... A liberal order begins with the presumption of freedom — yes, including economic freedom — and then requires public justification when the government chooses to intervene (often for good reason!).
The cult of the common good reverses that presumption. It begins with an Official Version of the Good Life and then treats the law and politics as the way to direct people toward it.
... there is a world of difference between a government oriented around making it easier for people to live the lives they choose and a government that preordains certain paths and punishes you if you fall out of line.
... Many of my favorite political leaders have been overt about their own morality. In his second inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln urged “firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right,” while calling for “malice toward none” and “charity for all.”
I want political leaders whose moral convictions constrain their exercise of power, not leaders who use power to impose their moral convictions. ...
Well now, Lincoln used the power of the state to impose his moral convictions on the whole nation by force of arms, and punished it with 1.5 million casualties in the process. He most certainly did not constrain himself, and Union and Confederate soldiers didn't go about killing each other crying "Nothing personal! Just business!"
According to the left, the liberal order in America didn't truly begin until 1865 when this stain of slavery was finally removed, but it meant that Southerners were no longer allowed to live the lives they chose. One race of slaves was simply replaced with another.
Is America still that "liberal order"?
Yes! We routinely replace one group of slaves with another group of slaves.
Nearly 50% of teenagers 16-19 years old used to work in this country in the 1950s and the 1970s. Now just 30% do, and today we import low-wage H-2A farm labor in the hundreds of thousands from foreign countries to replace the almost 1 million American teenagers who used to do this kind of work in the 1950s. We don't want the crops to rot in the fields, but it's OK if the kids do in front of a screen.
While most people will conclude that it is a gross exaggeration to say that there are over 1 million living in involuntary servitude in the United States today, the number is not zero. The creepy evidence is probably just the tip of an iceberg.
How did that happen in a supposedly liberal order?
Meanwhile the right to life we all claim as our creed has not applied to 66 million aborted since 1973, because they are all dead! Mail-order abortion is making this easier than it has ever been.
"Freedom for me but not for thee" is not the definition of a true liberal order, but apparently that has always been our definition of it. It is our definition, and we aim to keep it.
The religious name for this is The United States of Total Depravity, the same yesterday, today, and forever, in liberal quantities.
