You can tell a lot about someone’s politics given what they might have to say about the conviction of Donald Trump.
Anyone telling you that Trump’s conviction is comeuppance for a sordid hush-money scandal, in which he broke the law, probably leans left.
Someone explaining that it was all a disgraceful attempt by Joe Biden’s Democrats to stop the 45th President from being re-elected, is likely to be a conservative.
In an increasingly post-religious society, politics has become a substitute belief system for many. The danger is that we view everything through the prism of politics.
Rather than ask what Trump’s conviction means for your side in the Reds versus Blues battle, perhaps what we ought to reflect on what this might all mean for America.
For most of human history, the law meant whatever the powerful said it meant. Anyone who has ever tried to do business in Russia or China knows that’s still the way things are in much of the non-Western world.
A system in which the law is elevated above the executive – in which the rule of law has supremacy – is historically unusual. Indeed, it is largely the creation of people who spoke and wrote in the language in which you are reading this.
It was English-speaking civilization that invented the notion that the powerful are constrained by rules, and that the rules should apply to everyone equally. A straight line runs from Magna Carta at Runnymede to the Founders at Philadelphia. The US Bill of
Rights of 1789 was preceded by an English Bill of Rights of 1689.
America has become the most successful society on earth precisely because in this Republic, government doesn’t get to change the rules as it likes.
“Exactly!” the anti-Trumpers will say. “Trump’s conviction is true to that tradition! Even former Presidents are subject to the same rules as everyone else”.
But is that really so? In what way has Trump been subjected to the same set of rules? Surely, those on the right will say, he has been singled out, prosecuted over something essentially trivial?
Those that brought the charges, it seems to me, were motivated by politics, rather than justice.
Prosecuting political rivals is what they do in Russia, Brazil or Malaysia. It is awful to see political prosecutions in the United States – and it bodes ill for the future of freedom in this country and around the world.
Twenty years ago, George Bush’s electoral strategist, Karl Rove, hit upon the idea of using ‘wedge-issues’ to galvanize the conservative base. At the time, Rove seemed to be remarkably successful. Republicans won.
Two decades on, I wonder if it was partly Rove’s ‘wedge-issue’ approach that provoked the left into doing something similar. Under Obama, the left became increasingly inflammatory. Perhaps there is a straight line that runs from the politics of ‘wedge-issues’ in the noughties to the culture wars we see today?
Some on the left might be tempted to celebrate the use of lawfare to try to take down a political opponent. They might want to stop and think first. It is, I worry, only a question of time before we start to see something similar from the right.
If lawfare becomes part of American politics, what chance is there that the United States remains exceptional compare with all those other less happy republics?
It is not just the legal process that America needs to de-politicize. We need to stop making everything a question of where you stand in the culture war. Your views on Disney or money management, Taylor Swift or Chick-Fil-A should not automatically correlate with the way you vote.
If it is politics alone that gives you a belief system in life, you are going to end up desperately disappointed with both politics and life.
The United States was founded by people that believed that to survive, a Republic needs a moral citizenry. America needs to believe in something above politics and beyond the next election cycle.
Beware of politicians who want to ban things.
What would you most like to see Mississippi’s elected lawmakers do during the current legislative session?
Action to eliminate the reams of red tape holding our state back, maybe? Further tax cuts, perhaps? With so many other southern states moving ahead with school choice, you might wish that our lawmakers would do something similar.
I doubt that a bill to ban “squatted” trucks is your top priority. Yet, that is precisely what one bill in our state legislature aims to do.
I’m not about to invest a lot of effort into opposing this bill, but I do think we should be wary of politicians in the business of banning things.
Typically, politicians resort to banning things when they don’t have any other ideas. The impulse to ban things is driven by their search for validation and purpose.
Those in favor of a ban on “squatted” trucks are quick to tell us that action is urgent given how dangerous these trucks are. I can think of a lot of things that could be deemed dangerous.
Do conservatives really want to get into the business of banning things because they are dangerous? Once you start, where do you stop? If trucks are to be banned for being dangerous, wait ‘til you hear what progressives have to say about guns.
Under this proposed law, anyone caught driving a vehicle whose front ends are raised more than four inches above the height of the rear fender faces a $100 fine. Will police officers pull people over to measure their fenders? Should the guy with a truck raised a mere 3 inches expect to get pulled over every time?
As the parent of a teenager, I’ve discovered how adding a young person to your insurance policy can make your premiums soar. This is because the insurance system is good at assessing risk. Higher risk = higher premiums.
If squatted trucks really were the danger that the detractors claim, surely it would be reflected in raised insurance premiums to the point where they became prohibitively expensive.
In a free society, there must be an overwhelmingly good reason to use the state’s monopoly of force to restrict something. It is not enough to ban something because we disapprove of it. Or. as I fear, disapprove of the people that drive “squatted” trucks.
Once politicians form the habit of seeking out things to ban for the benefit of the rest of us, they won’t stop. Next will come a ban on certain types of vapes. Or, as in California, certain food additives and Skittles. If they can ban one type of truck, why not another?
If you want to see where relentless banning leads, take a look at my own native Britain. Despite having had notionally conservative governments, politicians across the pond have relentlessly banned things from certain breeds of dog to plastic drinking straws. From the ability to use email lists for marketing to self-defense pepper spray. From disposable cutlery and gas water heaters to the internal combustion engine (from 2035).
On their own, none of these restrictions have proved to be a catastrophe (although the ban on internal combustion cars, once it comes into force, may yet prove to be). Collectively, however, the blizzard of bans has been devastating by infantilizing British society.
Treated like children, more and more people behave like children. Denied responsibility, society grows irresponsible. Britain today feels utterly demoralized as a consequence. This is what happens when you put politicians in charge of deciding what’s best for everyone else.
Banning tilted trucks won’t be the end of the world for Mississippi. It will be the end of a little bit more liberty.
The impulse to ban things, I believe, comes from what H.L. Mencken called “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be having a good time.” Let’s leave Mississippi truck drivers alone.
Douglas Carswell is the President & CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.
Following Hamas’ terror attack on Israel, tens of thousands took to the streets. They marched in Manhattan and Chicago, as well as London and Paris. Rallies were held on the campuses of colleges across America.
Were the protesters lamenting the death of Israeli civilians? Not at all. Were they there to demand the release of young children taken hostage by Hamas? I missed that bit.
Instead, in the wake of a pogrom that saw the murder of 1,400 Jews, tens of thousands of Americans marched in support of their killers. The protesters literally chanted for the destruction of the state of Israel.
How can it possibly be that the great grandchildren of the generation of Americans that liberated Dachau could think this way?
For a generation, ‘woke’ ideas have been left to fester on college campuses. Over the past few weeks, we have started to see the real world consequences.
If we are to put this right, we first need to understand what has gone wrong. Looking at the protesters on social media, I was struck by the farcical contradictions.
Feminists were out there in support of an Islamist ideology that denies women rights. Self-styled democrats sided with those seeking to establish a theocracy. On social media, I saw a group calling themselves “Queers for Palestine”, holding aloft a rainbow motif. How long do you imagine they would survive in Gaza?
This confusion by the pro-Hamas protesters, which would be comical if it were not so grim, points to the root cause of the problem; for millions of young Americans, a creed of cultural relativism has been allowed to establish itself as a secular belief system.
If all cultures were of equal worth, then every culture would be as capable of producing science, innovation and political liberty – not to mention a US Constitution. Most cultures are not.
The trouble is that if you refuse to accept that some ways of life are better than others, you have no means of measuring what is good. In your twisted belief system, the head hackers of Hamas are no different from the Golani reservists prepared to take great personal risks to minimize civilian casualties.
Cultural relativism begins by applying double standards. It rapidly descends to favoring the non-Western over the Western.
Taught to believe in decolonizing the curriculum at school and university, perhaps you start to see Hamas terrorists as noble savages, battling to decolonize Palestine from the wicked West. Often unconsciously, we have raised an entire generation to see the human condition as Rousseau perceived it, rather than though the hard-headed realism of Hobbes. No wonder some then think like latter-day Jacobins. No surprise that the BBC, a once credible organization, refuses to call Hamas terrorists.
Ambivalence about the Western way of life slips into open animus.
“But what do you mean by Western way of life?” some will ask. “What do people living in the southern US or in Scandinavia possibly have in common with those in the Negev? There is no single Western culture”.
Culture is indeed complex, like the branches of a very tall tree. But within the tree of culture there is a definable trunk that one might call Judeo-Christian culture, from which extend a multiplicity of off shoots.
Culture, as with the branches of a tree, can sometimes be grafted, some cultures fused onto another. You even get what arborists call ‘inosculation’, when branches that had separated fuse back together as one again.
But as any arborist also knows, not every kind of graft will work. Not every kind of culture can be fused with every other. Some are incompatible. Nor can every way of life coexist alongside every other. Those Western feminists marching in support of Hamas seem not to have understood this. Their children and their grandchildren will.
Nor, perhaps, have Western progressives understood that Western culture, whether we are conscious of it or not, is a product of a distinctive set of ideas, both secular and ecclesiastical. I doubt many atheists would appreciate me pointing it out, but even their humanist belief system is a product of something uncontestably Judeo Christian. (Try living under Hamas as a secular humanist and see how long you last).
None of this really matters when everyone around us shares the same underlying Western cultural assumptions. To a degree that might surprise both evangelicals and atheists, they fundamentally do share a common set of assumptions. The trouble is that there is a growing body of those living in the West that don’t. There are an increasing number of people in the US, Britain and Europe – not to mention the Middle East - whose world view is shaped by the ideology of political Islamism, and Islamism’s principle proponent, Sayyid Qtub.
When political Islamism comes into conflict with Western ways, as it has with increasing frequency since the Salman Rushdie affair in the 1980s, the cultural relativists living in the West have no idea where to draw the line. Indeed, they do not even appreciate that there is a line to be drawn.
“But what about the sins of Western culture?” some will counter. “Weren’t Western countries once at the center of the slave trade? Didn’t women and minorities have to endure unequal treatment within living memory?”
Almost every contemporary non-Western culture around the world today falls short of the standards set by campus progressives. Only in the West are individual rights respected, often at times imperfectly (as the campus puritans are quick to point out). Anyone who does not know that may not know much about life outside America.
That the West today is a far more pleasant place for minorities than it was in the past is not evidence of Western guilt. It shows that cultural progress is possible. The way we used to live is not as good as it is today. Not every way of living is of equal worth. That cultural progress is possible is proof that cultural relativism is a nonsense, and that some ways of life are worth fighting in preference to others.
Here in the southern US, the Mississippi Center for Public Policy tries to teach a cohort of young Americans some of the underlying ideas and principles that underpin Western liberty. Through our Leadership Academy, we introduce them to the history of Western thought – Hobbes, Locke and the Founding Fathers. We discuss with them the morality of the free market, and American exceptionalism.
Students graduating from our program will, I hope, see the world very differently from the day they started. The insights and lessons we teach will, I hope, remain with them for life.
When we launched the Academy two years ago, I saw it was important, but no more than a nice-to-have. After the events of the past few weeks, I see it as perhaps the most important thing a think tank in America could be doing.
Twenty two years ago America was hit by a horrific terrorist attack. Like many readers, I can remember exactly where I was when I first heard that a plane had struck the Twin Towers.
An entire generation of young Americans has, of course, been born since that terrible day, with no recollection of an event many of us can never forget.
That makes it vital that we take a moment this year to think about September 11th 2001. We should remember the victims who headed out to work that day expecting to see their loved ones again. We should remember the heroes, too, especially those on flight 93, whose selfless actions saved many lives.
Let us not forget, either, why it was that a group of savages in a distant land should want to commit such an atrocity.
Over the past two decades a myth has emerged that the attack on the Twin Towers was somehow pay back against American interference in Iraq or Afghanistan. This idea, surprisingly widespread in Europe, puts the cart before the horse.
America invaded Iraq and Afghanistan in response to the attack on the Twin Towers. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan could not possibly have been a cause of it.
Islamist terrorists first attempted to blow up the Twin Towers way back in 1993. At that time, America’s direct involvement in the Middle East had been largely limited to the liberation of Kuwait – at the invitation of Arab leaders. Indeed, America had had precious little direct military involvement in the region since Ronald Reagan pulled US peacekeepers out of Lebanon in 1983.
No, the real reason Islamist terrorists attacked America 22 years ago is because America exists.
Why does the existence of America offend the Islamists? It’s not about Israel or George Bush. America is resented by Islamists because the United States represents not only a better way of life, but the best way of life yet lived by any portion of humankind.
Cultural relativism, an often well-meaning belief that every way of life is equally valid, is so pervasive among America’s elite, I fear it blinds them to the truth; there is no better place to live your life than in the United States of America.
The United States is founded on a revolutionary set of principles that emerged out of the European Enlightenment – that each of us is created equal and in possession of natural rights. The US is governed not by theocrats, but by a Constitution written by men.
Even more galling for the Islamist fundamentalist, this American system works.
Think of the southern US border today. Thousands of people from every part of the planet are clamouring to get into the United States. They are not trying to make their way into Yemen or Syria.
If, like the Islamists, you believe that the path of a perfect society is to order it in accordance with fundamentalist Islamist principles, the evidence from Iran, Sudan or Libya is not entirely encouraging for your cause.
One of the first acts of America’s first President, George Washington, was to state explicitly that it was not enough to merely tolerate religious differences. Henceforth in this country, he wrote to the Jewish congregation in Newport in 1790, people of every faith should “enjoy the exercise of their inherent natural rights”.
That idea of religious freedom must be hard to take if you believe that you alone have an understanding of the divine.
These are the principles on which America was founded, and they are a better way of organizing a society than every other way ever attempted.
Perhaps most important, we should remember the brave Americans who stepped forward after the attack on the Twin Towers to protect the American way of life. Thanks to many thousands of brave acts – some big, some small, some documented, others untold – they have helped keep this country, and the West, largely safe ever since. Thank you.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(Jackson, MS): The Mississippi Center for Public Policy has re-launched its Legislative Tracker.
The updated website will summarize legislation being moved through the process and make the information assessible to both the average and scholarly viewer, grade each bill on whether it increases or decreases liberty, and amplify transparency amongst legislative output.
The MCPP Legislative Tracker will:
- Show what bills are being discussed and moved through the legislative process
- Allow MCPP to rate the bills, giving a green light for those that extend liberty, a red light to those that limit liberty, and a yellow light to those that we are ambivalent about – an "MCPP APROVED" stamp will be given to bills that especially enhance freedom and liberty.
- Show a rating for each member of the legislature, keeping lawmakers in line with the promises they made to their constituents
"All Mississippians deserve to know whether their legislators are effectively representing the interests of their communities," said Senior Director of Policy & Communications Hunter Estes. "Our Legislative Tracker helps to accomplish exactly that. We summarize legislation, offer our thoughts on the impact bills could have on your rights and liberties, and publish this information to the public. We believe that transparency is the best way to ensure our representatives carry out the promises they made to the people. We hope you’ll find this tool valuable as you work to stay up to date on what’s happening under the dome of our capitol building."
You may access the Legislative Tracker HERE.
For media inquiries, please reach out to Stone Clanton, [email protected].
We recently announced the MCPP Freedom Agenda, which will become a yearly strategy to lay out our goals for each Legislative Session. The 2022 Freedom Agenda covers five policy areas we deem necessary for reform: Critical Race Theory, economic liberty, education, healthcare, and technology and innovation.
For Critical Race Theory, we are supporting legislation that will combat this divisive ideology by ensuring no public funds supports its teaching, as well as legislation that will provide academic transparency. As parents, families, guardians, and taxpayers, we deserve to know what is being taught to our children and what educational materials our funds are being used for.
For economic liberty, we are, of course, supporting the abolition of Mississippi's income tax, which will help boost our economy by allowing workers to keep more of what they've earned and making the state more business-friendly. We also hope to see the cutting of more regulatory "red tape" – Mississippi is burdened by far too many boards, commissions, and states agencies that are constantly pushing new regulations onto the people. Big businesses can navigate this minefield of market obstacles, but small businesses and entrepreneurs are often stifled.
For education, we support legislation that would allow open enrollment to all public schools (giving the ultimate school choice) and establish more charter school authorizers to streamline and encourage the expansion of education freedom. We also hope to see the capping of "fat cat" salaries, as we need the funds to go into the classrooms to better our students, not into administrative pockets. We are also pushing legislation that will even more so protect free speech on campuses, ensuring that peaceful assembly, protests, lectures, petitions, and literature distribution will be allowed.
For healthcare, we are supporting the full repeal of the socialist-like Certificate-of-Need laws that plague the industry in the state. These laws basically mean that no new health care provider can come along and offer services without the express permission of competitors. This makes as much sense as allowing a Pizza Hut to block the building of a Papa John’s because of the potential for competition. We aim to get rid of this incredibly outdated policy.; In companion with this, with more folks seeking to get medical care from the comfort of their own homes, we support legislation that would make it easier to offer medical access directly. Our home health moratorium currently makes this almost impossible.
For technology and innovation, we support legislation that would reduce the regulatory obstacles in front of agricultural innovation to encourage growth in an area that our state relies so much on. The same goes for the obstacles in front of telemedicine/telepharmacy.
The Mississippi Center for Public Policy believes providing these reforms would lift up our state, safeguard liberty, and promote limited government. Ultimately, we also believe they would make Mississippi more prosperous and a happier place to live, work, and raise a family.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(Jackson, MS): The Mississippi Center for Public Policy has released its plan for success in 2022 – The MCPP Freedom Agenda, which will become a yearly strategy to lay out our goals for each Legislative Session. The Freedom Agenda will cover five areas needed for policy reform: Critical Race Theory, economic liberty, education, healthcare, and technology & innovation.
"Freedom is a process," said Senior Director of Policy & Communications Hunter Estes. "The defense of our liberties necessitates constant work. Recognizing this, we are launching a strategic campaign to advance freedom in Mississippi from the classroom to the hospital, the office to the home, and the college campus to the tech start-up. Our goal is to better Mississippi, and we believe these tangible legislative reforms can help to accomplish that mission."
The 2022 Freedom Agenda sets out a twelve-point plan:
- Combat Critical Race Theory
- Promote Academic Transparency
- State Income Tax Abolition
- Red Tape Reduction
- Open Enrollment in Education
- Cap School Board Administrative Costs
- Establish Multiple Charter School Authorizers
- Free Speech on Campus
- Repeal Certificate of Need
- Repeal of Moratorium on Home Health Agencies
- Agricultural Incubator
- Reduce Barriers to Telemedicine/Telepharmacy
“Mississippi needs a boost. That’s why we are publishing our Freedom Agenda to help elevate our state. Each of these twelve reforms are affordable and achievable – and our lawmakers could easily make them happen,” said President & CEO Douglas Carswell. “The Freedom Agenda includes measures to give families tax breaks and grow our economy, so that young citizens of the Magnolia State won’t have to move away to work. We also propose school freedom to ensure that every child growing up in here gets the chance of a great education, as well as detailed reforms to make healthcare more affordable.”
The Mississippi Center for Public Policy believes providing these twelve reforms would lift up our state, safeguard liberty, and promote limited government. Ultimately, we also believe they would make Mississippi more prosperous and a happier place to live, work, and raise a family.
You may read the full 2022 Freedom Agenda HERE.
For media inquiries, please reach out to Stone Clanton, [email protected].
Recently, the Cato Institute released their yearly index for personal liberty and economic freedom in the fifty states. Sadly, Mississippi ranked at an underwhelming #40.
“Mississippi is a typical Deep South state in that its economic freedom far outstrips its personal freedom. But the state’s worst dimension is actually fiscal policy,” wrote Cato. The think tank continued, saying Mississippi’s overall tax burden is a bit above average at 10%. Debt is much lower than average, too, but government employment and GDP share are far higher than average – State and local employment is 16.2% of private-sector employment.
Personal liberty in the Magnolia state is described as sub-par, with it imprisoning its population at a rate of 1.5 standard deviations above average and allowing hardly any school freedom. On the economic freedom side, Mississippi’s monopolization of alcohol sales, the lack of statewide cable franchising, strict regulation of health insurance, and certificate of need (CON) laws don’t make things any better.
With it being the end of the year, folks normally begin to create their new year’s resolutions to better themselves, whether that be by learning a new skill or hobby, exercising more, or spending less and saving more. Mississippi should look at its horrendous ranking and aim to better itself in 2022.
The Mississippi Center for Public Policy is looking forward to the new year as we take on many of the challenges laid out in the Cato report, including expanding school freedom through open enrollment and creating multiple charter school authorizing boards, repealing the awful CON laws that plague our healthcare industry, and abolishing the income tax. We believe that doing these things will, of course, make Mississippi freer. It will also, though, ultimately make Mississippi more prosperous and a happier place to live, work, and raise a family.
We talk more about this in our 2022 Freedom Agenda, which you may read HERE.
While noble in making the federal government mostly harmless, the Articles of Confederation (the country’s first governing document) approved only one legislative chamber, relied on voluntary tax support, and had no common currency or central military, among other issues. To effectively run a country consisting of independent states, there needed to be some common procedure. As more and more states became interested in amending the Articles, a meeting was set in Philadelphia, PA on May 25, 1787. It was quickly agreed that simple changes would not work. Instead, the entire document needed to be replaced. This meeting became the Constitutional Convention.
The first draft set up a system of checks and balances that included an executive branch, a representative legislature, and a federal judiciary. The document was remarkable, but deeply flawed. The main issue being that it did not include a specific declaration of individual rights. It specified what the government could do but did not say what it could not do. The absence of a "bill of rights" turned out to be an obstacle for ratification by the states. It would take four more years of intense debate before the new government's form would be resolved.
Recently freed from a monarchy, the American people wanted guarantees that the new government would not trample upon their newly won freedoms of speech and religion, nor upon their right from warrantless searches and seizures. So, the Constitution's framers heeded Thomas Jefferson who argued, “A bill of rights is what the people are entitled to… and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference.” In 1791 the United States Bill of Rights became the Constitution's first ten amendments and the law of the land.
This said, it must be noted that it, no matter the language, did not include everyone. For instance, women and property-less men were second-class citizens, unable even to vote. Native Americans were entirely outside the constitutional system and governed by treaties. Slavery was legal and the slaves had no access to the rule of law. But, as the preamble to the Constitution says, “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,…” The key words here are, “in order to form a more perfect union.”
The US will never be perfect, but we must always strive to be, and we have made great progress in doing so. Jefferson once wrote to Lafayette, “We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a feather-bed.” He was correct, but through civil rights, innovation, individualism, and economic liberalism, this American experiment has prevailed. We have become an example to other nations and are the “shining city upon a hill” – and we will continue this course. Additional amendments were later added to extend its protection of rights to all people, regardless of race or gender, and to keep state and local governments from violating the people’s rights. The Bill of Rights is the perfect example of believing in your fellow man.
This Bill of Rights Day, we should be grateful and celebrate our basic liberties reiterated in the text of the same name. It has proven to be one of the most influential documents in contemporary history, codifying the theory of natural rights, which holds that humans are granted certain liberties by God, God alone, and that no one should have the power to infringe them.