by Tim Sommers
Donald Trump is not running for President. He is running to be, as he openly says, “a dictator on day one.” He sometimes implies he will give up these dictatorial powers at some later point. But given that he fomented a coup to prevent the peaceful exchange of power the last time he lost an election, given that his Supreme Court has recently granted him sweeping immunity from prosecution for criminal conduct, and given that he has told Christian Nationalist supporters that if they elect him they would never have to vote again, Trump peacefully giving up dictatorial powers doesn’t seem likely. So, Trump is running for dictator. But it is equally important to be clear about what Trump is running against. It’s usually called liberalism.
Liberalism is the view that the most fundamental principle of justice is that everyone has certain basic rights, liberties, and freedoms. These freedoms are not arbitrary. These rights are the liberties required for people to pursue their own good in their own way (as John Stuart Mill put it) – including having some input on the political system as a whole (via democracy, for example).
The rule of law is one of those basic liberties – the oldest, in fact. It makes possible the rest by mandating that everyone, including the president or king, must obey the law – and that no one is above or beneath the law.
There’s also an epistemic side to liberalism. There are facts. These facts are often knowable. There are reliable, though fallible, procedures for arriving at them. These procedures and these facts are potentially available to everyone directly, via reasoning and empirical investigation, or indirectly from reliable sources. So, in addition to respecting the rights and liberties of everyone, our social institutions must be responsive to facts and expertise and avoid being overly political.
The basic liberties include, specifically, the (1) freedoms of the person (from physical and psychological assault, the right to bodily integrity, and autonomy), (2) liberties of conscience (freedom of thought, religion, expression, and association), (3) the rule of law (habeas corpus, due process, the right to own property, etc.), (4) political liberties (of thought, speech, assembly, press, voting, holding office, etc.)
(For another enumeration of these liberties, see the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution. (But don’t forget the Ninth Amendment which says, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” See also, the Reconstruction Amendments mandating equal protection, due process, and the right to vote for all.)
Liberalism was a response to the Wars of Religion which killed millions – as much as 30% of the population of some European countries – and raged on and off for two hundred years. Liberalism brought peace by taking questions of religious conscience, and later how to live the best life, out of the hands of governments and leaving them to individuals and voluntary associations. The philosophy behind liberalism was provided by the Enlightenment with its emphasis on freedom, knowledge, and faith that people could regulate their own lives.
“Liberalism” came to America in a big way during the Presidential election of 1932 both Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Both claimed to be the “true liberal” in the race. Hoover and his more laissez faire view lost to FDR’s New Deal liberalism – which included a commitment to fair equality of opportunity and concern with the material well-being of the least well off. Or, as FDR put it, there are four fundamental freedoms: of speech, of worship, from want, and from fear.
This style of liberalism was dominant in the U.S. until the 1980s when reactionary conservatives began an organized, well-funded, and sustained project to make liberalism mean something, anything, perceived as bad; e.g., Marxism, socialism, atheism, identity politics, etc. In the early 1990s, for example, Newt Gingrich, the Republican Speaker of the House, instructed his fellow Republicans to always use certain words when referring to liberals and democrats, including “bizarre”, “pathetic”, “radical”, “sick”, and “traitors”. It’s hard to believe that protecting basic liberties is the political philosophy that Gingrich, “conservative” Republicans, Tea Partiers, Trump, and the MAGA movement despise enough to have done violence, and promise to do more violence, to destroy.
How, specifically, is Trump against liberalism? Here’s the tip of that iceberg.
Trump and the MAGA movement have given control of women’s bodies to the state, denying them the right to make their own medical decisions, even where they have been subjected to sexual violence or their lives are at stake. They have begun taking steps to track women’s menstrual cycles and to prevent them from traveling out of state while pregnant. They have also promised to put an end to contraception and ”recreational” sex.
Trump and other Republicans have assaulted voting rights, throwing out the Voting Rights Act of 1965, pushing for voting suppression one state at a time, and consistently refusing to accept the outcomes of elections. They have denied the rule of law and openly plan to go further if reelected. Their motto is, as another authoritarian fascist put it, “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”
Trump’s MAGAs are also planning to do away with freedom of religion in favor of religious nationalism. It’s worth mentioning that the Wars of Religion that gave rise to liberalism, and killed off so many, were mostly a dispute between Protestants and Catholics, because whether MAGA Christian Nationalism will be Protestant Christian Nationalism (“establishing an exclusivist version of Protestant Christianity as the dominant moral and cultural order”) or Catholic Integralism (the Catholic faith “should be the basis of all public law and public policy within civil society”) remains to be seen.
Trump is waging war against facts as well as rights. He ushered in the age of “alternative facts” – better described as “alternatives to facts” or propaganda or simply lies – by himself lying in public 30,570 times during his presidency. His Supreme Court is busy cashing out this disdain for facts with a war on expertise. In the face of a global scientific consensus on climate change, SCOTUS denied the EPA the ability to regulate greenhouse gasses. In defending gerrymandering, the Chief Justice dismissed the mathematical models submitted by experts as “sociological gobbledygook” – though these models are already used by gerrymanders to effectively gerrymander. Finally, SCOTUS knee-capped all the Federal Agencies that rely on nonpartisan expertise all at once by throwing out the Chevron Doctrine that allows agencies to appropriately apply regulations to cases. There are hundreds of Federal Agencies, by the way, with a total of 3 million employees. These agencies’ fight the proliferation of nuclear weapons, direct air traffic, run lighthouses, maintain federal highways, predict weather, track hurricanes and tornadoes, and provide emergency disaster relief – among many other things. The fact that Republicans have, for a long time, wanted to do away with the Department of Energy – which mainly deals with nuclear safety and nuclear weapons – suggests they lack the most basic knowledge about what these various agencies actually do. And the fact that a recent SCOTUS decision confused the pollutant at issue in the case with “laughing gas” five times, suggests the Court’s also lack the knowledge to take over for Federal Agencies.
That’s all familiar enough, I suppose, but it is essential to see that the basic rights are not simply a list of things that are important. They are a coherent set of liberties that follows from a particular philosophy. The list of rights is liberalism operationalized. So, we should note that there are also things that MAGA people want to add to this list that have no place. I am tempted to talk about masks and vaccines, but here’s a much longer running public health problem.
Massive amounts of empirical evidence shows that more guns lead to more suicides, murders, and accidents. Lots of people die because of gun proliferation. Nowhere else in the world do school children suffer through mass shooter drills. (After every mass shooting, the Onion’s headline is, “’No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where this Regularly happens.”) We are told that the reason all this is unavoidable is that people have a basic right to own guns that is enshrined in the Bill of Rights. This is nonsense. The Second Amendment was meant to give the States (frankly, the slave states in particular) the right to arm a standing militia to stand against slaves and the Federal Government, if it became necessary (frankly, to defend slavery). This is not shrouded in the mists of history. Start with Hamilton in the Federalist Papers #29.
But I don’t want to argue Constitutional interpretation here. The deeper point is philosophical. We do not, cannot, have a fundamental right to own any kind of physical object. You don’t have a basic right to own a gas stove or a microwave oven. Nor do you have a right to own particular projectile devices. A gun is just metaphysically the wrong kind of thing to be the object of a fundamental right.
Another way to put it is that owning a particular physical thing is at the wrong level of abstraction to be a basic liberty. You could argue that your website not being censored is essential to your free speech, which is a basic right. But the right is not to have a website, the right is to speak freely. Similarly, you could argue that you have a right to self-defense (against individuals or the government) that requires a gun. But the right is to self-defense not to own anything in particular, including a gun or any certain type of gun.
Why does this matter? The degree to which having a gun supports your right to self-defense is an empirical question not a rights question. For example, if there were robust evidence that reducing the availability of guns (or certain kinds of guns) promoted your self-defense better than you being allowed to own a gun does, there would be no further relevant, rights-based argument that you should get to own one anyway, regardless of the consequences. In other words, something can be essential to some fundamental right without itself being a fundamental right. It could turn out that guns are essential in that way. But the empirical evidence for such a claim is not promising.
According to Benjamin Constant, while political rights were central to the “Liberty of the Ancients,” since only a small number of people make politics central to their lives now, the “Liberty of the Moderns” (our nonpolitical liberties) are more important. Yet, the courts have consistently privileged, for example, political speech over nonpolitical artistic expression. Why? Because beyond the intrinsic value of these liberties to those engaged in politics, political rights play an essential instrumental role. Democracy is the last line of defense of the rest of our liberties. In other words, vote to keep liberalism. Please.