In a world where a Supreme Court nominee can’t safely say what a woman is, perhaps we should be unfazed by a U.S. senator who insists that the concept of God-given natural rights is really crypto-Iranian theocracy. In the week leading up to the assassination of Charlie Kirk, that is exactly what Virginia Senator Tim Kaine claimed.
The Left has long recoiled from natural rights, which rest on a truth (gasp) about human nature (deeper gasp). They axiomatically hold that all rights are just privileges bestowed by the state and that there is no truth, only persuasive assertions that serve the Left’s power.
Senator Kaine therefore rejects the truth about human nature on which the American republic is founded: that all people—no matter their differences in ability or circumstances—have natural rights. That in the possession and exercise of these rights we are indeed equal. And that the source of these rights is God, not the state nor the common acquiescence of the community.
For starters, nobody during the Constitutional Convention was debating whether human beings enjoy natural rights. The Declaration of Independence makes the bold claim that the existence of such rights is so obvious (“We hold these truths to be self-evident”) that the signers would not even offer philosophic or practical proofs for them. Alexander Hamilton’s debate with the Anti-Federalists was not over whether such rights exist, but about how best to protect them from a new federal government that would be robust enough to govern effectively.
The second point to reflect on is that many of the leading proponents of natural rights in the Founding generation were enthusiastic for, or at least tolerant of, religious liberty as it is expressed in the First Amendment. You would search long and in vain for a theocrat of any variety among the authors and signers of the Declaration, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention, or the members of the inaugural Congress who approved the Bill of Rights.
How then does a supposed “smart guy” like Kaine (Hillary Clinton’s running mate, let us not forget) get off insinuating that the authors of the First Amendment’s prohibition against Congress creating a national religious establishment were thinking, “My cunning plan cannot fail—this will get the mullahs in power here in a jiffy.”
The obvious explanation for Kaine’s public act of stupidity is that he attended an American university. There he would have undoubtedly imbibed the modernist nonsense that there is no human nature, or any other truth. Most of his classmates would have nodded and repeated this in hopes of getting a B on their philosophy midterm. As an aspiring politician, Kaine would have apprenticed in the leftist practice of mouthing pseudo-patriotic platitudes (“muh rights, bro”) while he connived for power behind the scenes with other cynics on campus. He would have been encouraged by self-loathing Boomer faculty to hate America, her founding principles, and the truths for which she stands and strives to live up to.
The inane assertion that there is no truth is not a mere coping mechanism for college faculty—it is a first principle of sorts, not an after-the-fact justification. And never mind that “there is no truth” cannot, by definition, be a first principle.
Their truth is that there is no truth, and the rest of the American faculty lounge worldview flows from that central claim. This is why the present state of the academy is so corrosive to civic virtue: it stands fundamentally opposed to the founding proposition of our nation that all men are created equal. And so we should be unsurprised that college campuses are training grounds for anti-American activism—after all, they routinely produce politicians like Tim Kaine.
You would think that “there is no truth” would lead quickly to “so there’s no point in the rest of higher education; everyone can go home now.” But that would short-circuit the purpose of the American university system, which is to vacuum up tuition from its students (as it does so efficiently) while teaching them—especially the more talented and cynical ones—how to amass and hold on to power, with many then becoming politicians, bureaucrats, unethical business leaders, or (if they lack these useful talents) college professors, journalists, and think tankers.
Of course, you don’t get very far in normie America telling people that the Bill of Rights they treasure is a meaningless scam. Especially not in politics. So leftist politicians and academics pander to Americans’ sense of rights while relying on a completely different theory of rights, attributing their source to the state instead of to God. Since the Left seeks above all else to control the state in perpetuity, this works out well for them. If politicians and bureaucrats are the source of our rights, they can extend them or withhold them as they see fit.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk, a week to the day after Kaine’s “theocracy” diatribe, is a grim illustration of the Left’s nasty inversion of rights. They get to decide whether Kirk had a right to his life and pursuit of happiness. Since some apparently didn’t think he did because he undermined their source of power on college campuses, they have mocked and even celebrated his death in some cases, warning his emulators not to feel safe if they insist on exercising their right to free speech.
At the same time, the Left fears being overthrown. They feel the need to scare Americans away from truth, human nature, and the American Founding by maligning these basic realities as Iranian theocracy, which everyone knows is a Really Bad Thing. Kaine’s ridiculous equation of natural rights with the Iranian mullahs was not just in service to his own power as an arbiter of who has what rights, but a desperate defense of the American faculty lounge’s postmodern, nihilistic project against Kirk and other missionaries who stand for truth.
Kaine’s vapidity may feel like unrelated news that was swept away by Kirk’s murder. But in the big picture it was a harbinger of Kirk’s assassination.