opinion in the public square, including even the right, as you observe, to truthfully warn fellow theater goers of fire. It is not a right to falsely use the threat of fire solely as a weapon of terrorism.
Here, however, would be an example of, not a limitation or modification, but rather an actual abrogation of the right of free speech: it should logically be a consistent use of the right of free speech to opine that the country would be better off if a public figure, even the President, were assassinated. While many might find such a sentiment hateful, it nevertheless full falls within ostensibly fully protected political speech. As a matter of practice, however, voicing such an opinion will earn one an unpleasant visit from the Secret Service with possibly even more unpleasant consequences. The more direct course of actually threatening the life of the President is, of course, just that, a threat, a directly predatory action in words. (I leave myself open to be advised as to what actual case law has rendered.)
Universal extended parole is, in effect, the paradigm Eric Holder is applying to the population at large, with Obama and Holder as the parole officers.
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
H.M.: I hate to keep asking for clarification, but I really don’t know what you mean when you say that “limits and modifications either are the originals of the rights themselves, or they are abrogations of those rights.” Are you saying that rights–say, freedom of speech–are self-limiting in some noncontroversial way, and that we all know and agree on what the limits are?
As you no doubt know, Blackstone differentiated between “absolute rights” (or “natural liberty”) which individuals possess merely by dint of being human, and the “civil liberties” they enjoy as members of a society. Here’s the passage, followed by the link:
“The absolute rights of man, considered as a free agent, endowed with discernment to know good from evil, and with power of choosing those measures which appear to him to be most desirable, are usually summed up in one general appellation, and denominated the natural liberty of mankind. This natural liberty consists properly in a power of acting as one thinks fit, without any restraint or control, unless by the law of nature; being a right inherent in us by birth, and one of the gifts of God to man at his creation, when he endued him with the faculty of free will. But every man, when he enters into society, gives up a part of his natural liberty, as the price of so valuable a purchase; and, in consideration of receiving the advantages of mutual commerce, obliges himself to conform to those laws, which the community has thought proper to establish.. And this species of legal obedience and conformity is infinitely more desirable than that wild and savage liberty which is sacrificed to obtain it. For no man that considers a moment would wish to retain the absolute and uncontrolled power of doing whatever he pleases: the consequence of which is, that every other man would also have the same power, and then there would be no security to individuals in any of the enjoyments of life. Political, therefore, or civil liberty, which is that of a member of society, is no other than natural liberty so far restrained by human laws (and no farther) as is necessary and expedient for the general advantage of the public.(c) Hence we may collect that the law, which restrains a man from doing mischief to his fellow-citizens, though it diminishes the natural, increases the civil liberty of mankind.” (Blackstone, On the Absolute Rights of Individuals (1753))
http://oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1415&Itemid=262
So are you talking about “absolute rights” which exist prior to any social compact, or about the “civil liberty” which follows from being a member of a society, and which Blackstone seems to say necessary entails some abrogation of that preexisting liberty? Or am I just confused (it wouldn’t be the first time)?
H.M.: I hate to keep asking for clarification, but I really don’t know what you mean when you say that “limits and modifications either are the originals of the rights themselves, or they are abrogations of those rights.” Are you saying that rights–say, freedom of speech–are self-limiting in some noncontroversial way, and that we all know and agree on what the limits are?
My good Jack,
No.
No.
I am saying that the concept of rights as rights does not allow for there to be such a thing as a limited right, any more than there can be such a thing as a potential right. Like an integer, a right either exists in its totality or it doesn’t. Either the scope of what is described as the limitation is in actuality all there is to the right already, or that which is described as a limited right is in actuality a right abrogated entirely, replaced at best by a privilege.
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
Where do our rights come from? A creator? Sufficiently abstract moral laws? Politicians and attorneys general elected by the majority of the popular vote and electoral college to cleave to the Constitution?
It’s certainly then up to the rest of us, based on our founding documents, to decide how our the 2nd amendment should be interpreted by judges, Presidents and lawyers at the ballot box, and maybe during public discussion.
This seems similar to an argument that Robert Bork made about the living document folks. They would sufficiently erode the intellectual and moral foundations and intent of the founders by washing away the soil of religion. This would grow a weaker, more dependent society where the leaders would set themselves up to be the only people capable of leading. They would be immanentizing the eschaton.
As to the 2nd amendment, I suspect Obama and Holder have always been anti-gun, and where popular sentiment failed, and trotting out children, they’ve again gone to the powers of the President under executive order. There are cases to be made that there should be limitations on who gets guns, and why, and who is in the “realm of rights” as you put it, and who restricted by our laws, is outside of that realm due to a felonious past, mental instability etc.
The anti-gun crowd likely want much more than that though, because their vision of how society should be doesn’t involve guns (more understandable in an inner city with drug thugs, illegal guns and high mortality rates). They want a lot of change very quickly, and there may be underlying ideas about who ought to be in charge, and why.
Chris N.: It’s a small world, as they say–I had just finished reading a piece about Eric Voegelin, and then I check this site and see your comment about “immanentizing the eschaton”. It may be time to popularize a “Six Degrees of Eric Voegelin” game. More seriously, I think your question “Where do our rights come from?” is at the heart of this matter, as H.M. has been explaining.
Rights are little codified packets of will: “I will speak freely”, “No means no”, “This property is mine”, “I will bear arms”, and so forth. They serve as an enduring reference to our will for others, but equally as importantly, for ourselves: these, we constantly remind ourselves, are our highest values, values which separate us from animals because we hold them higher than mere life itself.
Whether they come from God, are inspired by God, or whether they are purely our own heuristic creations is ultimately moot: if we ourselves do not promulgate, maintain and defend them, they will melt away and vanish to the favor of others with competing wills who have maintained theirs.
But, as mentioned previously, we can always define them downward, we can always settle for less in exchange for a less self-taxing existence.
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
I personally am more interested in hearing from MI in a particular manner: more than any clerical collection of legal citations, I would like his own reasoned opinion of how this collision comes to be accepted as logical within the legal mind.
Honestly, I’m honored, but I’m not sure I can provide an adequate answer. Perhaps I’m misunderstanding the question, but methinks a proper response would require a far better knowledge of modern constitutional law than I currently possess (or am ever likely to possess, for that matter). Perhaps the best I can do, at least in the Second Amendment context, is refer any interested readers to Eugene Volokh’s 2009 article, “Implementing the Right to Keep and Bear Arms for Self-Defense: An Analytical Framework and a Research Agenda,” which considers various ways in which Second Amendment rights may be limited.
My good MI,
If you are so inclined, just tell us what you think.
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
As I understand it, restrictions on liberty may be affirmed if a) the action restricted falls outside the scope of what a given constitutional right protects; or b) if the restriction does affect actions within the scope of a constitutional right, it nevertheless satisfies some sort of judicially-accepted standard of review (e.g., strict scrutiny, intermediate scrutiny, rational basis).
Jack,
It’s a small world!
H.M
I respectfully disagree, as I think it matters. If we have no epistemological foundations for that which is assumed to be a universal, or transcendent truth, then we’ve got some issues maintaing the boundaries of rights, but I take your argument.
This is the main problem I have with progressives, and modern liberalism more generally, and why it can be so troublingly dismissive of rights as defined in the Constitution, and those of the 2nd amendment.
My good Chris,
You are certainly free to respectfully disagree, but you are still left with two consequences, nonetheless.
First, already mentioned, it is you who still must voice, promulgate, maintain, and defend your rights, with your life if required. God will not do so for you in the absence of you or some alternate human doing so entirely themselves, or at least he has not done so in commonly experienced history.
Second, if you require God as a basis of rights, you leave the unbeliever embarassingly unable now to explain how he nonetheless successfully voices, promulgates, maintains, and defends his own. And yet he does so, including the right not to believe.
None of this is to say, of course, that God cannot be that basis which drives believers to voice, promulgate, maintain, and defend the rights they do.
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
H.M, as to an old philosophical problem: Is there some source of knowledge, or fundamental structure underlying the natural world, that transcends our experience of it? I remain a Kantian agnostic on that front: our reason simply won’t allow us to know, but that also requires accepting Kant’s vast metaphysics, which I have trouble with. It’s the last place I’ve left my thinking.
Obviously, moral thinking is not exclusive to religion, but it gets tricky when one is trying to establish foundations of knowledge (the source of rights, the oughts, ethics) and not having some basis for universality (and I will grant I can’t offer good empirical evidence for the existence of God).
I never really said I required a God as a basis of natural rights, but rather that those who do provide a vital defense against the very problem you raised in your post. I’m ok with religion when, as defined in the Constitution, there is no specific religious test for office. Much danger comes from the progressives, the nihilists, the postmoderns, the Continentals, the post-Hegelian rationalists (Marxists Communists Socialists, many secular humanists) as far as liberty is concerned. The liberal State is no longer liberal once it seeks to root out discrimination, for example.
It’s why I can’t call myself a liberal. I”ll make peace with the free exercise of religion, but there’s plenty to be worried about, to say the least. I’ll make peace with liberalism when it stops trying to force me under collectivist political philosophies which erode my political and economic freedoms. I don’t find Rawls, Martha Nussbaum, J.S. Mill etc. satisfactorily providing an epistemological basis for the liberal project, and knowledge, and the oughts, ethics and duties.
Actually, they don’t convince me they’ve properly understood human nature and what I understand of history for that matter. Liberals have the same problems with power.
That’s a long-winded response, I know.
Chris: I don’t mean to horn in on your dialogue with H.M., and I can tell from your last post that I’m way over my head (Kant, post-Hegelians, Rawls, Nussbaum etc.)–but I wonder if you could clarify one point I found particularly interesting: “The liberal State is no longer liberal once it seeks to root out discrimination…” That, as you obviously know, has been a huge part of the “liberal project” for at least the last fifty years or longer; could you explain a bit (when you get a chance) what you mean? Thanks…