Frederick Douglass: The Un-Obama

From Libertarianism and Liberty Pulse:

FREDERICK DOUGLASS---THE UN-OBAMA


EmailWritten by beckychr007 on Jan-15-11 3:03am







It may seem curious at first that Barack Obama ever became a scholar of the Constitution. He has said many times it is not a document he is particularly impressed with. The president worships at the altar of Big Government, and has been critical that the Constitution is primarily about “negative rights”--things that the government can not do—limitations on the power of the federal government generally, as well as its constituent parts. http://bit.ly/eLjwTO



Obama is concerned with “positive rights”--things the government is obliged to provide to (or redistribute amongst) the people. He became a constitutional scholar/lawyer for the same reason most leftists do--because they wish to rewrite the flawed and oppressive document which (as they always correctly, but repeatedly ad nauseum, point out) was written by rich, landed white slave owners. E.g. http://bit.ly/bMGsL9



These revisionists wish to use the Constitution as a tool to do things that were clearly not contemplated by its drafters and are inconsistent with the political theory at the heart of the Revolution. They want to read a collectivist “Second Bill of Rights” (as FDR called it) into the Constitution and create a bigger and better government for the betterment of society and all men and women i.e. the Welfare/Warfare State (See “The Second Bill of Rights: FDR'S Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More than Ever” by Cass Sunstein, Obama's confidant and administrator of the most important and powerful agency in the federal government that most people have never ever heard of-- Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs ).



These naive and deluded people would send shivers up the back of the great abolitionist, American hero and icon of modern libertarianism-- Frederick Douglass.



There is very little similarity, other than the pigmentation of their skin, between Barack Obama and Frederick Douglass, whom I am highlighting today in honor of the upcoming Martin Luther King Holiday. Douglass was not raised in the comfortable world of middle-class chic leftism—he was born a slave, and had every reason to hate everything about the enabling document of the government which oppressed and tortured him, and millions of his brothers and sisters.



But Frederick Douglass, an intellectual descendent of John Locke, loved and appreciated freedom and liberty too much, to ever hate a radical social, political and economic philosophy (or a country which made those philosophical ideals its creed) which came out of the Age of Enlightenment, devoted almost exclusively to the protection and furtherance of individual liberty.





In 1852 the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison denounced the Constitution as “an agreement with hell” and publicly burned it. Douglass denounced Garrison for his ignorant attack on the “Glorious Liberty Document”---and then aligned himself with America's greatest anarchist theoretician---the abolitionist Lysander Spooner. See the individualist anarchist classic “No Treason: The Constitution Of No Authority" by Lysander Spooner, See also “Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty” by Randy Barnett.



Douglass and Spooner maintained that both the Constitution-banging slave owners and the the Constitution-burning abolitionists were wrong---slavery was unconstitutional. They argued it would be impossible for a Constitution to ever validly confer the power on a government to take away any of the natural rights of man—and slavery was the most egregious taking away of natural rights imaginable. http://bit.ly/b8Z3E6 See “The Unconstitutionality of Slavery” by Lysander Spooner,



The Spooner/Douglass interpretation of the Constitution never persuaded the majority of white abolitionists. It did, however, persuade many, perhaps most, black Americans, as well as the Radical Republicans, who drafted the Fourteenth Amendment. http://bit.ly/7GHOyM







In McDonald v. Chicago (the 2010 case where the Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment was binding on the States and their political subdivisions), in Justice Clarence Thomas' brilliant concurrence (agreeing with result, dissenting on reasoning) for the first time ever, both libertarian bomb throwers, Douglass and Spooner, were cited as authorities—a monumental first in Supreme Court history.





Thomas called for a libertarian constitutional revolution through the restoration of the “privileges and immunities” clause of Section One of the Fourteenth Amendment—that portion of the Fourteenth Amendment which makes it clear that no American, no matter who they are or where they live in this country, may be denied any natural rights by any government—whether the right is specifically enumerated in the Constitution or unenumerated (the original drafters refer to these unenumerated rights of the people in the Ninth Amendment ). See http://bit.ly/gEmGiq , http://bit.ly/ckutko See also “The Lost History of the Ninth Amendment”



Barack Obama has said that Justice Thomas is unqualified to be on the Supreme Court bench. From his various comments over the years, it is clear that Obama (like the fawning revisionist liberal press) admires Douglass in the same pretend way that many establishment Republicans preposterously claim a commonality with Ronald Reagan, or the current Chinese leaders imply they are one with Chairman Mao.





It's not that Frederick Douglass had any problem trashing America and condemning those who cheapened, perverted and made it a force of evil. But his greatest anguish was that the cornerstone of the Republic—liberty, had been betrayed. See “Douglass' “Fourth of July Oratation” See also “Frederick Douglass and the Fourth of July” by James Colaiaco & “A Glorious Liberty Document” by Damon Root



President Obama has no use for that cornerstone, except as an oratorical device. As for the rest of the problems--- they can be fixed with smart laws, regulations, an efficient central government, a well-educated and empowered class of apparatchiks, Chicago-style corruption, political thuggery and histrionics.



Douglass would be appalled by the new spirit of dependency and control ushered in with the Age of Obama. Douglass championed limited constitutional government, colorblind law, capitalism, hard work, and self-help. See "My Bondage and My Freedom" by Frederick Douglass.





His principles are not the stuff of " New Deals" but rather of the Declaration of Independence, and its embodiment in the best parts of our Constitution. Brother Douglass would agree with Barry Goldwater that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. For liberty is too important to be left to those who find civility of discourse to be the highest civic virtue:



“it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced” http://bit.ly/cXgjq



And if we ever become true to our liberty roots:



“America reigns without a rival.....”