We have to parse the “cultural issues” into different subdivisions. Someone can oppose the tyrannical agenda of the religious right and at the same time want to see tougher measures taken against violent crime, greater encouragement of the indigent to work if they can, and a limit on the number of people who can enter the United States without complying with our immigration laws.
Supporting abortion rights, LGBTQ rights, and opposing government favoritism for religion can be seen as struggling to uphold individual choice and personal libertarian freedoms. In fact, true conservatives who want to see limited government should have joined with liberals to oppose the religious right ever since such advocates of religious hegemony came to power in the 1980 presidential elections. Former New York governor, Mario Cuomo, was absolutely on target when he once said that it is rank hypocrisy for the religious right to preach to us, the American people, about limited government; and then to turn around and try to tell us what God to believe in and how to apply the judgment of that God to our bodies and our bedrooms.
The Democratic Party should continue to champion the freedoms that are within the general category of the separation of church and state. However, the party should also demonstrate a greater willingness to accommodate those who fear violent crime and want everyone to do at least some work if they are able to. There can be many good faith views on immigration. However, Democrats must abandon the tendency to label anyone as racist who believes that only lawful entry into the United States should be allowed. Such a view can be held without the slightest hint of ethnic or racial prejudice. The party must also recognize that someone can express concern about the crossing over of identity politics into reverse racism without being racist.
Democrats must also reaffirm the universal, non partisan nature of free expression under the First Amendment. Anyone who maintains that anti Israel demonstrators who actually blockaded access to various parts of a campus should face no consequences for their actions, should also affirm that if pro Israel demonstrators acted in an identical manner, they, too, should be immune from any accountability for their actions.
A Democratic Party that would continue its current overall support for the “personal freedoms” issues but be more welcoming of those with more moderate positions on other issues would be a better political force than it currently is.
I largely agree with what you've just said but I have to ask: how is it hypocritical for an advocate of limited government to tell you or me what god to believe in or how to behave in order to comply with some deity's supposed commands? Impertinent and annoying though it may be, merely preaching to nonbelievers does not violate their civil rights or otherwise constrain their freedom. Nor, for that matter, do I see why it would be fair to call someone who advocates lower taxes, less regulation of commerce, cutting government spending, etc. a hypocrite if, because of religious scruples, he's also in favor of restricting or banning abortion. (FWIW, I am agnostic.)
Obviously, if religious right political operatives and elected officials were to have all along stated their moral objections to the exercise of certain freedoms, but always added in that they don’t want to see those freedoms outlawed and then punished by the police power of the state, there would be no functioning hypocrisy for us to worry about.
This is not however what they have been doing since they came to power in 1981. In 2003, when the Supreme Court finally ruled that all remaining state laws that criminalized same sex intimacy among consenting adults are no longer valid, the religious right strenuously opposed this ruling. They wanted, in that case, Texas to be able to continue to be able to arrest adults of the same gender who have sex with each other even in the privacy of their own home.
Before and during the time that the Supreme Court ruled that there is constitutional protection for same sex marriage, I saw a letter that a religious right wing legal group sent to its members. The letter said that this organization was opposing the legalization of same sex marriage in order to protect “our” freedoms. One’s freedom is not legitimately jeopardized because society allows others to be able to legally do things that the religious objector believes should be prohibited. Heterosexual married couples can’t make a viable claim that their legal rights are endangered because two men, married to each other, live next door.
I can’t claim that my right to enjoy a tuna fish sandwich is interfered with because somebody in the next booth ordered scrambled eggs.
If someone believes in limited government, it is a contradiction to want abortion banned for everyone, just because of the religious believer’s faith. If you favor limited government, you can’t make an exception in order for government to be able to enact enforceable prohibitions so that your religious beliefs can be imposed on others.
I agree that it makes no sense to say that same-sex marriage should be banned in order to protect anyone's freedom. (It would make sense, however, to say that a Supreme Court ruling that every state government must recognize same-sex marriage and give it the same legal status as marriage between men and women infringes democratic sovereignty. I'm not saying that's a compelling argument -- the same can be said of all constitutional limits on the authority of popularly-elected legislatures -- but it's true.)
Since it's rightwingers you're accusing of hypocrisy here, I assume what you mean by "someone who believes in limited government" is someone in favor of relaxing regulatory restrictions on private enterprise. I don't see how that's logically inconsistent with advocating restrictions on abortion; it makes no more sense to me than saying economic laissez-faire conservatism is logically inconsistent with advocating criminal sanctions for theft or murder. Arguing that we should be free to do A or B doesn't necessarily imply that we should also be free to do X, Y, or Z. (Don't get me wrong; I'm not antiabortion, and nothing I've just said implies that abortion should be banned.)
Thank you, those are important points. It's also worth mentioning that the cultural Left is happy to use government power to force its opinions on the electorate, from public education that that normalizes homosexuality -- note that it's correct for public education to teach that homosexuals are equal before the law and inviolate in their persons and property, but claims about whether the behavior is good or bad is beyond the competency of the government and a usurpation of parental authority -- to refusing public services to citizens because of their religiosity (ala First Lutheran and the Maine school-voucher case).
The very idea that agnostic-progressives and religious-conservatives are such different kinds of people that these abuse the system in ways that those don't, given the same opportunities, is very un-progressive.
Here’s where it is inconsistent. If the religious right from the outset made a clear distinction between it’s support for the absence of economic regulation but always clearly delineated where the police power of the state should stop consenting adults from doing what they want in private, we could argue about each specific instance.
However, the religious right has always made generic statements about the need for limited government, as have other advocates of right wing policy. Pat Robertson and Jerrry Falwell never acknowledged that there is an apparent contradiction between their call for limited government and their desire to see their religious views imposed on others, even in the privacy of others’ own homes.
It would have been different if, all the way back to 1981, when the religious right came to power with the Reagan Administration, they attempted to explain why government should be able to burst into the bedroom of two consenting adults but not still not be permitted to place certain regulations on manufacturers whose emissions cause pollution.
They never attempted to make a constitutional argument about why government should not regulate in the realm of freedoms they support but be free to crackdown on behavior that they regard as violating their religious mores.
If the purpose of the Bill of Rights was to empower the individual, then it doesn’t matter if the freedom in question is trampled on by a state or by the federal government. That freedom is still being encroached upon by government with the power to stop people from exercising that liberty.
The 10th Amendment says: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” This gives both the states and the people authority. However, when there is a conflict between a state government and an individual’s quest for personal freedom, we have the 9th Amendment which says: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”
This shows that where there is a conflict between branches of government seeking to interfere in one’s personal liberty, particularly in an area where if individuals can do what they want they won’t be hurting others, the Bill of Rights leans in favor of the individual versus any division of government. This was then made more explicit when the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868 incorporating the Bill of Rights to apply to the states.
If one advocates for banning abortion due to one’s religious beliefs, the encroachment on the individual liberties of others stems from wanting the government to forcibly impose one’s religious views on the rest of society.
Again, had the religious right from the very beginning attempted to explain their constitutional theory as to why government should not be permitted to regulate certain financial activities but should be permitted to regulate certain intimate personal conduct, even if carried out in one’s own home, we could explore the applicability to of the Constitution to each proposed area of activity.
Even if their attempts to explain away their views were inconsistent at least the hypocritical nature of their views on government intervention would not be as stark as Cuomo commented on.
However, even so, it would still be hypocritical of that religious right legal group to call for individual freedom and then claim that their individual liberties are being compromised if two people of the same gender are permitted to legally marry each other. If one still doesn’t like the word “hypocritical,” though I think it applies here, one could replace that term with “double standard.”
"It would have been different if ... when the religious right came to power with the Reagan Administration, they attempted to explain why government should be able to burst into the bedroom of two consenting adults ...."
If Reagan ever advocated criminal prosecution for any sort of consensual sex between adults in the privacy of their bedrooms or if that was a plank of the Republican platform in 1980 or '84 it's news to me.
Evangelical protestants predominantly supported Reagan because his political conservatism and get-tough defense and foreign-policy proposals jibed with their own preferences, but I don't think it's fair to say that the religious right "came to power" with the Reagan administration.
William Galston: "We're now going to go through at least five months ... of Republican vilification of the judicial system .... [T]rust in institutions has declined so far in recent decades .... The judiciary has been somewhat exempt from this process until recently, but, led by the Supreme Court, public confidence in our judicial system has been declining as well."
As eminent a legal expert as Allen Dershowitz, a lifelong Democrat who voted against Trump in '16 and '20, has castigated the prosecutor and the presiding judge in the recently concluded trial in New York for waging politically-motivated "lawfare," based on a specious legal theory compounded with tendentious jury instructions, with the evident intention of squelching the campaign of the preeminent, and sole remaining, Republican contender for the upcoming presidential election. Yet, without bothering to address such criticism on the merits you blame those raising (or echoing) it for undermining confidence in our judicial system -- thus tacitly implying that the criticism is unwarranted rather than attempting to persuade us of that through rational discourse.
Yet as regards the role of the Supreme Court you seem to see it the other way around, implying that the rulings and/or conduct of current members have undermined public confidence in the system, not the vehement criticism of some of its recent holdings or the highly publicized personal attacks against some of its members, of which you say nothing.
In general, I assume the more conservative members here are quite comfortable with the unstated assumptions that "we" want Democrats to win and support various progressive positions. We're here by choice and we know where "here" is. Still, slipping in tendentious characterization of facts should be checked.
Galston really nails it in the last four paragraphs of this discussion. If you want supporting evidence, go to Spotify and listen to Chrissie Hynde and The Pretenders do "My City Was Gone", Bruce Springsteen sing "My Hometown", or James McMurtry's angry "We Can't Make It Here Anymore". Hearing Hillary Clinton tell out of work West Virginia coal miners that they needed to "learn to code" is as good a lesson as it gets to why the working class left the Democrats in droves, and few Dems seemed to care.
An effective ideological realignment would make possible national consensus, necessary for good governance. A realignment ought to be based on rectifications of historic errors. First, divisive leftist identity politics must be replaced with cultural pluralism, grounded in a progressive reading of the founding principles of the American Republic, with a nationalist stamp. Diversity must be rooted in continuity. The absence of such a proposal, in the context of the changed demographics of the nation for the last half century, well illustrates the failure of national political leaders. Secondly, the political establishment must be discredited for its irresponsible foreign policy of economic and militaristic attacks on the nations and peoples of the global South since the 1980s, which have provoked an uncontrollable migration to the global North. The nation needs to turn to a project of cooperation with the nations of the world in promoting the common economic development of all nations and peoples, combined with enforcement of immigration laws and effective control of international migration. Thirdly, strong government must be dissociated from Big Government and government spending. A strong state mobilizes private and public resources and the people in a national struggle to attain well-conceived national goals.
We have to parse the “cultural issues” into different subdivisions. Someone can oppose the tyrannical agenda of the religious right and at the same time want to see tougher measures taken against violent crime, greater encouragement of the indigent to work if they can, and a limit on the number of people who can enter the United States without complying with our immigration laws.
Supporting abortion rights, LGBTQ rights, and opposing government favoritism for religion can be seen as struggling to uphold individual choice and personal libertarian freedoms. In fact, true conservatives who want to see limited government should have joined with liberals to oppose the religious right ever since such advocates of religious hegemony came to power in the 1980 presidential elections. Former New York governor, Mario Cuomo, was absolutely on target when he once said that it is rank hypocrisy for the religious right to preach to us, the American people, about limited government; and then to turn around and try to tell us what God to believe in and how to apply the judgment of that God to our bodies and our bedrooms.
The Democratic Party should continue to champion the freedoms that are within the general category of the separation of church and state. However, the party should also demonstrate a greater willingness to accommodate those who fear violent crime and want everyone to do at least some work if they are able to. There can be many good faith views on immigration. However, Democrats must abandon the tendency to label anyone as racist who believes that only lawful entry into the United States should be allowed. Such a view can be held without the slightest hint of ethnic or racial prejudice. The party must also recognize that someone can express concern about the crossing over of identity politics into reverse racism without being racist.
Democrats must also reaffirm the universal, non partisan nature of free expression under the First Amendment. Anyone who maintains that anti Israel demonstrators who actually blockaded access to various parts of a campus should face no consequences for their actions, should also affirm that if pro Israel demonstrators acted in an identical manner, they, too, should be immune from any accountability for their actions.
A Democratic Party that would continue its current overall support for the “personal freedoms” issues but be more welcoming of those with more moderate positions on other issues would be a better political force than it currently is.
I largely agree with what you've just said but I have to ask: how is it hypocritical for an advocate of limited government to tell you or me what god to believe in or how to behave in order to comply with some deity's supposed commands? Impertinent and annoying though it may be, merely preaching to nonbelievers does not violate their civil rights or otherwise constrain their freedom. Nor, for that matter, do I see why it would be fair to call someone who advocates lower taxes, less regulation of commerce, cutting government spending, etc. a hypocrite if, because of religious scruples, he's also in favor of restricting or banning abortion. (FWIW, I am agnostic.)
Obviously, if religious right political operatives and elected officials were to have all along stated their moral objections to the exercise of certain freedoms, but always added in that they don’t want to see those freedoms outlawed and then punished by the police power of the state, there would be no functioning hypocrisy for us to worry about.
This is not however what they have been doing since they came to power in 1981. In 2003, when the Supreme Court finally ruled that all remaining state laws that criminalized same sex intimacy among consenting adults are no longer valid, the religious right strenuously opposed this ruling. They wanted, in that case, Texas to be able to continue to be able to arrest adults of the same gender who have sex with each other even in the privacy of their own home.
Before and during the time that the Supreme Court ruled that there is constitutional protection for same sex marriage, I saw a letter that a religious right wing legal group sent to its members. The letter said that this organization was opposing the legalization of same sex marriage in order to protect “our” freedoms. One’s freedom is not legitimately jeopardized because society allows others to be able to legally do things that the religious objector believes should be prohibited. Heterosexual married couples can’t make a viable claim that their legal rights are endangered because two men, married to each other, live next door.
I can’t claim that my right to enjoy a tuna fish sandwich is interfered with because somebody in the next booth ordered scrambled eggs.
If someone believes in limited government, it is a contradiction to want abortion banned for everyone, just because of the religious believer’s faith. If you favor limited government, you can’t make an exception in order for government to be able to enact enforceable prohibitions so that your religious beliefs can be imposed on others.
I agree that it makes no sense to say that same-sex marriage should be banned in order to protect anyone's freedom. (It would make sense, however, to say that a Supreme Court ruling that every state government must recognize same-sex marriage and give it the same legal status as marriage between men and women infringes democratic sovereignty. I'm not saying that's a compelling argument -- the same can be said of all constitutional limits on the authority of popularly-elected legislatures -- but it's true.)
Since it's rightwingers you're accusing of hypocrisy here, I assume what you mean by "someone who believes in limited government" is someone in favor of relaxing regulatory restrictions on private enterprise. I don't see how that's logically inconsistent with advocating restrictions on abortion; it makes no more sense to me than saying economic laissez-faire conservatism is logically inconsistent with advocating criminal sanctions for theft or murder. Arguing that we should be free to do A or B doesn't necessarily imply that we should also be free to do X, Y, or Z. (Don't get me wrong; I'm not antiabortion, and nothing I've just said implies that abortion should be banned.)
Thank you, those are important points. It's also worth mentioning that the cultural Left is happy to use government power to force its opinions on the electorate, from public education that that normalizes homosexuality -- note that it's correct for public education to teach that homosexuals are equal before the law and inviolate in their persons and property, but claims about whether the behavior is good or bad is beyond the competency of the government and a usurpation of parental authority -- to refusing public services to citizens because of their religiosity (ala First Lutheran and the Maine school-voucher case).
The very idea that agnostic-progressives and religious-conservatives are such different kinds of people that these abuse the system in ways that those don't, given the same opportunities, is very un-progressive.
Here’s where it is inconsistent. If the religious right from the outset made a clear distinction between it’s support for the absence of economic regulation but always clearly delineated where the police power of the state should stop consenting adults from doing what they want in private, we could argue about each specific instance.
However, the religious right has always made generic statements about the need for limited government, as have other advocates of right wing policy. Pat Robertson and Jerrry Falwell never acknowledged that there is an apparent contradiction between their call for limited government and their desire to see their religious views imposed on others, even in the privacy of others’ own homes.
It would have been different if, all the way back to 1981, when the religious right came to power with the Reagan Administration, they attempted to explain why government should be able to burst into the bedroom of two consenting adults but not still not be permitted to place certain regulations on manufacturers whose emissions cause pollution.
They never attempted to make a constitutional argument about why government should not regulate in the realm of freedoms they support but be free to crackdown on behavior that they regard as violating their religious mores.
If the purpose of the Bill of Rights was to empower the individual, then it doesn’t matter if the freedom in question is trampled on by a state or by the federal government. That freedom is still being encroached upon by government with the power to stop people from exercising that liberty.
The 10th Amendment says: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” This gives both the states and the people authority. However, when there is a conflict between a state government and an individual’s quest for personal freedom, we have the 9th Amendment which says: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”
This shows that where there is a conflict between branches of government seeking to interfere in one’s personal liberty, particularly in an area where if individuals can do what they want they won’t be hurting others, the Bill of Rights leans in favor of the individual versus any division of government. This was then made more explicit when the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868 incorporating the Bill of Rights to apply to the states.
If one advocates for banning abortion due to one’s religious beliefs, the encroachment on the individual liberties of others stems from wanting the government to forcibly impose one’s religious views on the rest of society.
Again, had the religious right from the very beginning attempted to explain their constitutional theory as to why government should not be permitted to regulate certain financial activities but should be permitted to regulate certain intimate personal conduct, even if carried out in one’s own home, we could explore the applicability to of the Constitution to each proposed area of activity.
Even if their attempts to explain away their views were inconsistent at least the hypocritical nature of their views on government intervention would not be as stark as Cuomo commented on.
However, even so, it would still be hypocritical of that religious right legal group to call for individual freedom and then claim that their individual liberties are being compromised if two people of the same gender are permitted to legally marry each other. If one still doesn’t like the word “hypocritical,” though I think it applies here, one could replace that term with “double standard.”
"It would have been different if ... when the religious right came to power with the Reagan Administration, they attempted to explain why government should be able to burst into the bedroom of two consenting adults ...."
If Reagan ever advocated criminal prosecution for any sort of consensual sex between adults in the privacy of their bedrooms or if that was a plank of the Republican platform in 1980 or '84 it's news to me.
Evangelical protestants predominantly supported Reagan because his political conservatism and get-tough defense and foreign-policy proposals jibed with their own preferences, but I don't think it's fair to say that the religious right "came to power" with the Reagan administration.
William Galston: "We're now going to go through at least five months ... of Republican vilification of the judicial system .... [T]rust in institutions has declined so far in recent decades .... The judiciary has been somewhat exempt from this process until recently, but, led by the Supreme Court, public confidence in our judicial system has been declining as well."
As eminent a legal expert as Allen Dershowitz, a lifelong Democrat who voted against Trump in '16 and '20, has castigated the prosecutor and the presiding judge in the recently concluded trial in New York for waging politically-motivated "lawfare," based on a specious legal theory compounded with tendentious jury instructions, with the evident intention of squelching the campaign of the preeminent, and sole remaining, Republican contender for the upcoming presidential election. Yet, without bothering to address such criticism on the merits you blame those raising (or echoing) it for undermining confidence in our judicial system -- thus tacitly implying that the criticism is unwarranted rather than attempting to persuade us of that through rational discourse.
Yet as regards the role of the Supreme Court you seem to see it the other way around, implying that the rulings and/or conduct of current members have undermined public confidence in the system, not the vehement criticism of some of its recent holdings or the highly publicized personal attacks against some of its members, of which you say nothing.
Exactly correct.
In general, I assume the more conservative members here are quite comfortable with the unstated assumptions that "we" want Democrats to win and support various progressive positions. We're here by choice and we know where "here" is. Still, slipping in tendentious characterization of facts should be checked.
Galston really nails it in the last four paragraphs of this discussion. If you want supporting evidence, go to Spotify and listen to Chrissie Hynde and The Pretenders do "My City Was Gone", Bruce Springsteen sing "My Hometown", or James McMurtry's angry "We Can't Make It Here Anymore". Hearing Hillary Clinton tell out of work West Virginia coal miners that they needed to "learn to code" is as good a lesson as it gets to why the working class left the Democrats in droves, and few Dems seemed to care.
An effective ideological realignment would make possible national consensus, necessary for good governance. A realignment ought to be based on rectifications of historic errors. First, divisive leftist identity politics must be replaced with cultural pluralism, grounded in a progressive reading of the founding principles of the American Republic, with a nationalist stamp. Diversity must be rooted in continuity. The absence of such a proposal, in the context of the changed demographics of the nation for the last half century, well illustrates the failure of national political leaders. Secondly, the political establishment must be discredited for its irresponsible foreign policy of economic and militaristic attacks on the nations and peoples of the global South since the 1980s, which have provoked an uncontrollable migration to the global North. The nation needs to turn to a project of cooperation with the nations of the world in promoting the common economic development of all nations and peoples, combined with enforcement of immigration laws and effective control of international migration. Thirdly, strong government must be dissociated from Big Government and government spending. A strong state mobilizes private and public resources and the people in a national struggle to attain well-conceived national goals.
https://charlesmckelvey.substack.com/