Daniel Horowitz of Conservative Review encapsulated equality and our natural individual rights as Americans quite ingeniously – representing our rights by use of a bell curve metaphor.
Horowitz cited the great President Calvin Coolidge’s July 4, 1926, address honoring the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. I would invite and encourage everyone to make the time to read the transcript of Coolidge’s speech. It is brilliant, educational and enlightening.
Coolidge said: “About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern.”
He was, of course, referring to the dawn of the modern day “progressive” era, well advanced by his and the late President Harding’s predecessor, Woodrow Wilson.
And Coolidge knew almost 100 years ago that this new progressive era, should it further influence the leaders of the nation, would be anything but progress. Rather the opposite – regressive.
Since the passing of the last of the founders in the mid 1800s, progressivism began to take hold, and Wilson was one of its most avid advocates and propagandists. Coolidge took it upon himself to attempt to right the founders’ ship, correct the record regarding the Declaration and the Constitution, and warn of the damage progressivism would cause to the underpinnings of liberty and natural rights.
Coolidge continued:
“But that reasoning cannot be applied to this great charter [the Declaration]. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.”
The time of our nation’s founding, Coolidge correctly concludes, is not the beginning, but the height of free men’s progress – these things described in the Declaration and the Bill of Rights are, in fact, the final pieces of the liberty puzzle, not the beginning.
Horowitz describes it as an ascension to the height of a bell curve, that our inalienable rights are achieved at the very top of the curve, and then must be “locked in,” in perpetuity. Any supposed “progress” proposed by Wilson and his successors is not progress but a declension from the peak of the liberty curve to one “backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people.”
“In all the essentials, we have achieved an equality which was never possessed by any other people. … The rights of the individual are held sacred and protected by constitutional guaranties, which even the government itself is bound not to violate,” Coolidge explains.
Coolidge understood, as do Horowitz and all originalist conservatives, that balancing on top of the bell curve is the most precarious place to be and the most difficult to maintain.
“If there is any failure in respect to any of these principles, it is because there is a failure on the part of individuals to observe them,” and, “If we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed to us, we must be like-minded as the fathers who created it.”