Welcome to Ordered Liberty

[Valin]

PJ Media:

Andrew C. McCarthy

5/13/12

 

For Edmund Burke, liberty was the distinguishing feature of the British constitution. He did not, however, mean liberty in some vacuous, hopeychangey sense. “The only liberty I mean,” he wrote, “is a liberty connected with order; and that not only exists with order and virtue, but cannot exist at all without them.”

 

When we hear the term “ordered liberty” nowadays, it is generally in a legal context. It has become famous — we might better say “infamous” — in the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence of “incorporation”: the doctrine holding that Bill of Rights protections that restrict the federal government are also validly asserted against the state governments, through the Fourteenth Amendment. The doctrine’s premise is dubious: state sovereignty is the foundation of our form of constitutional governance; if it had been the purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment to undo that basic assumption, one might have expected that incorporation would be clearly prescribed — and that it might have taken less than sixty years for the Supreme Court to start enforcing it.

 

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Still, it would be foolish to insist that liberty is not a dynamic concept or that our perceptions about it do not evolve. To take two powerful examples, our notions of equality and cruelty have dramatically changed in just the last three centuries. Both are now attuned as never before to the dignity of each human being — at least, once a person is born.

 

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“Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom,” Benjamin Franklin observed. “As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.” What is it that makes us virtuous? What slides us toward corruption and viciousness? I look forward to a long deliberation on those questions......(Snip)