Welcome Allies, but Remember

A tale of "Mark" and "Tim"

Apr 22, 2025

So I shared something on Facebook, pretty much the rub these days, in the Virgillian sense:

“It is easy to go down into Hell; night and day, the gates of dark Death stand wide; but to climb back again, to retrace one's steps to the upper air - there's the rub, the task.”

Here’s what it was:

A friend of mine replied. I’m gonna call him Mark because that’s not his name, and I didn’t bother asking if I could use his sorry ass as a hook for this Substack entry.

He’s always portrayed himself as sorta-conservative, though if you dare to insinuate he ever supported Trump, he’d try to fight you on the spot. Here’s “Mark’s” response:

Now, I’ve been bickering with, and trolling, Mark for years, as friends do, so I felt the need to reply:

The exchange got me reflecting.

Was I just being pedantic? Was I just responding to Mark’s pedantry with some of my own? Was I just relitigating an old argument I’ve kinda-sorta had with Mark over the years in a moment when it doesn’t mean very much?

I mean, remember the instigating post: we’re disappearing people with zero due process. People who grasp that really shouldn’t be rasslin’ around in the dirt about meta bullshit, right? We should be arm-in-arm on the battlements, shoulder-to-shoulder in the great mass of protestors storming the statehouses, demanding an end to this regime, petty differences put aside for now. All that should matter is saving the fundamentals of the rule of law, right?

Right?

Some version of this has gnawed at me for years now. I get it from the Right and the Left.

After Liz Cheney voted Yes on the second impeachment of Donald Trump, then became the star Republican on—and Vice Chair of—the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack, her redemption arc began. For millions of liberals, she’s a sign that Americans can unite over things that matter, things that make us Americans.

I continue to hold my grudges.

I’m not even talking about her long career as a hawk and die-hard conservative. We could talk about how, like so many latter-day Never-Trumpers, she aided and abetted the rise of toxic right-wing culture and the rise of MAGA only to flip when, you know, Trump sent the insurrectionists after her and her colleagues.

But no, I remember the accounts of J6 Committee staffers who worked to document the role of the Christian Nationalist movements in the insurrection, only to get word from Cheney that this would not be part of the unifying narrative the committee would be presenting.

Why does that matter? Why does any of this relitigation matter?

Because it’s not just relitigation or the revisiting of grievance. It’s not just me insisting I was right about the “conservatives” all along.

Because I wasn’t right about conservatives all along.

If you lived in a red state all your life, especially spanning the period when there were still liberal and moderate Republicans to the time when Marjorie Taylor Green is the most well-known GOP House member, you couldn’t help but be socialized, initially, into the idea that “conservatives” were just people with different views about things, but basically like you, and you could sit down over coffee and hammer out some common ground with facts and logic and some good old folksy wisdom drawn from your mutual experiences as Kansans or whatnot.

I used to believe that. I used to work at trying to do just that, in print and on the radio.

So I don’t think I’m trying to get the world to acknowledge that I had The Truths All This Time and Everybody Should Have Listened to Me! I was duped along with a lot of others. A lot of what I try to unpack here is about how I could have gotten it so wrong for much of my life, how so many basically decent people could have been led so far astray, how the insidious tendrils of supremacy and hierarchy wrapped themselves around principles like equality before the law and liberty and justice for all—which “conservatives” were supposed to believe in—and turned them into the knuckle-dragging hordes who stormed the Capitol or then cheered those who had done so.

What I care about is trying to make sure we won’t get fooled again. As depressing as the news is, as despairing as I may seem here, this project is, at base, hopeful: if we can figure out how we got played, what pitfalls we got suckered into, maybe we can avoid them in the future. Which at least hopes we have a future, that we will survive this and rebuild something, hopefully better, not just a restoration of “normalcy,” but something stronger and more resilient that learns our lessons.

That means we have to study the lessons. That means we have to look at people’s priors. That means we have to see what certain trains of thought and rhetoric have done and enabled, and why they aren’t good foundations for re-America after these evil clowns are done burning down what they can.

In the case of Liz Cheney, her desire to target Trump and Trump only, without running any risk of splashing recriminations on Christian Nationalism (which might have hurt the fee-fees of the Republican base) served to hide the role Christian Nationalism played in undermining the rule of law, free and fair elections, accountability for the powerful, respect for objective reality and facticity, and so much more. She also kiboshed any focus or the role of social media, mainly Xitter, and we now know how Elon Musk became a prime mover in the Trump restoration.

Hamilton Nolan just wrote a good and provocative piece about other buried lessons that unpacks the Democratic and liberal embrace of the “patriotism frame” as a trap, limiting rhetoric and thinking and maneuvering inside a box of American exceptionalism, which he begins by puncturing the aura around Edward R. Murrow’s opposition to Joseph McCarthy. It’s a challenge.

The fact that it is a challenge is important. If you read his piece and recoil or want to punch that sumbitch in the face for writing it, take note of that visceral anger. To take on the idea of patriotism—that sacred cow of left and right, that cultural Third Rail of Americana itself—suggests that Nolan is onto something.

If the Sacred cannot be questioned or dissented from in even the mildest, most tentative way, if apostasy from that orthodoxy means burning at the stake or de Tocqueville’s auto-da-fe, then we have a thought-terminating barrier. And what terminates thought terminates reasoning from principle, including moral principle. It kills logic and evidence as much as it kills empathy. Sound familiar? Sounds a lot like MAGA to me.

Back to “Mark”

And that’s where we come back to my friend Mark.

Mark is reminding us of American theology, basically. The notion that “the laws of nature and Nature’s God” are what ground our unalienable rights:

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.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

That, of course, is from the Declaration of Independence, and it opens with Mark’s key concept:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

Not to knock the Founders unduly here, but they started with mixed messages. It’s understandable, but they did.

They knew they couldn’t prove that all people were equal—it’s absolutely not the sort of thing one can “prove.” They were trying to assert it, create the idea, or give it rhetorical nourishment, since they felt it already stirred in the hearts of the colonists. But they couldn’t even bring themselves to say people instead of men, and not just for reasons of patriarchal linguistic convention. Think we’re sexist today? These dudes knew that if they tried to form a government that extended equality and the franchise to women and the poor, they’d be run out of town.

So, knowing they couldn’t prove human equality, they said it was “self-evident.” Common sense. Everybody knows it. I mean, Duh, dude. They were honest enough to admit that they were “holding these truths to be” self-evident, which is more than modern politicians do: acknowledging that they can’t prove it, but declaring that they believe it despite an inability to prove it. They were declaring the faith of the nation, the orthodoxy, the bedrock of belief upon which they would build … whatever came after.

If they’d left it there, we might have been better off: Hey, world—this is what we believe, at rock bottom. It’s our article of faith. We may come to this article of faith from a million different directions, but it’s our common ground.

The rhetoric would have suffered, and the stirring appeal through time of the language of the Declaration would have been the poorer. The stuff about “endowed by their Creator” and “laws of Nature and Nature’s God” got added in by these mostly-Deists as flourishes and appeals to the ineffable, signals to the deep sense that humans everywhere have a sense of dignity and fairness that is offended and injured when they are treated as less-than, mere subjects, unheard, used and abused, not given due process to make their case as equals alongside their peers back home in England.

I can’t blame the Founders: everybody was really God-fearing back then, and that language was the powerful medium of mystery and awe and sacred motivation. And they had a war to win.

But the second they invoked “Natural law” and “Nature’s God,” they opened the door to lawyer-brained “conservatives” and scripture-parsing clerics, those who believed in human hierarchies and rejected equality, who almost immediately looked for loopholes.

There was the split among the Constitution cons and Declaration cons, those who insisted that the Declaration was nothing but pretty war-time rabble-rousing and not legally binding while the Constitution was the law of the land and the only thing we needed to attend to. No “all men are created equal” in the Constitution, is there? these confederates screeched.

And Civil War-era records are chock-a-block with bold-faced statements of rejection of “all men are created equal,” like South Carolina Senator James H. Hammond’s mud-sill speech in 1858 (ranting about Kansas1). Here’s how the “laws of Nature and Nature’s God” had morphed for half the country within only 82 years of the Declaration:

In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement. It constitutes the very mud-sill of society and of political government; and you might as well attempt to build a house in the air, as to build either the one or the other, except on this mud-sill. Fortunately for the South, she found a race adapted to that purpose to her hand. A race inferior to her own, but eminently qualified in temper, in vigor, in docility, in capacity to stand the climate, to answer all her purposes. We use them for our purpose, and call them slaves. We found them slaves by the common "consent of mankind," which, according to Cicero, "lex naturae est." The highest proof of what is Nature's law. We are old-fashioned at the South yet; slave is a word discarded now by "ears polite;" I will not characterize that class at the North by that term; but you have it; it is there; it is everywhere; it is eternal.

There was pro-slavery Illinois Senator John Pettit, who called our founding, self-evident truths “nothing more to me than a self-evident lie.” And Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, whose “Cornerstone Speech,” given less than two months after Kansas became a state, called the Declaration’s ideas “fundamentally wrong.” Why? Because “They rested upon the assumption of the equality of the races. This was an error.”

See? So-called “natural laws”—those mysterious and powerful appeals to deep convictions about the proper order of the universe—are profoundly dangerous placeholders.

If we’d just admitted that we were a diverse population of many beliefs and experiences, a pluralistic country, we could have opened with “we hold these truths to be self-evident” and not tried to ground them in something ineffable and supernatural. We could have offered them up as a conclusion we had come to as a diverse people reasoning together, from whatever premises each of us may have believed.

The Problem with Asserting a Foundation for Us All

Meant to be universal statements of what is right, ethical, true, and proper everywhere regardless of culture and preference, “natural laws” are easily hijacked by parochial animosities and established systems of prejudice and domination.

You have a Southern culture built upon racialized chattel slavery? Well, that must be as nature intended. So why isn’t that the proper way of things? Why shouldn’t it be the way all societies should be ordered? Why shouldn’t that order spread across America, or the globe? To oppose such a future is to go against the laws of Nature and Nature’s God. Since there’s no proof otherwise in a faith-based statement of self-evident truth, just assert a contrary self-evident truth and use political and military might to establish yours over the preceding one.

The Civil War put an “end” (wink-wink, nudge-nudge) to the blatant rejection of “all men are created equal’s” self-evident truth, but of course, our failure to follow through just forced the rejection underground. Abandoning Reconstruction, we readmitted the South and allowed frank plundering white nationalists to devolve into regional terrorists and regional racist warlords ruling through the Klan and Jim Crow for another century undisturbed. Their ideology and grievance spread as their people migrated, revising history to such an extent that my own Kansas schooling on Reconstruction left me with a picture of it as some kind of bad and botched external meddling at the hands of grifting “carpetbaggers” picking over the corpse of the South like scavengers.

Not only has my own biography run the gamut from early learning framed by Lost Cause influence to finally grasping the Missed Opportunity that was Reconstruction, but I’ve seen the cooptation and intentional distortion of Martin Luther King’s speeches; the claims by militia-favorite Cliven Bundy that the enslaved had it pretty good, actually; Unite the Right; SCOTUS’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act and affirmative action; the whitewashing of history texts and school curriculum, and so much more.

And most of this happens without direct rejection of the “self-evident truth” of universal human equality, Nick Fuentes notwithstanding. It’s been sub rosa, dog-whistle, lawyer-brain, gutter-grievance appeals, shock-jock tactics from William F. Buckley suggesting tattoos on gay men’s asses to Trump’s gyrating impression of a disabled reporter. We now have the Secretary of Health and Human Services declaring autistic children are useless burdens on society to a mass of people who so believe that vaccines cause autism that they are willing to die and let their children die rather than “risk” such a fate befall their progeny.

My argument with my friend Mark is that he wants to salvage the validity of so-called “real conservatives” who once believed in what was supposedly our civic religion, based somehow in the laws of Nature and Nature’s God. But those fill-in-the-blank law books always allowed us to choose who qualified as people deserving of equal rights and treatment, then announce that such a minimum standard was etched in the Divine or Natural Order and thus sacred, unquestionable, a holy cause and crusade to be forced into law and policy, pluralism be damned, because that Order forms the foundation from which things like free speech and opinion proceeds.

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The Story of “Tim”

I learned all these lessons from another friend. I’ll call him Tim.

Tim came from Hoxie, Kansas, if memory serves. He attended my university, Fort Hays State, and bonded with a poly sci prof I knew well. Thirty-some years ago, give or take, Tim got sucked into the right-wing pipeline, the recruitment vacuum hose, of the Claremont Institute, a think tank in California started in 1979 by disciples of a political philosopher named Harry Jaffa.

Now Jaffa’s an interesting guy. He was, by all accounts, a completely irascible asshole. And a homophobe. Conservative as the day was long, a student of Leo Strauss, and best known for his impact on the conservative movement for his magisterial work on Abraham Lincoln and the Declaration of Independence.

Jaffa argued that Abraham Lincoln definitively placed the Declaration—and specifically, the notion of equality—at the center and heart of the American project. Equality, not liberty, was the essence of America. This was in 1959.

Twenty years later, four of Jaffa’s disciples founded the Claremont Institute, and nobody—I mean nobody—talked “laws of Nature and Nature’s God” more than Claremont folks, and that included Tim. Back in the early 1990s, when he, our mutual poly sci prof pal, and I went round and round in epic email debates, Tim served us pure Founding Kool Aid from the Claremont firehose.

It was, well, totally cringe stuff. Very upright. Very proper. Very “conservative.” Tim felt nothing but disgust for the “politically correct” detractors who only taught about the Founding Fathers (always “Fathers”) to denigrate them as racist slavers and hypocrites, a project he insisted was sweeping the nation.

The natural law dictated that no man was more or less a man than any other, so individual rights reigned supreme, which was fine with us civil libertarians, but then he’d go on to claim more and more ground, as if natural law was an artificial island he was constructing, and he’d add sand and rock and refuse to extend its landmass to encompass wider territory. Some examples:

Since individual rights are what natural law holds sacred, then human law, policy, and institutions can only look through a lens of “individual vs. individual,” so, like, everything’s a libertarian contract and we’re returning to the Lochner Era.
Beyond that, everything is a question of the poor, solitary individual vs. the massive, dominating State, and the State has been going wrong since Progressivism and the New Deal (telling people what they can and cannot do with their own money, businesses and property.) Forget massive power imbalances and situations where individuals form alliances and legal compacts (like corporations and associations to leverage collective power).
All Tim—and his “natural law” reasoning, which he said came straight from the Founders and was thus the only truly American lineage of thought, a kind of uncontaminated bloodline of thinking—could see was disparate individuals. If groups gathered together to advocate for their rights based on their common interests as, say, women discriminated against, Blacks discriminated against, well, so long as the letter of the law said that stuff was a No-No, case closed: any thinking beyond that amounted to asking for “group rights” which was antithetical to and destructive of natural law’s deification of individual rights.

At the same time, the (nuclear, of course) family had some kind of ur-place as the foundational social unit, despite it being a social group. Same for the rights of states to do as they wished to balance the dominance of the federal government. Why? Because it was written in the Constitution (Amendment X, which conservative / Claremont hero Robert Bork called an “ink blot”). So, group rights are bad because of murky reasoning from the Mystic Book of Natural Law which says only individual rights count, but group rights for the nuclear family are sacred because the family is the foundation of all human society, according to … wait for it … natural law … and must be kept sacrosanct. Also those blobs on a map and created by human legal designation called “states,” which are just groups of people who just happen reside in a certain geographic space … they too have sacred rights vis a vis the federal government’s tyrannical power because the Constitution says so, even though the whole argument from Claremont and Jaffa is that we can see the Natural Law’s primacy on the equality of individuals in the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution.

Overall, Tim’s method was what made me reject his philosophy. I was always okay with admiring the achievements of the Founders. I mean, it was remarkable what they pulled off. But I’m averse to deification and the notion of idol-worship. Nobody’s feces lacks odor, to say nothing of the proposition that anyone’s is only redolent with the delicate notes of sandalwood and roses.

Tim’s method was an attempt to apply formal logic to social science. Get someone to accept a dry premise, like the notion that an order of Natural Law exists, with at least one precept that you buy, like all people should be treated equally. Then reason from that truth down to every single question of contemporary current events and social and political controversy roiling today’s headlines. If All Men Are Created Equal, then feminism must be a destructive force undermining society, since it posits … hell, I can’t remember … either rights of women as a group instead of each discrete individual woman, or because, based on the writings of Andrea Dworkin or someone, it rejected the foundational social role of the nuclear family.

I just wasn’t buying. That sort of things sounded too much like the ready-made programming of too many churches out there: Invite Jesus into your heart, and we’ll tell you how to vote, live, husband, wife, parent, date, marry, speak, not speak until spoken to, never speak in church or from a pulpit, etc. etc., etc. — all, ultimately derived from some weird take on passages ripped from ancient scriptures translated umpteen times, included or excluded and edited by committees, and filtered down to you by powerful authorities who claim to have all the answers but who almost certainly can’t read Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic.

It was all a leash on independent thinking, a set of ideological blinders against reality, laundered through high-minded Great Books curricula and citations of Madison and Aristotle and guys like that. Tim seemed to buy it, and I tried really hard, in good faith, to punch some holes for his conscience and mind to breathe free. But I was young and inexperienced, and I think he was already showing signs of bad faith.

Eventually the correspondence died out. Tim went on to a pretty successful career with Claremont and Hillsdale College, rubbing elbows with dudes now in the news for insurrection. He seems to have left Claremont’s direct universe, but not necessarily its worldview.

John Eastman, member of the board and on the faculty at the Claremont Institute, also known for his efforts to block certification and overturn the results of the 2020 United States presidential election

Claremont was the think tank that went Trumpist before Trumpism was cool on the Right. As their worldview shifted from cringey “respect the powdered wig guys” to “everyone who votes Dem is not actually an American,” they’ve been pipelining and pouring their worldview right-wing influencers2 and “Constitutional sheriffs.”

The “laws of Nature and Nature’s God” sure didn’t serve as any kind of principled bulwark against the rejection of due process and habeas corpus in America. No, they veered straight into the mindset of “We’re losing the culture. Our theories about Natural Law and all that don’t resonate. We need to cultivate power and force the country to do things our way, think our way, through fear and deprivation of rights as needed. We’ll couch it in obscure legalese and confabulation of ancient principles and double-speak, and we’ll mobilize the hatred of the Left we’ve been feeding on the down-low for decades, to overturn not just the Civil Rights movement, but the New Deal as well, both of which just happen to be the bete noirs of the most lunatic fringe of the radical right going back for over a century.”

Masks off, indeed. Same-old, same-old of the nutbags of the radical fringe of right-wing nutbags who called themselves “conservatives” going back over a hundred years.

I’ve spent decades wondering where my ex-friend Tim got suckered. There’s my theories about his psychology, of course, but then there’s the intellectual project of Claremont, which is more relevant here for the nation—and for my beef with my friend Mark.

As I told Mark,

…trying to ground rights in something like God or Nature practically BEGS people to scheme ways to argue that anything or anyone outside God's or Nature's predetermined order therefore lack rights that those within it enjoy.…we can see the real-world example of this in The Claremont Institute.
…it's better to acknowledge that belief in these things we call rights is a human-constructed framework we have to continually maintain and service and upgrade because it's something humans can DE-construct through apathy, ignorance, and malice, and because it still leaves a lot to be desired in how it manifests in people's lives.
…if it's an ongoing human construction project and not an inheritance from God or Nature, we can't get complacent about it or imagine the moral arc of the universe will bend down to save us, and it helps prevent static fallacies like "originalism" that actively work AGAINST rights.

The problem with Claremont—and with its inspiration Harry Jaffa (despite his efforts to place equality at the center of the American experiment), and with Jaffa’s teacher Leo Strauss (who looked to ancient thought for some kind of safe harbor / sturdy foundation to counter the wackiness and uncertainty of modernity)—is the same problem most conservatives face: a need for a ground. It’s the same problem from Nietzsche and Dostoevsky: If God is dead, then everything is permitted.

If humans need a divine, supernatural, or capital-N Natural order of right and wrong hanging over their heads as a threat and/or reward to keep their earthly behavior in line, then, yeah, pluralism, difference, people being on different pages about that order undermines everything. And deep down, conservatives have always kinda believed this. If you stray too far from the One True Path, you—and maybe civilization itself—are doomed.

The problem is, you can’t prove a One True Path or Order exists. Not to everybody’s satisfaction. Even in the most theocratically or ideologically draconian societies, there are always free thinkers and dissenters who question in their secret thoughts. Life tends to want to be free of imposed strictures. Monocropping does not make for a sustainable ecosystem.

Even if the core precept of your draconian society is the insistence on “individual liberty,” if you move from that axiom through lock-step reasoning you impose on everyone to reach specific conclusions about how women must dress and behave, what ideas are corrosive to the “natural” order, you’ve just recreated the tyranny you claimed to be oh-so-against. You just construct an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine to bring you right back around to the oppression you allegedly wanted to escape from.

It’s an Is-Ought problem. You insist there IS a natural order, natural rights and natural laws, therefore people OUGHT to live such-and-such a way. You can’t prove the existence and content of the mystical natural order—it’s just “self-evident.” But because you started with this mystical IS that nobody can check—a Natural or Divine Order—you get to rewrite it as you fancy, backfill it as needs arise. Twist the details or interpretations of scriptures religious or civic to suit your agenda as needs arise.

When the IS changes, then the OUGHTS change as well. So when new ideas and developments happen in society, when we learn new things about sexuality or gender or decency or neurodivergence or the historical record of white supremacy operating under color of law or through social pressures, well, such knowledge leads to “unnatural” conclusions and thus threatens the foundation of the natural order.

The problem is thinking in terms of Is and Ought entirely. Drop the “This is how the universe was meant or Created to unfold and be” thinking. No one knows that stuff, and everybody has different ideas about it. It’s inherently tyrannical to impose one person’s view on anyone else on that scale. Quit looking for a cosmic ground to stand on for the entirety of society. You won’t find one. You might find one that satisfies you, but not everybody else. And even if you find one that satisfies 90 percent of us, that still means dictating to the 10 percent who believe in a different cosmic order.

Forget the Is, from which everything else must necessarily follow. Stick with “We hold these truths to be self-evident.”

Why do we hold them to be self-evident? Sheesh, dude, that varies. Some folks come at it from religion. Others come at it from reasoning about what makes sense. Others get there from experience, or from the examples of virtuous elders, or inspiring stories, or maybe a wicked trip on shrooms in the desert. I dunno. People are different, but this is where we as a society start from. Don’t claim an IS that pre-exists in Nature or the mind of some God that dictates that your self-evident truths must be truths lest the whole thing crumble like sand. Just confess ignorance and infinite diversity and go from there.

Focus instead on the Ought. Grant, from the start, that human beings just don’t know or agree on what, if anything, orders the heavens and directs human existence. We may never know, and we almost certainly will never agree if some of us find out. So quit trying to be intellectual archaeologists unearthing Scrolls of Truth that will lay out the perfect lanes for each and every one of us to remain in all our lives.

Instead, try to look at this business of human existence in community together as a simple question of Ought: given that we’ll never prove and agree on what our divinely or naturally sanctioned purpose here might be, what kind of life do we want for ourselves and our children going forward? What kind of social order should we attempt to build and maintain? Treat it like road maintenance. Wherever folks want to go, we need roads or pathways to get there, and if they’re full of potholes or caltrops or IEDs or infectious sewage, nobody thinks that’s good.

My argument with Natural Law as it’s enshrined in our founding mythos is that it tries to ground our collective project in fulfilling some destiny, following some ultimately unknowable, ultimately fill-in-the-blank plan that only the archaeologists and scholars or theologians (civic of religious) are supposed to be able to parse. It’s the IS that’s supposed to hem in our OUGHTS.

If, instead, we all shrugged and admitted that we just can’t say for sure what our collective purpose here IS, and set ourselves to trying to do what seems right and fair and decent beyond that, we’d acknowledge that we are the ones in the driver’s seat in constructing our social order, not some dead Founders, and not some dead Europeans and deader Greeks long before them. When they had good ideas, smart warnings, steal those. When they declared, like Aristotle, that some people are—by nature—slaves, yeet them into the sun.

Civilization requires constant work and maintenance, and it’s not the sole province of Constitutional scholars or lawyers or think tankers or any specialists. And we constantly get into trouble when large groups of people who are convinced that everything rests on THIS ONE SACRED FOUNDATION FROM WHICH EVERYTHING FOLLOWS begin to seize power because they can’t seem to convince all the skeptics who say, “Well, what about this…and THIS?”

The laws of Nature and Nature’s God was probably necessary rhetoric to rouse the colonists back in the day, but that kind of thinking—thinking we all need to agree on some fundamental foundation for what we accept as “self-evident,” our articles of democratic faith, left room for and practically invited bad faith actors—from Civil War secessionist white supremacists to Claremonster natural lawyers plotting and fomenting insurrection—to use that rhetoric and the habits of thought it instilled in us to hamstring our ongoing quest to build and maintain an actual, living, breathing, and evolving multiracial, egalitarian, and pluralistic democracy in America.

We need to know this background and recognize where we allowed ourselves to go wrong and be vulnerable, if we’re ever going to make something better and more resilient in the aftermath of … well, all this.

Know Your Place

Welcome Allies, but Remember

A tale of "Mark" and "Tim"

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