Author: The FAR Platform

Many conservatives are comparing Obama’s comments about bitter Pennsylvanian rural and working class voters clinging to guns and religion with a young Karl Marx’s discussion of the logic of criticism, which he sees as having its embryonic form in the criticism of religion (see Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, presented in his “Contribution to the Critique,” published in Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher in February, 1844. They say that Obama is using Marx’s argument.

Since this is the subject of so much discussion, I thought it would useful to write a blog entry on the matter. First, here is some of what Marx said:

The foundation of irreligious criticism is this: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is indeed man’s self-consciousness and self-awareness so long as he has not found himself or has already lost himself again. But, man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, it enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.

It is, therefore, the task of history, once the other-world of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world. It is the immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked. Thus, the criticism of Heaven turns into the criticism of Earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.You will note, first of all, that Marx is criticizing the conditions of existence, not those affected by these conditions. He does not suggest there is some psychic or emotional defect in persons who are raised to believe in the supernatural. Alienation is not a individual phenomenon, but an objective condition in which individuals collectively exist.

Second, religion is a consequence of historical forces that affect virtually everybody in segmented society, not just for those living in small towns or in some other location. Obama’s own faith in Christianity – assuming he isn’t lying about that, too – is, according to Marx, ultimately the result of the general conditions of the present state of existence human beings experience. Many liberal elites believe in a god or have adopted some form of supernatural belief and spiritual analysis as a consequence of living in a social formation where alienation is fundamental to its character.

Third, this general problem of existence in segmented society is not reducible to economic troubles under capitalism. It is, in capitalist society, the problem of capitalism itself. Under feudalism it was the conditions of feudalism, not, say, a bad harvest. Obama can’t wean small town voters from their belief in god by improving their economic conditions. The way to create the possibility for movement away from belief in the supernatural is to, as Marx would have it, turn the social order upside down. You have to put working people in charge. The more democratic a country – that is, the more control working people enjoy over their lives – the less religions they become over time. It’s not about being bitter over economic troubles but about being alienated from history and the means to make history. It’s about a fundamental level of control over one’s existence.

If we are to believe that the origin of Obama’s argument is Marx’s critique of religion, then we must emphasize that Obama got Marx very wrong. Marx wasn’t talking about small town America. He was talking about the totality of alienated society. Marx wasn’t suggesting that we find some way to make capitalists bring their factories back to small-town Pennsylvania. Marx was talking about overthrowing the conditions of an alienated existence. He was talking about overthrowing capitalism. He was talking about revolutionary socialism.

Finally, the argument Obama did make is wrong. Small Americans do not cling to religion because of poor economic conditions. Obama might have avoided this problem if he had simply asked himself why he believes so strongly in god. After all, he has made his Christianity the centerpiece of his biography.

According to the Associated Press, Linda Ramirez-Sliwinski, a trustee in the Chicago suburb of Carpentersville, was issued a 75 dollar ticket for disorderly conduct after neighbors complained to police. 

Here’s what happened. Two children were playing in a tree next door to her house. She told the boys to get out of the tree because she was worried for their safety and because the magnolia tree was small and the boys were damaging it. 

The father, who evidently doesn’t understand what a trustee is, told her that it was none of her business.

This was her response: “I calmly said the tree is not there for them to be climbing in there like monkeys.”

The boys happened to be black. The mother of one of the boys called the police. In Illinois, there is an ordinance that bans conduct that disturbs or alarms other people. The police said that one boy was scared and a mother was disturbed. 

Why isn’t everybody in a panic over calling a black male “boy”? Could it be because context is everything?

Ramirez-Sliwinski says she will fight the ticket—as she should—but that she will not seek re-election to the board.

Turns out that there’s more to the story. Ramirez-Sliwinski is an Illinois delegate for Barack Obama, a position which she has resigned. The resignation was announced by Amy Brundage, a spokesperson for the Obama campaign. 

The AP story irresponsibly states that she was “using the word ‘monkeys’ to describe black children playing in a tree.” No, she wasn’t. She was using the word “monkeys” to describe boys playing in a tree.

Meanwhile, poverty among black children is still much greater than it is among white children. When are we going to do something about that?

Howard Dean, the chairman of the DNC, the man who is supposed to be looking out for Democrats, says, “I think there is 800 [superdelegates], and 450 have already said who they are for. I would like the other 350 to say who they are for at some point between now and the first of July, so we don’t have to take it to the convention.”

Mort Kondrake, who would love to see an Obama candidacy, says, “The only way out of this that I can see, since there is not going to be a re-do in Michigan or Florida, is for somebody, and Phil Gretason [sic], the governor of Tennessee is trying to organize this, is a pre-convention of the super delegates—get them all together and have them decide.”

A “pre-convention”? Conventions are not supposed to be public relations affairs where the party parades around looking as if it’s unified. We don’t want stage-crafted “democracy.” Conventions are where issues are discussed and the candidate that stands the best chance of being elected president and who best represents the interests of Democratic voters is selected. Liberal elites are desperate to bring the election to a close because they’re scared witless that, by August, Obama will have self-destructed, denying them the claim of the first African American presidential candidate. 

Ending the primary is not what Democratic voters want. As Clinton has pointed out, two-thirds of Democrats in a recent poll want the primary process to work itself out through voting. There are millions of people who haven’t yet voted, and they want their say. Of those who want the race to end, the same percentage of Democrats want Obama to drop out of the race as want Clinton to drop out of the race. The party should take note of this fact, because, coupled with the one-third of Clinton supporters who say they will switch to McCain if Obama wins the nomination, it signals how many Democrats are worried about an Obama candidacy.

* * *

Very interesting story out today by ABC news on Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter. I don’t agree with everything he said, but I greatly admire his standing up for substance over symbolism. He says in no uncertain language that he would have left Trinity United over Jeremiah Wright’s teachings. “I could not sit and tolerate that kind of language, and especially over a very long period of time,” he said. “If I were in my own church and heard my pastor saying some of those kinds of things, we’d have a conversation about what’s going on here, what is this all about, and then I would have to make my own personal decision about whether or not to be associated or affiliated.” When asked if he would have quit, he answered, “Absolutely.”  

He talked about the pressure from the black community, pressure that has already caused prominent members of the black community to switch their vote to Obama. The most disappointing defector to the Obama camp was House member John Lewis, who admitted that he switched because of anger and harassment from the black community. Nutter said that he hears all the time, “Why not support a brother?” He answers, “Somehow, someway, for some people there’s an automatic assumption that a mayor who is African American or some other elected official has to support another African American.”

As for the possibility of an historic moment, he added, “Certainly the opportunity to demonstrate to my 13-year-old daughter that there is a bright future for her, that a woman could get elected president of the United States, is equally compelling.” This historic possibility has been lost on the press. Black men got the right to vote in 1870. It would take another fifty years for women—all women—to get the right to vote. There’s no rule that says race comes before gender in “historic firsts.”  

Nutter said, “Either candidate will clearly make history. But you only get to vote for one. The most important thing is winning in November, putting a Democrat in the White House.” He continued, “I’m a great fan of history. I don’t know that when people are struggling to pay the bills, that they ultimately conclude that, ‘Well, if we can just make history with this vote, then all of my problems will be solved.’”  

Nutter condemned the Democratic Party for disenfranchising voters in Florida and Michigan, two states Clinton won by large margins. The Democratic Party is refusing to seat those delegates. “Think about who we are in the Democratic Party and the country we are in,” Nutter said. “That we would somehow leave out any of our citizens in this process, I think, would be an absolute disgrace. We need to be a bit smarter about it.”

Many in the black community are confused by Nutter’s endorsement. They thought for sure that he would support Obama. Instead of scratching their heads, however, they should listen to what he said and realize that his endorsement is rooted in reason, a commodity in short supply among those caught up in Obamamania. What Nutter says about electability is on point.

* * *

A great many democrats have been sucked into the Obama cult of personality, and, with virtually every media outlet claiming that Obama’s speech on race was historic and satisfying in terms of addressing the outstanding problems of his association with Jeremiah Wright (without going into detail about Obama’s close association with James T. Meeks and Salem Baptist and other black leaders of Wright’s ilk), it’s not particularly surprising that a majority of Democrats have come to this conclusion. After all, Obama is winning the election. Democrats needed a reason to justify their vote and the corporate media handed it to them. It’s all hunky dory now.

As for Republicans, their responses are for the most part a combination of subconscious fear of being perceived as racist by interviewers (many respondents, especially those who perceive interviewers as having reason to suspect them of racialized politics, are deceptive with interviewers in polls when race is a factor), a deep-seated hatred of Clinton that has them convinced that there is no way Clinton can be a strong candidate (they don’t know anybody who would vote for Clinton, so how could most Americans?), and a press so completely in Obama’s camp that they are convinced that McCain won’t be covered fairly in the general election if Obama is the candidate.

Given everything we can plainly see about the circumstances surrounding this poll, the results are predictable. More accurate are polls asking Clinton supporters whether they will support Obama or McCain in the event Clinton doesn’t get the nomination. The finding that one-third of Clinton supporters will support McCain given such an outcome is a much clearer indication of the possible consequences of an Obama candidacy. Numbers to this question put to the Obama side have risen of late because Obama supporters, frustrated by Clinton’s reluctance to quit in the middle of the fight, have turned on her (when the question was first asked, only a small proportion of Obama supporters would switch parties given the opposite scenario).

If the polls ever switch in Clinton’s favor, it will happen despite the overwhelming force of the corporate media’s surreal push for an Obama’s candidacy. Moreover, with Obama contributing so much money to the campaigns of superdelegates, who, more than 80 percent of the time support the candidate who contributes the most money to their campaign, it looks bleak for Clinton.

Bill Burton, a key Obama adviser, when asked why Obama disinvited his spiritual mentor Jeremiah Wright to speak at Obama’s presidential race kick off, said, “Senator Obama is proud of his pastor” and that Obama wanted to “avoid having statements and beliefs” of Wright show up on blogs and conservative talk shows. So Otis Moss III was asked to speak instead. Of course, Moss’s statements and beliefs are no different from Wright’s, but then the media hasn’t pursued that. They have made this about Wright, because they believe they can—as Obama has done—dismiss him. But it’s not about Wright; it’s about Trinity United Church of Christ and black liberation theology.

At the time, Al Sharpton criticized Obama over the disinvitation saying that blacks were rightly distressed by Obama failing to stand by his pastor. Sharpton doesn’t make this criticism any more, even though Obama has failed to stand by his pastor in even more dramatic fashion as of late.

Wright understood why Obama distanced himself from church teachings. “When his enemies find out that in 1984 I went to Tripoli [to visit Muammar el-Qaddafi] with [Louis] Farrakhan,” he said, “a lot of his Jewish support will dry up quicker than a snowball in hell.” Wright also knew that such statements as the following one could prove fatal to Obama (if, of course, the media ever harped on them): “White America and the Western world came to realize [in the wake of the 9-11 terrorist attacks] that people of color had not gone away, faded into the woodwork or just ‘disappeared’ as the Great White West kept on its merry way of ignoring Black concerns.” (I guess I don’t really need to point out that this quote hasn’t been discussed at all in the current discussion over Wright’s teachings, even though it is a well known among those who are paying attention.)

Obama knew full well the character of Wright’s language, telling Wright during the disinvitation conversation: “You can get kind of rough in the sermons, so what we’ve decided is that it’s best for you not to be out there in public.” For those slow on the uptake, this means that Obama is lying when he says he was unaware of the controversial remarks. Clinton’s misremembering of events during one hour 12 years ago in a war zone goes to the heart of her trustworthiness, we are told, but no similar claim is made about Obama’s continuing and deliberate deception in hiding his spiritual mentor from the public and denying that he heard controversial remarks (a story Obama can’t keep straight).

This really is the story: Obama’s lying. But the media isn’t reporting the story this way. The corporate media angle is that his speech was the best speech ever on race and Americans for the most part believe he addressed their concerns. The media doesn’t provide the proper angle because, as it is as obvious as anything could be at this point, their goal is to see to it that Obama gets the nomination. Whether their overwhelming support for Obama stems from the desire to ameliorate the guilt they feel as whites over racism or sabotage Hilary Clinton’s chances is a matter of interpretation. (Maybe it’s both.)

Wright has cancelled many of his appearances of late, one suspects because the attention they would receive would prove embarrassing to Obama. But one wonders why Wright, who once said that Obama was “the hope of the world,” continues to do Obama’s bidding. Wright warned both Obama and Moss years ago that an Obama presidential campaign would make criticism of Trinity inevitable. I’m sure he didn’t expect Obama to turn his back on the church and reduce its preacher to a crazy old uncle who says bizarre things when that inevitability manifested itself in the clips of Wright’s sermons shown on YouTube.

Obama now says he would have quit the church if Wright hadn’t retired. “Had the reverend not retired and had he not acknowledged that what he had said had deeply offended people and were inappropriate and mischaracterized what I believe is the greatness of this country, for all its flaws, then I wouldn’t have felt comfortable staying there at the church.” But that’s not what Obama said in the “greatest speech ever.” Remember what he said then? “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother.” 

Obama can’t get his story straight. He says he never heard controversial remarks despite being a member of the church for twenty years. Then he says in his speech he did hear controversial remarks. Then he says after his speech that he didn’t hear controversial remarks, that he wasn’t there those days. Then we learn that he didn’t let Wright speak at the ceremony announcing his run for the White House because of Wright’s controversial statements. He says Wright is family and he can’t disown him and that’s why he didn’t leave the church. Now he says that had Wright not retired he would have left the church.

Obama knows that, if white America ever realizes that for two decades Obama faithfully, willingly, and enthusiastically attended a church where the minister preached the things Wright preached week in and week out, Clinton will likely be the nominee of the Democratic Party. But the truth is that this is exactly what happened. So rather than simply admit it and take this opportunity to explain to America what Trinity United is all about, Obama lies. And the media covers and spins.

Wright and Trinity United got attention a while back when another member of the church, Oprah Winfrey—who says that “Obama is the one we’ve been waiting for” (The Matrix?)—actually stopped attending the church (she hasn’t been a member for nearly a decade), because she didn’t like Wright’s rhetoric—again, rhetoric Obama has always known about but which he denies knowing. Wright didn’t take Oprah’s leaving well. When asked about it, he said, “She has broken with the (traditional faith)…. She now has this sort of ‘God is everywhere, God is in me, I don’t need to go to church, I don’t need to be a part of a body of believers, I can meditate, I can do positive thinking’ spirituality.’ It’s a strange gospel. It has nothing to do with the church Jesus Christ founded.”

Although Obama never left the church, he has turned his back on the church’s teachings. As readers of my blog know, Wright advanced what he called a “Black Value System,” one of the tenets of which is the rejection of “middleclassness.” This value issues from the Marxist character of black liberation theology. Obama has fully embraced the middle class lifestyle, pitching his campaign specifically to the middle class voter—the white affluent college-educated liberal who wants desperately to vote for any black man to prove to themselves that anything is possible in America. Working people (except working class blacks, who are tragically voting on the basis of identity politics and not on the basis of their objective interests during this campaign season) get this and therefore are supporting the candidate with the practical policy and program proposals (who has the added bonus of potentially beating McCain in November).

You can’t trust Obama. He has either sold out completely or he was always lying to the south side of Chicago. In any case, he has been lying to Americans all along and he won’t stop lying about all of this.

Obama is getting a free ride from the corporate media. Obama tells the public that any statement his preacher made that offends them he did not personally hear (because he wasn’t in church on those days) and he categorically condemns and denounces it. Then he says he heard controversial statements made by Wright while sitting in the pews of Trinity United. Then he says he didn’t. Now Obama says he would have left the church had Wright not retired. But Wright was making these remarks at least throughout the present decade.

Did Wright tell Obama he was going to retire in 2008 way back in 2001 when he gave his “Chickens coming home to roost” sermon and Obama rode it out until then? Oprah left because of what Wright said and there was a public war of words over the matter. Why didn’t Obama do the same? Is the new minister (Otis Moss) acceptable to Obama since Obama remains a member of the church? The press is not pressing Obama on any of these things. Nobody who gets anywhere near him is openly challenging his obviously absurd answers to the questions he asks himself. 

Electability is the central issue in this campaign, yet the media is too busy piling up Democratic voices on one side calling on Hillary to step aside and marginalizing those voices that point out how close the contest is. They want to stop the fight before the final bell because they the fear that Obama will stick out his chin and Clinton will land a knockout blow. They suspect there’s more in Obama’s past hanging over his candidacy and they desperately want Clinton to concede before that information gets out. They couldn’t contain the Wright sermons and they don’t want a repeat of that debacle before the big primaries coming up. While they were able to make a confusing speech appear to the public as a special speech by hyping it, there’s no guarantee that they can spin future speeches in the same way. 

The problem is not so much with what Reverend Jeremiah Wright has said, but with how Barack Obama has reacted to the controversy. For twenty years, Obama was a member of a church that preached black liberation theology, a Christian worldview with roots in Marxism. Yet, when he needed to appeal to white voters, Obama denied he knew about the character of Wright’s theology, denounced church teachings, and reduced Reverend Jeremiah Wright, his spiritual advisor, the man who put him in touch with his black identity, to a rough-and-tumble style preacher. Obama didn’t stand up for the black community or for black liberation theology. He gave a speech in which he treated racism for the most part as a thing of the past. He depicted the radicalism of Wright and others as anger and frustration held over from the 1950s and 1960s. It was a remarkable moment in which a politician believed to be something different was revealed as little more than a superficial and willing pawn of the establishment.

There are some who are claiming that Barack Obama is being subjected to a Willie Horntoning. They defend the reverend, but also cast Obama as the victim. He’s not. Obama is pulling a Sister Souljah. The progressive community should be out front in condemning Obama for this. The media’s reaction to Wright’s comments was predictable. Obama’s reaction to Wright’s comments were despicable.

Recently, The Washington Post interviewed Peter Paris, professor emeritus of Christian social ethics at Princeton Theological Seminary. Paris worries that Obama’s condemnation of some of Wright’s words could hurt him in some black churches. It is interesting that, instead of condemning Obama for his betrayal of the church, many progressive theologians are concerned about how Obama’s speech plays among black church goers with respect to how it helps or hurts Obama.

“So many black churches understand the role of prophetic speech alongside of pastoral speech, and I don’t think that Obama helped…communicate that strongly enough,” Paris said. “I hope that he doesn’t find black churches moving away from him in that respect.” Paris said that Wright’s comments about past slavery and modern-day segregated schools are not, as Obama claimed, “distorted.” “Jeremiah Wright is seen as a major prophetic voice in the black community,” Paris said, “and there are many people who adore him.”

Yet Paris, who was a divinity school classmate with Wright in the 1960s, is an Obama supporter. Why, if Paris and others realize that Obama’s characterization of black liberation theology as distorted is wrong, do they support him? Do folks still think Ferraro was wrong to say that the reason why Obama is doing so well is because some Americans are caught up in the idea of a black president?

I think people have to understand Obama’s motive. Either he joined Trinity United because he believes in black liberation theology and its black Christian Marxist roots or he used Trinity United to find his black identity and build a constituency. It doesn’t appear that Obama ever believed in black liberation theology. He used the church as a stepping stone and then when he got to where he wanted to be—at the threshold of the Democratic nomination—he turned his back on them.

Even if Obama still holds to black liberation theology and is denying it because he knows he couldn’t get elected otherwise, then he’s perpetrating a fraud of mega-proportions. If you know people won’t like you because of what you believe, and you have the courage of your convictions, then you don’t pretend to be something else; you tell them what you believe and let the chips fall where they may. Obama is too busy feeding everybody what they want to hear to have any convictions.

As an aside, I wonder how much press this latest thing about Italians with their “garlic noses” will get. Wright is big on this metaphor of Rome as the United States. No way did Barack Obama not know about this thread. It pops up over and over again. Two days ago Obama discussed the “very objectionable things [said] when I wasn’t in church on those particular days.” How convenient. If Wright says anything objectionable, just assume that Obama wasn’t in church that day. That may work for Obama true believers, but to rational persons it’s ludicrous.

If the press was going after Obama the way it’s going after Hillary this race wouldn’t be close. Seriously, I would really like to see a video of Obama laughing and clapping in the pew over one of Wright’s objectionable comments. Trouble is, they’re likely hiding that evidence. For some reason or another, even though Obama threw Wright and Trinity United under the bus, they’re still protecting him.

If you are a person who believes that what Jeremiah Wright said about 9-11 and white America is false and wrong, then you probably should not on principle support Obama since he approved of those statements by not leaving the church or by encouraging the removal of Wright as its pastor. Folks who sit in church silently while their minister is damning America for tolerating homosexuality endorse those statements when they fail to sack the minister or leave the church. Obama can offer no justification for why he did neither. He has admitted he lied when he claims to never have heard the statements.

If you are a person who believes that what Wright said about 9-11 and white America is true and right, then you probably should not in principle support Obama since he condemned those statements, denigrated Wright the person, and turned his back on the community. Obama gave a speech in which he came out in favor of the convenient understanding of racism, a speech aimed at making white people feel good about his presidency by making racism appear for the most part as residual anger among older black Americans. Obama betrayed Wright’s teaching. So if Wright is somebody you admire, then Obama offends you. And you see the speech for what it was: a superficial, self-serving attempt to confuse the issue.

Obama sought to walk a tightrope, as the media was constantly reminding us. But there is no tightrope to walk. There are only two ways to feel about this if you operate on principle, each rooted in your political worldview. These worldviews are represented by the establishment standpoint, on the one hand, and the popular standpoint on the other. If you are of the former, then Obama’s failing is that he is a member of a radical black anti-American church. If you are of the latter, then Obama’s failing betrays your core values as an advocate for social justice.

Following Obama’s lead, the media used empty words to make a speech that couldn’t possibly work appear as if it did. They manufactured an illusion, one that millions of the believers sitting at the feet of the Obama cult of personality needed no prompting to believe. Why can I see the speech for what it is? Because I am consistently justice oriented. I can see what Obama is up to. He’s the establishment’s black candidate.

But others who adhere consistently to the establishment standpoint also see through the speech. They can see how he changed the subject from the problem of his minister’s anti-Americanism to the problem of racism in America, a switch he exploited to gain traction among liberals seeking satifaction on the question of race. Obama’s speech was an object lesson in the importance of developing a consistent worldview rooted in principle, as well as why bipartisanship is an undesirable goal and centrism is an extremist ideology.

By the way, have you noticed that white Christian ministers can say all sorts of nasty things about America, but when a black Christian minister does it he is a racist anti-American demagogue?

The communitarian critique of liberalism rests in essence upon the argument that one cannot derive a moral theory from the position of individualism. Morality must exist beyond the individual, say communitarians. Communitarians locate morality in normative actions rooted in community and tradition. This means that morality usually comes rooted in religious rules, or at least religious-like rules.

However, whether religious or secular, communitarianism ultimately leads its proponents into relativism. This is not accidental; communitarians challenge the liberal claim of universalism. The problem of particularism versus universalism has already been solved (albeit the solution is pending), and this solution issues from the historical materialist conception of the relationship between the individual and society.

Specific moralities, whether rooted in religious or secular notions of bad and good, right and wrong, are, to a substantial degree, expressions of alienation under power. While concrete moral systems sometimes reflect universal morality, rules and values are articulated through the commands of estranged and oppressive systems. The objective core of alienation and oppression is the unequal condition of human existence in segmentally-arranged societies. Whenever the individual is prevented from performing the definitive role in shaping her destiny, and a social system is prevented from working to each individual benefit—that is, when some individuals, alone or organized into groups, systematically enjoy advantage and other individuals or groups suffer disadvantage—then the moral system will always be constrained and distorted.

Now I come to the solution: the elimination of segmentation and the creation of a substantively egalitarian social order, one in which benefit to the one comes with the benefit to all. Only when such an order is established—or, more precisely, restored—will an undistorted universal morality exist.

To put this another way, liberty and universal morality are achieved through equality. It is in the demand for justice that liberalism, at least as currently articulated in all its many forms, is revealed as inadequate, as the emphasis on negative freedom and minority ownership and control over the means of production runs counter to the establishment of a social order based upon democracy and personal liberty.

An argument with which you may be familiar concerns the objectivity of morality. Many persons of religious faith believe that any moral claim or action ultimately must issue from a transcendent source, which they define as a supernatural agent or force. Without a supernatural entity or force, which exists as a universal and timeless thing, morality is merely the product of the subjective mind and, as such, its advocates can claim no final objective authority over the behavior of the individual. Thus secularists, while they may articulate moral sentiments and advocate rules appealing to their attendant values, have no real foundation upon which to build an ethical and legal structure. Societal arrangements change over time and space (they are culturally and historically relative), whereas the supernatural agent or force, which we shall call “God,” is intransitive. In short, no religion, no morality. It follows, therefore, that, without “God,” there is no reason to be or do good.

I know of no claim that suffers from greater invalidity and unsoundness. When one examines culture and history, he finds, among the many things that a particular people produce, concrete religious systems. The first thing that strikes the observer, after examining a handful of different cultures, is the great degree of cross-cultural variability in religious systems and associated aspects of the moral order these religious systems are alleged to underpin. With different religions come different moral systems, which mean there are different ideas and motives for a person to be or do good (or evil). Thus, the evidence demonstrates that appealing to supernatural agents or forces does nothing to make universal or immemorial any particular moral order. On the contrary, on the surface, morality is found to be as culturally and historically relative as religion.

The only way out of this relativity problem, from a religious perspective, is to assert (and assert one must, since one cannot prove) that one religion is the only true religion, while all of the others are false religions. But such an assertion is self-evidently subjective, and thus cannot be the objective grounds for arguing that religious morality is superior to secular morality. Belief in the supernatural is, after all, a matter of faith. Indeed, what we find when we look at several specific religions—each of which claims to be the one true religion—are practices accepted and even encouraged by religious leaders and texts that are recognized as moral wrongs in the present day.

The Judeo-Christian Bible, for example, advocates the killing of defiant children, homosexuals, and infidels, acts that widely recognized as criminal acts. The Bible also justifies slavery. Yet virtually every Christian and Jew opposes slavery. How is it possible that people recognize the immorality of prescriptions in the Bible if the Bible is the sole source of morality for adherents to this religion? Does the obvious truth that religion provides no objective foundation for morality mean that morality is doomed to relativism and subjectivism?

For a very straightforward reason, I believe the answer to this question is no. Here, social science (a secular system of thought) provides us with the needed tools to identify objective features of morality. A moral order is an emergent property of human society irrespective of any religious sentiment. Each Homo sapiens, as an accident of biological evolution, must live in society to become human in the moral sense. Morality is, at its core, the rules that organize individual action or behavior sufficient for the existence of human being and that make the continuation of society possible. Thus a universal morality is to be found in the universal features of human interaction and relations.

Sometimes a particular religion will reflect these transhistorical features of human society, such as is seen in the so-called “golden rule,” a prescription found, if only ideally, everywhere. Oftentimes, however, religious sentiments disrupts the basic decent human impulses given to us by deeper societal relations. Here we find those religious texts advocating killing and oppressing human beings in the name of a god or gods.  What we find when we study the matter from a position external to the religious system is that the leaders and scriptures are justifying power relations peculiar to a concrete social order; in other words, they wrap exploitation and oppression in the language of morality. The religiously-devoted in these instances are not oppressing others for the sake of morality, but for the sake of maintaining power and wealth, that is, perpetuating an unjust, or immoral, if you will, state of affairs. In this way, religion can be, although this is not always true, the epitome of immorality.

It seems no matter where I am, I am called upon to become the teacher of introductory students of American government. In this entry, I will instruct some of those who visit the blog about the distinction between “powers” and “rights.” Most of you already know this, but you may find the argument helpful in dealing with those who don’t—of which there are many.

Powers concern state action not forbidden by federal judicial interpretation of the US Constitution. In contrast, rights concern freedoms governments, state and federal, cannot legally curtail.  

Let us examine the text of the Tenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which is, with the possible exception of the Second Amendment, the most misunderstood and misapplied amendment: 

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

You will note that nowhere in the amendment is any reference made to rights. Read it again. The amendment concerns powers. The meaning of the amendment is explicit: if the federal government amends the Constitution, or if through closer examination the federal judiciary reveals more powers inherent in the Constitution, then the power of states and of the people may be restricted; but if this does not happen, then the states and the people enjoy the balance of (theoretically unlimited) powers. 

This is something quite different from the question of rights, which neither state nor federal governments may curtail without good reason; indeed, state and federal governments are required to protect and preserve our rights.

Let us now examine the text of the Ninth Amendment to the US Constitution:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

This amendment, unlike the Tenth Amendment, does concern rights. Please read it again and note that nowhere in the amendment is anything said about states. The reason for this is obvious: states have no rights; only people do. This amendment exists to accommodate state-level bills of rights that are more expansive than the federal bill of rights. The people of the various states were concerned that, if rights were outlined in a federal bill, this might restrict rights listed in state bills. Those drafting the federal bill wanted to assure the people of the various states that the act of drawing up a federal bill should not be construed as restricting state bills.  

The Ninth Amendment also means that citizens living in states that either do not have a bill of rights or have a more restrictive bill enjoy rights recognized by the federal government that states cannot restrict. Indeed, the key dynamic in the history of freedom in the United States is the progressive incorporation of all the states within the US Bill of Rights so that all citizens have the same rights everywhere at all times.

Here’s the bottom line: any state that restricts a constitutionally-guaranteed right, even if no judgment has been made by a federal court invalidating that restriction, is exhibiting tyrannical behavior. Case in point: the Texas Homosexual Conduct Act. The victims of this act of tyranny sought relief from the Supreme Court (Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558, 123 S.Ct. 2472 2003). The law did not suddenly become an act of tyranny because the Court overturned it. Indeed, any court failing to overturn the conviction and invalidate such a law was perpetuating that act of tyranny.

Neither God nor gods give you liberty. People successfully organized against tyranny give you liberty. Freedom concerns what you control, not what Mitt Romney imagines an invisible man in the sky controls. Politicians aim to exploit the blind faith that usually results from belief in the supernatural; they mean to control you through religion. Romney’s speech sounds like an ayatollah’s sermon, not the words of a man who may govern a secular country. Romney doesn’t believe this is a secular country. He fallaciously claims that secularism is a religion, then, hypocritically, rejects it.  

Secularism is the belief that public institutions shall exist free of the influence of religious belief. Secularism is not a religion; it is belief in freedom of religion. Secularists recognize that, since there are different religions with exclusive doctrinal elements, if government does not exist free of religion, then religious influence on government will inevitably fall to one sort of religion or another. Under such conditions, followers of other religions and nonbelievers will be less free.  

The problem of religious pluralism (not an ideology but a fact) is the reason why the first right guaranteed by the US Bill of Rights is religious freedom, i.e., secularism: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….” Mitt Romney is of course free to privately practice his religion; however, as a public employee, he is not free to impose his religion on us. No politician can be free to be a tyrant. Yet Romney is arguing precisely for such a tyranny of religion when he claims that the US Constitution was established for a religious people.

Romney supports his case by selectively quoting John Adams. What happens when we bring in two other founders of our secular republic, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison? Romney may not know it, but it was well known in the day that these men were free thinkers; you knew by the hysteria of the Calvinists of the day who, to quote Susan Jacoby, “denigrated [them] as atheists, heretics, and infidels.” But, just as Lincoln refused to join a church despite the pleadings of his advisers, public pressure didn’t deter Jefferson and Madison from their secularism.  

Thomas Jefferson wrote,

Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What have been the effects of coercion? To make one half of the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and terror all over the earth. Let us reflect that it is inhabited by a thousand millions of people. That these profess probably a thousand different systems of religion. That ours is but one of that thousand.

With history and the fact of religious pluralism in mind, Jefferson wrote to one religious association, “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.” 

James Madison also sought “total separation of the church from the state.” This was good for both the people and religion, for “practical distinction between Religion and Civil Government is essential to the purity of both, and as guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States.”

Mitt Romney soils the memory of our founders work by failing to praise them for creating the first country in history to disestablish its government from religion. He betrays the vision of the founders. He is a Christianist, and his presidency represents a danger to our democracy.

Moreover, Romney’s arguments are a form of bigotry. Surveys show that nonbelievers in US society outnumber black Americans. Any government practice compelling all black Americans to observe the desires of the white majority against the interests of black Americans is discriminatory. We call this racism, and it has been a problem throughout our history. It follows, then, that any government practice compelling all nonbelievers and non-Christian believers to observe the desires of the Christian majority is discriminatory. That makes Mitt Romney is a bigot.

Note 6.8.2022: I no longer agree with either my assessment concerning Scandinavian states or the merits of Hayek’s work. Part of my shift in opinion is because the character of European social democracy has changed considerably since I wrote this blog in 2007. But I have also changed my judgment with respect to Hayek. Indeed, I should not have a “but” in there, since the emergent authoritarian character of European social democracy suggests the predictive validity of Hayek’s argument. And it is not just Europe suffering from the overgrowth of elite planning; the American republic is suffering, as well.

What was the joke Paul Sweezy used to tell? Something to the effect of Hayek’s theory posits that if there is an overproduction in baby carriages, then the central planners will order the population to have more babies. A joke to be sure, but dead to rights.

The premise of The Road to Serfdom, “planning leads to dictatorship,” is on its face absurd; but more importantly, it has been empirically falsified. To be sure, planning by a corporate-state sharply increases the likelihood of authoritarian rule, such as, most obviously, in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, and, less dramatically but nonetheless obviously, in the United States. However, planning in contexts where workers have a substantial say-so in what happens in economic life (that is, democracy), such as in the Scandinavian states, increases personal freedom. Indeed, most European states have far greater levels of personal freedom than the United States, and the European countries that are most free present with a much greater degree of planning.

We don’t need to speculate on whether Hayek’s claims are sound; the evidence refutes the thesis of his book.

If you want to read more of Hayek’s immoral ideas, read The Constitution of Liberty (1960). If we stay true to the man’s logic, handicapped parking discriminates against the able-bodied. Only ideologues cling to his words any more. Unfortunately, ideologues, in contrast to rational minds, are never in short supply.