The Post-Conservative Right shares much of it’s worldview with the older Hard Left. Not in the eschaton they want to immanentize, but that we must more forcefully so immanentize. To this end, we see the false dilemma fallacy of freedom vs. order/morality. They see it as an either/or situation where too much freedom must come at the expense of the moral order. To that end they create some anarcho-capitalist or libertarian strawman and declare that it has failed to create a proper moral order consistent with traditional and veritable values, and thus must give way to more direct imposition by some ruling over others. It is “their base rhetorical trick” :
Or to put it another way:
“It is one thing to point out a practical difficulty which limits the application of a principle and quite another to refute the principle itself” – James FitzJames Stephen
Principles that were not first principles but grown organically is society with the generality derived therefrom. Rules being of a general nature and universally applicable. Equal application of those rules according to the facts and individual circumstances.
The limitation of government power and protection of freedom of legislative imposition, of executive arbitrariness and capriciousness, and of judicial restrain to not only the Constitution but more broadly to the common and statutory law.
Inalienable rights that are independent of and antecedent to government itself. As the Bill of Rights preamble stated, those Articles of Amendment were “declaratory and restrictive”: Declaring what already existed before acknowledgement by the government and restrictions upon said government.
The lack of economic freedom and the scourge of government without customary limits is why the Founding Fathers, who were familiar with what was being taken from them, declared independence!
Freedom and virtue are at opposite ends and to limit government is to limit the ability of the government to rebalance that. Freedom is curtailable, then, in order to rebalance towards virtue, and because limiting government prevents that.
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