Three Lockean Reasons to Oppose the Democrats
Our constitutional republic hangs by a thread. Will you do your bit to preserve it?
The main purposes of government are to protect life, liberty, and property. Subsidiary purposes are subordinate to the Lockean triad. This is lost on the present-day Democrat party which has been hijacked by the hard Left. Despite what they say, leftists are anti-life, anti-liberty, and anti-property. So if you value life, liberty, and property, then you must not vote for any Democrat. Why any? Because Democrat politicians are under party discipline and toe the party line. The one or two exceptions prove the rule. Because these exceptions are few and not reliably exceptional, my rule stands.
The Republicans in their timid way do stand for life, liberty, and property. Or at least some of them do. And they have become less timid under Donald Trump's tutelage. Lindsey Graham, for one, located his manly virtue and put it to work during the Bret Kavanaugh confirmation. Graham’s recent behavior has been less inspiring. In any case, the choice is clear. Vote Republican, never vote for any Democrat, and don't throw away your vote on unelectable third-party candidates. As I argue elsewhere, third parties are discussion societies in political drag.
You must never forget that politics is praxis, not theoria. What matters is not to have the best theory, but the best implementable theory. There is no implementation of policy without the power to implement. There is no power without winning. Win, gain power, and then implement ameliorative policies. If you don't have your hands on the levers of power, you are just another talker like me.
Two other related maxims.
First, it is folly in general to let the best become the enemy of the good. Second, politics in particular is never about perfect versus imperfect, but about better versus worse. You find Donald J. Trump deficient in gravitas? Well, so do I and defective in other ways to boot. But he was overall better than the alternatives in 2016 and 2020 and he is clearly better, all things considered, than Kamala Harris in 2024. (And thank you, Sleepy Joe, for making Trump's virtues and accomplishments stand out so clearly by contrast with your ineptitude and dereliction of duty, and for helping in his re-election with your ‘garbage’ slur, which is itself garbage. )
I will now briefly list some, but not all, of the reasons why the Democrats are anti-life, anti-liberty, and anti-property despite their mendacious protests to the contrary.
ANTI-LIFE. The Dems are the abortion party. They support abortion on demand at every stage of fetal development. They are blind to the moral issues that abortion raises. They absurdly think that abortion is merely about women's health and reproductive rights. They are not ashamed to embrace such Orwellian absurdities as that abortion is health care.
To make matters worse, Democrats violate the sincerely held and cogently argued beliefs of fellow taxpayers by their support of taxpayer funding for abortion. You will recall that the 'devout Catholic' Joe Biden reversed himself on the Hyde Amendment. He showed once again who and what he is, a political opportunist grounded in no discernible principles, not to mention a brazen liar whose mendacity is now compounded by his being non compos mentis, not of sound mind.
So if you value life, you must not vote Democrat. Some will say that you must not vote for either party. This is a mistake, but I don’t have the space to argue it out. I will simply refer you to Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano’s Open Letter to American Catholics. Excerpt:
. . . in this election you must choose between two radically opposed ways of conceiving the government of your Nation: you are called to choose between democracy and dictatorship, between freedom and slavery.
On one side we have candidate Donald J. Trump, who, despite serious problems in his positions – especially in the matter of abortion and assisted procreation – has as his objective the common good and the protection of the fundamental freedoms of citizens. In Donald Trump’s America, every Catholic can practice their Faith and educate their children in it without interference from the State.
On the other side we have a candidate and a party that promotes everything that directly opposes the Faith and Morals of the Catholic Church. In Kamala Harris’ America, Catholics – but also Protestants – are considered fundamentalists to be marginalized and eliminated, and their children are considered the property of the State, which arrogates to itself the right to lead them astray from an early age in both body and soul. Trump’s America can become great and prosperous again. Harris’ America is destined for invasion and for moral, social, and economic destruction: the most ferocious dictatorship.
ANTI-LIBERTY. The Dems of the present day are opposed to free speech, religious liberty, and self-defense rights. They regularly conflate free speech with 'hate speech,' not appearing to grasp that if I dissent from your views, it does not follow that I hate you. Are you identical to your views? Dems also regularly conflate religious liberty with 'theocracy,’ not appearing to understand that religious liberty includes the liberty to practice no religion. And this while going soft on genuine theocratic regimes such as Iran's. All of this puts them at odds with the First and Second Amendments to the Constitution. And in general we can say that contemporary Democrats are anti-Constitutional inasmuch as an open or living constitution, which they advocate, is no constitution at all, but a mere tabula rasa they hope to deface with their anti-American leftist ideology.
ANTI-PROPERTY. Today's Democrats, as hard leftists, are ever on the slouch toward socialism, which, in full flower (to put it euphemistically) requires central planning and government ownership of the means of production. That is where they want to go even though, as stealth ideologues, they won't admit it.
But let's assume that the statement I just made is exaggerated and that Dems really don't want socialism as it is classically defined. Still, they are anti-property in various ways. They think that we the people have to justify our keeping whereas government doesn't have to justify its taking. That is precisely backwards. They don't appreciate that the government exists for us; we don't exist for the government. They confuse taxation with wealth redistribution. And by the way, the government is not us, as Barack Obama has said. 'The government is us' is as perversely knuckle-headed as 'Diversity is our strength.' The latter stupidity is plainly Orwellian. What about the former? Pre-Orwellian?
Finally, you need to understand that private property is the foundation of individual liberty.