There Can Be No Right To Do What Is Wrong But Our Liberal Democracy Says There Is

THE ASSERTION THAT there was a "right to lie" which I noticed was being talked about by even liberal lawyers late last year has been a key that I believe unlocks one of the origins of what has put democracy in such danger.  In the case of the form of so-called democracy that most people fret about when they bemoan the collapse of democracy in the past decade or so, it is the inferior "liberal democracy" which has such nonsense as a "right to lie" embedded in it.  Such a "democracy" in which there are all kinds of misnamed privileges, for certain people, mostly those with money, well-off families, resources and, so, under such "liberal democracy," power to do bad things are called "rights" corruption accumulates, as under our so-called democracy and, when those surpass a limit under which civil government might prevail over corruption, we get a Trump or a government such as has had control of Britain for the past few decades or which has had control of the Israeli government for, now, most of that state's existence.  Various, so-called "liberal democracies" have various timelines of such corruption but I believe all of them have inherent corruptions that will always decay their institutions, laws and societies.

In each case the problem lies in legal and constitutional orders which, likely on purpose, confuse meanings so as to make evils into ersatz virtues, a right to speak which doesn't state that such a right doesn't include a right to lie and slander, to con and cheat is the first one.  The virtue that comes from being able to say whatever you want to say is when what is said is true.  The first time I ever got into this someone brought up the hypothetical of lying to Nazis about hidden Jews in which things are so degraded by lies that it turns lying to Nazis into a virtue.  But it was lies freely by Nazis and their allies that brought things to that state.  The fact is that that hypothetical doesn't do what those who want to protect "a right to lie" wants it to because it was those lies freely told that put the Jews in danger to start with, it only serves to prove the danger of allowing such lies.  Our First Amendment is stupidly written to not make that distinction a part of our laws, no doubt such protected lies under "free speech" served the purposes of our indigenous fascists well, the white supremacists when they lied about Native Americans and Black People.  It served the allied branch of that in 19th century WASP "nativism" when they lied about other minority groups, it served their later developed form, the eugenicists when they lied about Jews and other would-be immigrants fleeing Nazism and it served those who heard the lies of Lou Dobbs regarding Latinos, something that did so much to bring us to Trumpian fascist ascendancy and the danger we face right now.

Yet our First Amendment, set in stone by the First Congress under the reluctant fatherhood of James Madison, and the idiotic idolatry of it prevents any kind of remedy to make such lies even punishable by civil law.  Republican-fascists, overt white supremacists AND THE CIVIL LIBERTIES ESTABLISHMENT OFTEN STUPIDLY DEPUTED TO BE "LIBERAL" really hate hate-speech laws and fascists on courts will prevent any disruption of the tsunami of hate speech which has swept over the country in the freest of free media in history.  


But the inadequacies of the First Amendment don't stop there.  A right to assemble doesn't include a right to form a lynch mob or an insurrection against the winner of the presidential election.  A right to freedom of religious belief and, worst of all, for the "freedom of the press" that assigns "rights" to corporate entities which cannot have rights because those only inhere to living beings.  In the case of the United States with its horrifically badly written Bill or Rights, the Second Amendment only being the most obvious of those dangerous and badly written abbreviations, those have given corrupt and merely short-sighted Supreme Courts to bend the meaning of the Constitution into weapons to use against rights and freedoms.

One of the worst things about the United States Constitution is that it does not specifically define rights as being held equally by all People living in the country and require that Courts apply the laws on an equal basis.  Under the lie of "equal justice under law" those with the most money to hire corrupt lawyers will always have a disadvantage under the rules constructed by courts.  Unless that inequality is leveled out of practice, the rich and powerful will always get away with crimes such as Trump still does.  Judges and "justices" are not only in the habit of deferring to the rich, the white, the male, the powerful, etc. their culture considers that a virtue in most cases.  All of this was rather obviously done on purpose because such People as Native Americans, Black People held in slavery, Women, white men without property were intended by the framers of the Constitution to be excluded from what would have been real equality.  The history of the United States, everything from the Jeffersonian Revolution of 1800, the "Jackson revolution" (which served to empower white men to the exclusion of others), the great abolitionist movement, the movement for Women's suffrage, the struggle for the rights of workers, various other movements demanding equality and fairness for other minority groups and those held in wage and debt slavery is a history of struggle AGAINST THE CONSTITUTION AND THE LEGAL AND CONSTITUTIONAL ORDER AS THAT WAS ORIGINALLY DESIGNED.   That is why today's Republican-fascists on the Corrupt Court, in lower courts, in congresses and legislatures, holding executive positions on the federal and state levels are so hot for the "originalist" or "textualist" assertions about that document, because it is a dangerously anti-egalitarian thing as it was originally written.  One of the things that has become obvious during the corruptions of the Rehnquist and, even more so, the Roberts Court is that as long as that thing has the same language in it as it does now, the thing is a danger to whatever progress all those groups listed above and anyone else seeking equality and fairness have bought with their struggle, bloodshed and lives.  

The "originalist-testualist" reading of the Constitution has been an ongoing insurrection conducted by the well manicured, black-robed product of elite law schools for the past several decades.  The insurectionary act of the Rehnquist Court in Bush v Gore led directly to the Court today which has enabled Republican-fascist vote suppression and gerrymandering and rigging in order to overturn those rights previously gained and to thwart every future attempt to turn our corrupt system into a real democracy, an egalitarian democracy.  

I strongly suspect that any democracy will only be one AND REMAIN ONE for the extent to which real equality WITHOUT PRIVILEGES FOR THE RICH, THE WHITE, THE MALE, THE STRAIGHT, ETC. and their families is the real law of the land.  Those descriptions will need to be amended for the particular circumstances in other places and countries.

One of the problems for achieving real democracy, egalitarian democracy is that one thing embedded into our and most modern Constitutions is incompatible with egalitarian democracy, the amorality of modern legalese and academic babblage.  REAL DEMOCRACY IS A PRODUCT OF MORALITY OF A SPECIFIC KIND.*  It is a product of fulfilled responsibilities of individuals and groups of individuals to other people, to other living beings, to the environment.  Any "liberty" any freedom that is exercised under a democracy has to be limited by the rights of others, at all times.  While those items of moral action may be inconveniently large to fit into a constitution, that's the truth of the matter.  If the slave-holding framers had been serious in their claims of what they were constructing, they'd have had to give up holding People in slavery.  The land speculator-genocidalists among them would have had to give up murdering, expelling and stealing the land of Native Americans.  Those who made money off of the labor of others would have had to treat their workers not only "fairly" but well, cutting into their profits.  Men would have had to treat Women as equals.   Education would have had to be made universal and of equal quality, etc.  

That short essay "What Is Liberty" from Thomas Merton posted here the other day begins rather starkly by setting "the lowest limit of freedom, and the only thing that is free about it is the fact that we can still choose good."

He said, "To the extent that you are free to choose evil, you are not free.  An evil choice destroys freedom."  

Merton was concentrating on what freedom and liberty meant to an individual who might choose good or evil, but there is one thing that is certain, someone privileged and permitted to choose evil will seriously damage, not only the liberty or freedom of others, but considerably more than that.  There is no such a thing as a permitted choice to do evil which does not injure or destroy others.  Yet our legal system under the Constitution lets those with money, many lawyers, and privileges do that every single day.  Donald Trump's history of cheating and stealing, conning and duping, even before he started into politics is a history of courts and judges and "justices" allowing him to do that and his fully licensed lawyers held it to be their job to make sure that he not only got away with it, they instructed him in the ways to manipulate the courts into doing what he wanted to do, to cheat, steal, etc.  It's no wonder that he said what he did on the infamous Access Hollywood tape, he had every reason to believe he could get away with sexual assault because the got away with everything.   And it wasn't only the legal profession and the courts who let him get away with it, the "free press" was in on that act too, enhancing his con game thousands of times more than the best door-to-door or street corner con man ever could have.  The free press in the wake of his disastrous regime AND HIS INSURRECTION AND ELECTION STEALING ATTEMPT IS HELPING HIM EVERY WAY INTO GETTING ANOTHER CHANCE TO DO IT AGAIN.

The United States Constitution, the most worshiped and idolized part of it, the Bill of Rights has failed because it has been the vehicle for doing far worse than the words in it specify through Supreme Court rulings and other rulings and the legal and cultural code and lore and culture surrounding it and the results are that not only is liberal democracy in (entirely predicable) trouble, but the very claims of what they were doing when they framed the document is being overturned.  This is not a "more perfect union" it does not produce any of the "blessings" that they claimed their Constitutional order would produce, in the fullness of time it produced the Confederacy, the Civil War, the Jim Crow period of terror enforced de facto slavery, it produced the bodily subjugation of Women, it produced a Supreme Court that stole an election for a member of the party of a simple majority of its members* in 2000 and was packed with lawyers who worked on that election stealing scheme,  it produced Donald Trump.  Remember that the next time you hear someone talking about how the founders or framers would be appalled if they knew that the country would ever get a president like Donald Trump.  One wonders the extent to which, if they could have foreseen that, what items of that privilege embedded into the Constitution they'd have given up to prevent that.

I think it's well past time for us to care about, never mind speculate as to what those long, long, long dead men would have thought about any of it.  They're dead, the dead don't have rights here and now, the living do.  We have to make a choice to change things if there's to be anything like even a "liberal democracy" in the future.  I'd be all in favor of making that attempt to come up with a constitution that takes into account the entire range of experience in the centuries of life under that thing, that is I'd be in favor of it if the results were an egalitarian democracy.  One of the great lessons of this particular hour is that mere liberal democracy doesn't cut it, it's not safe, it's too liable to ratfucking and undermining and sabotaging and insurrection BECAUSE IT IS NOT BASED IN THE BASIC MORALITY THAT IS THE VERY SUBSTANCE OF EQUALITY.   It is not based in moral obligations as a condition to the exercising of liberty, the possession of freedom.  Liberty to do what?  Freedom to do what?  Those can't exist as free-floating abstractions like Euclidean figures that can be moved anywhere, they are embedded in real life and pretending they aren't is one of the main stupidities in our law and our legal system.  

*  That the five Republicans who were in the majority in Bush v Gore put the son of a powerful, rich, aristocratic white family into the presidency which his father had held, on the basis of political ratfucking of the Florida election under Jeb Bush, overturning the decision of the Florida Supreme Court to count all of the ballots cast was the successful Republican-fascist insurrection against the Constitution.  And the "free press" went along with it.  That the Trump insurrection twenty years later happened is directly a result of what had been building in Republican politics and actions and Supreme Court rulings for years.   I have absolutely no doubt that the Republicans on that Court, in their gun rulings, had just such a possibility of a Republican-fascist insurrection if not a civil war, this time the white supremacists winning it, in mind.  With the talk by Republican-fascist politicians of "Second Amendment remedies" for them losing elections is them just saying the quiet part out loud.   The oligarchs who met at Trump's golf bordello a while back shows the big money is all in for overt fascism in the United States.  Don't expect the courts and the lawyers to save us from it, they'll be all in, too.

* While I think the lauded and fabled Athenian "democracy" was the original inadequate and bad kind of oligarchic "democracy,"  I think the attack on religious symbols that was the first stage of the putsch of the aristocrats against it may be related to the fact that morality is the foundation of any real democracy.  You can't get the ideas and thoughts and feelings necessary for democracy from abstract rationality or math or science, it is certainly not something that is found in any notions of biological science as that stands now - Darwinism is, as Haeckel claimed with Darwin's assent, aristocratic, not democratic.  Clearly not even all Christianity will maintain the ideas of equality and charity and justice to maintain democracy as can be seen in the popularity of fascism among the "white evangelicals" and "traditional Catholics" as well as indifferent and nominal "Christians" not under those.  Such "Christianity" has no use for the Gospel and only for some of the most dubious parts of The Law.  Thus you get "Christian nationalists" who, copying those in Germany who wanted Christianity to be compatible with Nazism, reject Jesus, Paul, etc. as they are in Scripture.  I am fully convinced that modern democracy, certainly in its egalitarian aspirations, is directly attributable to the Jewish-Christian Law and Gospel.  Certainly in the Americas and Europe that's the case.  Though I think it's possible to derive them from other religious traditions, that hasn't been the case in any instance I've seen.