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THE VIEW FROM HERE - The signers of the Declaration of Independence knew that people are stupid. For this reason, when they got around to writing the US Constitution about a decade later, they hacked voting to a bare minimum. Unless we recognize the Founders’ dilemma, we cannot understand America.
The Declaration has two core elements. (1) all men have inalienable rights including Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, and (2) all legitimate governments protect theses inalienable rights. Let’s look at the Declaration’s words:
(1) all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness
(2) That to secure these rights, governments are instituted ... deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
The words “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” are redundant as that principle flows from all men having inalienable rights. Because men have inalienable rights and the legitimate purpose of government is to protect these rights, obviously the holders of the inalienable rights had to consent to the government. The Declaration evaded the difficult question of what form of government secures these rights.
Thomas Jefferson dodged this question by labeling his document, Declaration of Independence. Thus, all he had to prove was that King George did not secure our inalienable rights in order to justify the revolution. Until the colonies won their independence, there was no need to figure out what form of government was legitimate
Are People Stupid, Uneducated, or Both
Although the Declaration made individual inalienable rights axiomatic, Jefferson was addressing the top echelon. The colonies were run by the well-educated elite who well versed in history and especially in political philosophy. When the Continental Congress appointed the group of five to draft the Declaration, the group quickly deferred to Jefferson to write the draft. All five would have used the same concepts, i.e., mostly John Locke, but Jefferson had proven to be especially adroit at phrasing these concepts due to his A Summary View of the Rights of British America written two years earlier in 1774. Certain features, which were instantly obvious to his elite crowd, baffle, confused, and flummox today’s readers.
1. All men are created equal did not make Equality an inalienable right, but people who are too dumb or too educated to read and think that Equality is a right. It is not! The ersatz right of Equality, as the French would later enshrine, is an evil to be avoided. The sole reason Jefferson included “equal” was to fend off the claim of those accustomed to British Peerage that men of high birth had more or special inalienable rights than others. Jefferson slew this pernicious idea in advance by adding “equal” to modify the inalienable rights so that no one could claim that his inalienable rights overrode the rights of men from a different class or group.
2. John Locke’s Life, Liberty and Property changed Property to “Pursuit of Happiness” because in 1776 slaves were property. Without Jefferson’s change slave owners would claim the inalienable right keep their Property (slaves). As a result, Jefferson gave us the American formula of Life + Liberty = Pursuit of Happiness
3. “Pursuit” re-enforced the idea, that all men had the same inherent right to Pursue happiness, but the idea what all men would end up with equal outcomes was ludicrous. While interfering with a person’s pursuit of material wellbeing was a small part of it, the term was understood to mean a life of civic virtue, self-mastery, and moral excellence.
The Real Problems Facing The New Nation
Justifying the revolution was easy, just bitch, moan, complain and criticized King George, but fashioning a government to protect individual rights was a gargantuan task. The first attempt, The Articles of Confederation, had miserably failed as they were far too weak to function, let alone protect anyone. Thus, in 1787 the Constitutional Convention was convened.
The framers realized the Constitution had to thread the needle between too little power and too much power. All saw the inordinate danger of a government with too much power, thereby eliminating the democracy due to its tendency to devolve into tyranny. Briefly and crudely put, the masses were asses and would rush to support the first power-mad charlatan who appeared.
The Declaration had the troublesome concept of “consent of the governed” which necessarily flowed from individual alienable rights. The solution was to restrict voting as much as possible. Thus, only one part of the government was directly elected, The House of Representatives. Its rights were not great and their terms were only two years. The public was fickle and would become dissatisfied easily. Thus, they could vote out anyone whom they had just voted it. All other voting was based on two-or-three-tiered system. The popular vote did not elect the President, and it still doesn’t. Instead, voters are voting for Electors, who after the election, get together and decide who will be the President. Supreme Court justices were further protected from the masses because the President nominates justice and then the Senate has to approve each justice. The framer reasoned that since Senators were not directly elected, but rather were chosen by individual state legislatures, the legislators would choose the most qualified and most honorable men to be Senators. (It turned out that the corruption of state legislators was worse than allowing the masses to directly elect the Senators.) The lesson for today is that the US Constitution was constructed to protect our inalienable rights from two enemies: (1) the stupidity of voters, and (2) the venality of the elite.
Voters’ Attack on Inalienable Rights Reveals Their Stupidity
One might argue that lack of education is more the cause of Wokeism than Stupidity. It should not, however, require an Einstein to figure out that abandoning Martin Luther King’s summation of America’s core value would result self-destructive folly. As MLK said, judge a man by his own character and not by his skin color, race, ethnicity. Wokeism trashes both MLK and the Declaration by replacing the American formula of Life + Liberty = Pursuit of Happiness with the idiotic notion Equality of Outcome. Society is divided into warring factions where Whites and Jews are Oppressors and minorities, e.g. Blacks, etc. are Oppressed victims. Because white racism is the sole and only acceptable cause of any difference in group outcomes, society must redistribute wealth from Whites and Jews and give it to Blacks, Hamas, etc. See Joe Vega For Wokeism BS and John Thune for GOP’s perfidy.
Yes, people who vote for the abolition of their own individual rights are stupid.
(Richard Lee Abrams is a former Los Angeles-based attorney, an author, and political commentator. A long-time contributor to CityWatchLA, he is known for his incisive critiques of City Hall and judicial corruption, as well as his analysis of political and constitutional issues. Abrams blends legal insight with historical and philosophical depth to challenge conventional narratives. A passionate defender of civic integrity and transparency, he aims to expose misuse of power and advocate for systemic reform in local government. You may email him at [email protected])
