Barbarians vs. Rights Respecters

Conservative” used to be taken to mean someone who wants to conserve the system set up by America’s founding fathers, namely the system set up to defend individual rights.

Many of the people now calling themselves conservatives are trying to rewrite history to claim the founding fathers would have been as favorable toward the growth of state power as they are.

Due to the conceptual confusion they have created, some in the anti-woke nanny-statist camp (such as the men at American Reformer) are now considering whether it would be best simply to abandon the term “conservative.”

I am all in favor of them doing that, because they were wrong from the beginning when they ascribed to that term.

But in light of these men’s efforts at corrupting of the term “conservative,” and in light of the present ambiguities around what is meant by the term “right wing,” I propose that those who reject nanny-statism and who uphold individual rights ought to make use of terms that more clearly spell out their convictions.

I propose the following conceptual boundary:

“Rights Respecters vs. Barbarians”

If you believe that individual rights are absolute, and the role of the government is to protect individual rights, then you are a Rights Respecter.

Rights Respecters will not always agree about what the rights are and how they are to be protected. But at minimum they agree about the two foundational points:

-Rights are absolute.
-The role of the government is to protect individual rights.

But—if you do NOT believe that rights are absolute, or you do not believe the role of the government is to protect individual rights, then you are an advocate of a fundamentally different vision of society.

The post-liberals, the dissident right, and the “New Right” fall into this category. While they may not know it, their vision for society implies a state that eventually tramples individual rights. This is built into the logic of their position.

The situation in a society that tramples individual rights is rightly called barbarism, and the people who advocate such a state are rightly to be called barbarians, whether they understand it or not.

Indeed, we do not expect that barbarians will understand why we classify them as such. If they understood what we mean by civility, they would not be barbarians.

If Rights Respecters want to have a chance at prevailing in any battle, be it the broadest culture war, or the smaller skirmishes, they will need to identify each other. They will need to identify who is in—and who is out.

There are Rights Respecters and there are Barbarians.

That is the key difference conceptually. And that is also the key difference strategically.

When we decide whom to help, whom to praise, and whom to platform in the culture war, this is the principle dividing line.

And I don’t think very many people know it.

Good Premises,