{"id":8015,"date":"2014-04-18T13:24:23","date_gmt":"2014-04-18T13:24:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2014\/04\/18\/the-fundamental-division-in-u-s-politics\/"},"modified":"2014-04-18T13:24:23","modified_gmt":"2014-04-18T13:24:23","slug":"the-fundamental-division-in-u-s-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2014\/04\/18\/the-fundamental-division-in-u-s-politics\/","title":{"rendered":"The Fundamental Division in U. S. Politics"},"content":{"rendered":"

George F. Will, drawing upon<\/a> Timothy Sandefur, maintains that<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

The fundamental division in U.S. politics is between those who take their bearings from the individual\u2019s right to a capacious, indeed indefinite, realm of freedom, and those whose fundamental value is the right of the majority to have its way in making rules about which specified liberties shall be respected.<\/span><\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/span><\/p>\n

The argument is between conservatives who say U.S. politics is basically about a condition, liberty, and progressives who say it is about a process, democracy. Progressives, who consider democracy the  source<\/em> of liberty, reverse the Founders\u2019 premise, which was: Liberty preexists governments, which, the Declaration says, are legitimate when \u201cinstituted\u201d to \u201csecure\u201d natural rights.<\/span><\/p>\n

Progressives consider, for example, the rights to property and free speech<\/a> as, in Sandefur\u2019s formulation, \u201cspaces of privacy\u201d that government chooses \u201cto carve out and protect\u201d to the extent that these rights serve democracy. Conservatives believe that liberty, understood as a general absence of interference, and individual rights, which cannot be exhaustively listed, are natural and that governmental restrictions on them must be as few as possible and rigorously justified. Merely invoking the right of a majority to have its way is an insufficient justification.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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\"\"<\/a>George Will's column about my new book<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/fieldset>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

George F. Will, drawing upon Timothy Sandefur, maintains that The fundamental division in U.S. politics is between those who take their bearings from the individual\u2019s right to a capacious, indeed indefinite, realm of freedom, and those whose fundamental value is the right of the majority to have its way in making rules about which specified … Continue reading “The Fundamental Division in U. S. Politics”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-social-and-political-philosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8015","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8015"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8015\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}