The Rights Movement
The determination of right conduct should be based on enduring principles, not legalities and enactment. But today, our governmental institutions are increasingly determining right conduct based on laws and regulations that are part of a new “rights movement.” This movement and its growing body of individual rights are impacting how we function in the United States of America. This started with needed civil rights reforms in the 1960s, then took a turn toward segmenting society into disjointed groups that tend to view each other with antagonism. To discuss the issues with “rights” in a legal vs. moral context, I will draw heavily from the writings of Philip K. Howard, the author of many books, including The Death of Common Sense (1994, 2011) and Try Common Sense (2019). Again, the point is to consider a moral compass based on the fundamental principles of right conduct rather than what is legal.
Rights are all around us. The language of rights has become ubiquitous. According to Howard:
Rights were synonymous with freedom, protection against being ordered around by government or others. Rights have taken on a new role in America. Whenever there is a perceived injustice, new rights are created to help the victims.1
What's different about these rights? They don’t protect so much as provide—they offer a new, and often invisible, form of subsidy. These rights come at everyone else's expense. “Handing out rights like land grants has become the preferred method of staking out a place for those who feel disadvantaged.”2
Rights leave no room for balance or context or looking from everybody's point of view. Rights are a perpetual trump card—particularly for the pathological jackass (my term, although someone like Jordan B. Peterson might agree with my terminology).
We are experiencing “an inverted feudalism in which the rights-bearer, by assertion of legal and moral superiority, lords it over everyone else.”3 Note that a reference to the feudal system was previously found in one of the essays on mental models—Political Power Over People. Understanding the feudal system is important for appreciating the capacity and limitations of a liberal democracy. A feudal system (also known as feudalism) is a type of social and political system in which landholders provide land to tenants in exchange for their loyalty and service. This concept will emerge again later in The Common Sense Papers when discussing platform policy ideas. Okay, moving back to rights.
The rights revolution was really about ending racism and segregation for blacks who struggled far too long after the end of slavery to enjoy the same freedoms that other Americans enjoyed. Senator Harrison Williams, who fought to improve Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, said: “Those who say that equality means favoritism do violence to common sense.”4 The early civil rights leaders were pursuing moral equality, not a flipped hierarchy of reverse discrimination. However, over time progressive reformers have come to think—why not use “rights” as a method to eliminate inequality altogether?
Rights Can Create Legal Traps Between Citizens
In many states today, almost anyone can sue for discrimination. Rights are thrown around as a political passphrase, granting entrance into the classes of specially protected Americans and their privileges. New categories of anti-discrimination laws are constantly emerging, with the seeming goal of protecting anyone from a perceived everyone. Rights are touted as a shelter from facing anything uncomfortable. Howard offers this analogy:
Like termites eating their way through a home, “rights” began weakening the lines of authority of our society. Traditional walls of responsibility—how a teacher manages a classroom or how a social worker makes judgments in the field—began to weaken…. Rights became a fad.5
Rights can be compared to land grants, but they can also be thought of as currency, as in this analogy:
Like printing money, handing out rights to special interest groups for [fifty] years has diminished not only the civil rights movement but the values on which it was founded. Rights, intended to bring an excluded group into society, have become the means of getting ahead of society. But everyone is losing.6
Rights in the form of hyperinflation don’t sound so appealing!
We might rightfully ask: has the Civil Rights Act fulfilled its promise? Do we have harmony and genuine understanding between blacks and whites, or women and men, for that matter? Or are we in more isolation, mistrust, frustration, and disillusionment? American society has made enormous gains according to some indicators, but setbacks and concerns abound. The protests about racial injustice in 2020 shook the world as the Black Lives Matter movement gained significant attention.
We need to consider our ways. Discrimination has everything to do with evil motives. The challenge with workplace discrimination issues is that most employers want to keep their best workers. Letting go of those who don’t add enough value, or downsizing for reasons that impact the company and are not specific to individuals, can open up unjust claims of discrimination. Prejudice obviously exists in society, but there is a key difficulty in 1-on-1 discrimination claims due to all the other nested factors.
The risk of having to avoid court battles around discrimination has likely chilled a range of employers from hiring diverse or disabled workers in the first place—thus evading the risk of having promotion decisions or termination decisions being questioned down the road. Establishing a long and ever-expanding list of rights can increase conflict between citizens and organizations rather than smooth out a sense of moral fairness. Think of all the filing of complaints against perceived offenders.
“Rights are a kind of wealth and, like other forms of wealth, attract hangers-on.”7 People start looking for what right they can use to get what they want—classic social rent-seeking behavior. Recall that rent-seeking behavior in financial terms was presented in Common Sense Paper No. 12—Political Economy Part 2: Corporate Welfare.
Howard also uses imagery that lines up well with the recent book by Matthew McConaughey, Greenlights. Here is the sentiment applied to rights:
Society needs red lights as well as green lights. Rights provide a perpetual green light. That means everyone else is getting run over as those with rights try to get to where they want…. Society can be as liberal as we want it to be. But that requires a mechanism, which democracy used to try to provide, for injecting common sense and working out compromises.8
We seem to have arrived at the intersection of a two-party political traffic jam that tries to hijack the societal traffic lights and turn them perpetually green or perpetually red.
Helping people who are homeless, who are mentally ill, who are suffering from addiction, who bear children with an incapacity to care for them, or any other number of problems is a complicated human dilemma. If dilemmas were easy to solve, government programs would have already conquered the situations. They have not. Have they done some good? Absolutely! Have they done enough? I think not. But what you do as a government, how you do it, and who you trample on while doing it matters a great deal for broad buy-in and success. Our mechanism for solving the problems of democracy (representative government) is suffering from the dysfunctions of the two-party system as highlighted in the fourth section of The Common Sense Papers. Combining a thoughtful moral compass and a better deliberative process to produce outcomes that better address the common good is sorely needed in American society today.
Rights, Liberty, Democracy, and Compromise
Mr. Howard hits hard at the different classes of rights that pervaded the era of the nation’s founding versus the recent “rights movement” era:
“To reformers in the 1960s, rights seemed logical as a framework for defining relations with the welfare state. After all, the Bill of Rights stakes out the boundaries between individuals and government. But the Bill of Rights did not ask government to provide services; it told government to stay away. When we demand that the welfare state address difficult human problems like poverty and homelessness, and ordinary ones like education, we must allow the humans doing the job to operate appropriately.”9
Flipping constitutional rights (remember that these are fundamental laws for society—not statutory add-ons) into rights to government services is highly problematic. We are lulled into thinking of government entitlements as rights, but they are not. Government services are part of a social contract that is hammered out through democratic processes. Hence, our democracy is struggling to find common ground for the common good. Or in the words of Howard:
Handing out rights was supposed to provide justice in a fragmented society. But social structure cannot be divided up like land: We all live here together. Rights have ended up dividing society with deep legal fissures that zig and zag across the landscape of special interests.10
Rights allow special interest groups to define their new powers through the courts, not through elected representatives. Rights can also create a hierarchy of claims as different groups' entitlements start to collide with one another and the rest of society. Accordingly, we end up with passionate, competing factions that will not stand down or compromise.
To bring the rights discussion back to moral grounds, I emphasize this summary from Howard:
Rights sound so righteous. But the new rights aren't rights at all: They are blunt powers masquerading under the name of rights. They have nothing to do with rights. The rights our forefathers died for are a shield—government can't tell me what to do or say—to preserve our freedom from others ordering us around. The new rights are a sword. They are hailed under the flag of freedom. But no one doing the saluting is looking at how these rights impinge on what others consider to be their own freedoms. The coinage of the new rights regime has a flip side; it is called coercion.11
With that argument, we have come almost full circle to the discussion in Common Sense Paper No. 31. The definition of moral (#2), “founded on the fundamental principles of right conduct rather than on legalities, enactment, or custom,” requires right conduct stemming from core principles, not simply what is legal. The attempt to turn government services and social norms and privileges into rights has moved society toward coercion, which we defined as “wrong” in the moral sense. Legislating “rights” as services and favored entitlements creates the irony of institutionalizing some aspect of moral wrong in a free society.
“Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons.”
- Thomas Hardy
Trying to maximize the attainment of certain moral virtues like justice or equality through the granting of special group rights has the effect of introducing immoral forms of coercion.
Battling for societal services as rights has the potential to tear the fabric of society apart. Oh, the paradox and the irony to be found in the human condition! We must examine the best pathway to provide societal services through democratic processes.
Rights are not the language of democracy. Compromise is what democracy is about. Rights are the language of freedom, and are absolute because their role is to protect our liberty. By using the absolute power of freedom to accomplish reforms of democracy, we have undermined democracy and diminished our freedom.12
Life is unfair and always will be because humans are imperfect and always will be. Unless we improve the human character according to agreed upon virtues, no improvement of equality or fairness is to be expected. In practice, this new culture of rights has elevated the most ardent activists while unfairly disparaging decent, ordinary Americans everywhere. I wish I could offer an easy policy solution to address bigotry, racial or religious supremacy, and individual/collective narcissism. I’m open to great ideas from any source because a good moral compass would lead far away from such human character failings and harmful ideologies.
The rights movement has not manifested a moral compass that is serving society broadly. We are still struggling to address the dilemmas in the human condition.
Notes for new readers:
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The tabs on the top of the Substack page can bring you to earlier essays that spell out key political issues. Common Sense Paper No. 1, No. 2, No. 4, and No. 5 can help anyone get up to speed on the project.
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Philip K. Howard, The Death of Common Sense (New York: Random House, 2011), 118.
Ibid., 119.
Ibid., 120.
Ibid., 123.
Ibid., 127.
Ibid., 135.
Ibid., 154.
Ibid., 156.
Ibid., 167.
Ibid., 168.
Ibid., 170.
Ibid., 171.
Any "right" not enjoyed by all is not a right at all, it is a privilege. Those demanding rights do so because they have been denied their rights by those with privileges. The constitutional mandate includes promoting the general welfare which has been ignored in favor of maximizing profits for the privileged rich. We should make dominant the Jeffersonian principle, "Equal rights for all, special privileges for none."
David Webb reminds us that many rich didn't have any money during the depression either and the cabal is setting them up for a great taking. https://live.childrenshealthdefense.org/chd-tv/events/the-great-taking-film-premiere/great-taking-film-premiere-event/?utm_source=luminate&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=chdtv&utm_id=20231209