{"id":1501727,"date":"2022-06-02T17:44:46","date_gmt":"2022-06-02T21:44:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1501727"},"modified":"2022-06-02T17:44:50","modified_gmt":"2022-06-02T21:44:50","slug":"when-did-john-locke-become-the-enemy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/when-did-john-locke-become-the-enemy\/","title":{"rendered":"When Did John Locke Become The Enemy?\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">14<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fwhen-did-john-locke-become-the-enemy%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1501727&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>Post-liberalism has suddenly become all the rage these days, a cause c\u00e9l\u00e8bre in a burgeoning number of conservative journalistic circles. Conservatives should be exceedingly careful of giving a fatal sanction to damning critiques of The Enlightenment and classical liberalism. Here\u2019s why.<\/p>\n<p>When did it become fashionable for conservatives to bash the European Enlightenment?\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Or, to phrase the question another way, when did conservatives start celebrating intellectual eviscerations of the philosophical tradition undergirding the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the \u201cGettysburg Address\u201d, and Martin Luther King\u2019s \u201cLetter from a Birmingham Jail\u201d?<\/p>\n<p>Of course, American universities have long promulgated a steady potpourri of Anti-Enlightenment Leftist sentiment since the 1960s, disseminating a bevy of illiberal and postmodern notions\u2014sometimes Marxist bromides about \u201cfalse consciousness,\u201d sometimes banal citations of Foucault about \u201cpower\/knowledge\u201d or how reality is a \u201csocial construct\u201d that desperately needs to be \u201cdeconstructed\u201d for reasons that seem to change every few years.<\/p>\n<p>However, Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke, Adam Smith, Hume, Voltaire, and Baron de Montesquieu, to cite a few, are our philosophers. Their origins might be English, Scottish, or French, but many of their ideas are imbedded in the foundational documents of this nation. Jefferson thought Locke was one of the greatest men to have ever lived. Madison harnessed the ideas of Smith in the most famous of The Federalist Papers\u2019 eighty-five essays, The Federalist No. 10. Montesquieu was quoted more than any other philosopher during the Philadelphia Convention of 1787. Hamilton was powerfully influenced by Hume\u2019s reflections on commercial republicanism.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u201cInalienable rights,\u201d \u201cseparation of powers,\u201d the First Amendment freedoms, and a robust commitment to free enterprise and private property rights are all inextricably tied to what is unique and, yes, exceptional about the American Experiment. This bundle of practices and beliefs are typically associated with what is known as classical liberalism.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Our Founding Fathers were classical liberals. When they wanted to hurl insults at one another, they would paint someone as an illiberal \u201cmonarchist\u201d (Adams and Hamilton) or \u201canarchist\u201d (Jefferson and Paine). Webster, Calhoun, and Clay were classical liberals. Abraham Lincoln was a classical liberal who labeled the Declaration of Independence \u201cthe apple of gold\u201d and the Constitution a \u201cpicture of silver.\u201d TR, FDR, LBJ, and Ronald Reagan were classical liberals\u2014maybe not iterations modern Republicans would necessarily embrace, but still ardent believers in the classical liberal tradition underlying the American creed itself.<\/p>\n<p>The formation of America, among other things, was a philosophical experiment in democratic self-government\u2014an attempt to organize society from the bottom up, centering the locus of power not on the divine right of monarchs or the ecclesiastic diktats of established churches, but on the backs of ordinary human beings in possession of \u201cnatural\u201d or \u201cinalienable\u201d rights who were rational and capable of exercising moral agency.<\/p>\n<p>Until quite recently, American conservatives were almost universally committed to conserving the principles of the American founding\u2014what Lincoln describes in his First Inaugural Address as \u201cthe mystic chords of memory.\u201d Progressive college students might obnoxiously wear Che Guevara t-shirts on campus, but conservatives wax poetic when talking about Washington crossing the Delaware or reading the lyrical words of Jefferson in the apotheosis of classical liberal philosophy, the Declaration of Independence. Americans pulse with shame and pang with regret when reading Frederick Douglass\u2019s, \u201cWhat to the Slave Is the Fourth of July,\u201d because we cannot deny the chasm between our liberal ideals and the presence of human bondage in our national history.<\/p>\n<p>This tradition now seems suspicious to some. Jeff Deist, president of the Mises Institute,<a href=\"https:\/\/mises.org\/wire\/new-postliberalism\"> succinctly describes this phenomenon<\/a>: \u201cPostliberalism is having its moment on the political Right in America.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Let\u2019s hope the moment is brief.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The argument of the post-liberals is now familiar.<\/p>\n<p>A regime that champions individual liberty as its paramount virtue will eventually alienate itself from religious traditions, family connections, or any hint of community obligation. Liberalism, with its heavy emphasis on individual autonomy and sovereignty of the self, has encouraged its adherents to aggressively nurture every craving under the banner of choice and identity. The results have been a disaster. Civil society has become morally bankrupt, endlessly sexualized, and politically nihilistic while gorging on electronic titillation without end, effectively ruining our brains and corrupting our souls in the process.<\/p>\n<p>A broader and more damning critique is that liberalism is an ideology without a meaningful telos or guiding purpose and is, thus, inherently chaotic. There is no aspirational truth, no grand project, no transcendent meaning. Liberalism is a political project that intensely relegates meaning to the personal realm. Fulfillment is not reached through politics or other locales of the public square. We are not collectively serving a divine monarch or supporting the ecclesiastic writ of an established church.<\/p>\n<p>Thus, liberalism is built on the lower but firmer ground of universal rationalism and rights-based individualism.<\/p>\n<p>I am actually quite sympathetic to these critiques; in fact, I wrote an entire <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Hollowed-Out-Warning-Americas-Generation\/dp\/1684513804\/ref=sr_1_1?crid=ZJJP007J97JN&#038;keywords=hollowed+out+adams+paperback&#038;qid=1654164206&#038;s=audible&#038;sprefix=hollowed+out+adams+paperback%2Caudible%2C182&#038;sr=1-1\">book<\/a> chronicling how a cult of radicalized individualism<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Post-liberalism has suddenly become all the rage these days, a cause c\u00e9l\u00e8bre in a burgeoning number of conservative journalistic circles. Conservatives should be exceedingly careful of giving a fatal sanction to damning critiques of The Enlightenment and classical liberalism. Here\u2019s why. When did it become fashionable for conservatives to bash the European Enlightenment?\u00a0 Or, to &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":790,"featured_media":1501751,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1501727","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1501727","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/790"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1501727"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1501727\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1501751"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1501727"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1501727"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1501727"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}