{"id":346189,"date":"2010-02-21T12:30:31","date_gmt":"2010-02-21T17:30:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/firedoglake.com\/?p=68420"},"modified":"2010-02-21T12:30:31","modified_gmt":"2010-02-21T17:30:31","slug":"%e2%80%9cmount-vernon-statement%e2%80%9d-erases-equality-rights","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/346189","title":{"rendered":"\u201cMount Vernon Statement\u201d Erases Equality, Rights"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Conservative leaders\u2019 pompous and self-congratulatory \u201cMount Vernon Statement\u201d<\/a> twice refers to the line \u201cself-evident truths\u201d from the Declaration of Independence<\/a>. Conspicuously absent, however, are two of those self-evident truths: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed with unalienable rights.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think it was an oversight. The omission gets to the heart of the deeply authoritarian personality of the contemporary conservative movement, or movements, as the case may be. Oh, the Mount Vernon document mentions \u201clife, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.\u201d But universal rights and equality are anathema to conservatives. How would they justify oppression if everyone was equal and had equal rights?<\/p>\n

In the authoritarian worldview, some people are just naturally better than others. Or, as George Orwell famously put it, some are more equal than others. For conservatives, government’s only proper role is in enforcing the inequality. And that begs the question: if it’s so natural, why does it have to be enforced at all?<\/p>\n

It is striking, in a Tiger-Woods-on-chastity kind of way, to see a collection of gouty royalists like Ed Meese and Alfred Regnery masquerade as the true defenders of the American democratic tradition. These posers are idolatrous hierarchs who have spent all their lives building their rodent tunnels under Constitutional barriers to plutocracy.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

The MVS says:<\/p>\n

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The self-evident truths of 1776 have been supplanted by the notion that no such truths exist. The federal government today ignores the limits of the Constitution, which is increasingly dismissed as obsolete and irrelevant.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

These words from the defenders of the idea that corporations are people, too, people who are, incidentally members of the \u201cmost equal\u201d club. Just where in hell is that in the Constitution? These are the people who scrapped habeas corpus and the right to privacy, who oppose voting rights and brag about how they subvert the public will with elaborate voter suppression schemes.<\/p>\n

These are the defenders of the democratic tradition? What mad cowshit is this?<\/p>\n

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The conservatism of the Declaration asserts self-evident truths based on the laws of nature and nature\u2019s God. It defends life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It traces authority to the consent of the governed. It recognizes man\u2019s self-interest but also his capacity for virtue.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

See, no \u201ccreated equal\u201d or \u201cunalienable rights.\u201d I don\u2019t know what to make of their reference to the Declaration\u2019s mention of the \u201cLaws of Nature.”\u00a0 These conservative corkscrews spend much of their time on their flat earth ridiculing Nature’s laws for political and economic gain. Oh, I see they also mention \u201cnature\u2019s God,\u201d which gives them an out. \u201cDid we say nature\u2019s laws? We meant Pat Robertson\u2019s laws.\u201d<\/p>\n

And what happened to the upper case \u201cN\u201d in the Declaration\u2019s \u201cNature\u2019s God,\u201d which in the MVS becomes “nature\u2019s God?” Upper cased Nature, after all, might belittle the rightful dominion of God\u2019s Elect. It is unnervingly polytheistic. The hell with the Founders\u2019 language! So much for the MVS signatories\u2019 claim to be defending the Founders against the \u201csustained attacks\u201d of constitutional heretics.<\/p>\n

Still, nothing so clearly reveals the conservatives’ true authoritarian mission better than the omission of the Declaration\u2019s very first self-evident truth: \u201cThat all men are created equal.\u201d<\/p>\n

That beautiful phrase does away with the cornerstone of conservative thought, which is that some are born to rule, others to be ruled. Quite conveniently, conservatives place themselves in the former category. People have an essential nature. People of unwhite skin are lazy, unintelligent, and undeserving of the rewards that naturally acrue in the bank accounts of their betters. Many are born to be poor, many to die young, many to be imprisoned.<\/p>\n

This Declaration\u2019s phrase puts the torch to that particular pile of manure. It tells us we are alike in our hopes, dreams and aspirations. It tells us specifically that we are not born unequal. We certainly live unequal lives, though. So if conservatives agreed that we were born equal they\u2019d have to account for (among other things) the great disparity in wealth and opportunity.<\/p>\n

Such an accounting, of course, would end their masquerade. It would reveal that disparity to be their only real achievement and their only real goal for the future.<\/p>\n

\"Share <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Conservative leaders\u2019 pompous and self-congratulatory \u201cMount Vernon Statement\u201d twice refers to the line \u201cself-evident truths\u201d from the Declaration of Independence. Conspicuously absent, however, are two of those self-evident truths: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed with unalienable rights. I don\u2019t think it was an oversight. The omission gets to the heart […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4413,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-346189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4413"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=346189"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346189\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=346189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=346189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=346189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}