The other day, Tim Kaine, a Democratic senator from Virginia (of all places), created a social media storm when he tried to score a few points by knocking Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Rubio had apparently made a statement about man’s rights being granted to him by God, and that made Kaine unhappy. So, he responded:

The notion that rights don’t come from laws and don’t come from the government but come from the Creator—that’s what the Iranian government believes. It’s a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Sharia law and targets Sunnis, Bahá’ís, Jews, Christians, and other religious minorities. And they do it because they believe that they understand what natural rights are from their Creator. So the statement that our rights do not come from our laws or our governments is extremely troubling.

As every nominally educated Tom, Dick, and Harry pointed out almost immediately on Twitter/X, Facebook, Instagram, and heaven knows where else, Kaine was not just wrong in his attempted scolding of Secretary Rubio; he was profoundly, utterly, and totally wrong. He was wrong about every aspect of political theory and history his rant addressed. He was wrong about the nature of rights. He was wrong about the American Founding. He was wrong about the Islamic “Republic” of Iran. And he was wrong about the nature of Western civilization. He could not possibly have been more wrong if he’d tried.

The good news is that regular readers of this column didn’t need to be told that Kaine was wrong about the nature of rights because we had that very discussion in this space last week. In brief, conservatives and classical liberals believe principally in “negative” rights, those which are, indeed, endowed by our Creator and considered inalienable. Leftists, by contrast, tend to favor positive rights, those that are given to them/us by government and that can also be taken away by government. Kaine is a leftist, meaning it’s hardly surprising that he wouldn’t know the difference between the two or have much use for negative liberty and rights.

The better news is that Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz happened to walk in on Kaine’s display of ignorance and promptly pointed out to him that the leftist vision of rights is incompatible with the American Founding. As Cruz noted, Secretary Rubio’s position was identical to that taken by the Founders and expressed as clearly and inarguably as possible in a passage from the preamble to the Declaration of Independence that every schoolboy (and certainly every former governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia) should have memorized (emphasis added): “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that 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.”

The collective internet swiftly took care of explaining Kaine’s mistaken understanding of the Islamic Republic, meaning that the best news of all is that Kaine’s dim-witted understanding of Western Civilization is, more or less, the only one of his mistakes that still needs correction. And so…here goes (in brief).

“The West,” as we understand the term, is a unique blend of traditions, all of which flourished in the Mediterranean region two to five thousand years ago. This blend—a mix of classic Greek and Roman cultures and especially the Jewish and Christian religious traditions—fostered a civilization that was unlike any in the history of man, established on two bedrock principles: that all individuals are equal and important before God and that there are commandments that transcend human traditions and conventions that apply to all individuals equally, at all times, and in all places.

These two foundational values—the irreproachable worth of the individual and the transcendence of natural law—have their seeds in Jewish and Greek conventions and are embodied in two of the most celebrated quotes in all of written history, the first from the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Jeremiah and the second from Sophocles’ drama “Antigone.” They are as follows:

Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. And before you were born, I consecrated you.

And:

Creon: And still you had the gall to break this law?

Antigone: Of course, I did. It wasn’t Zeus, not in the least, who made this proclamation—not to me. Nor did that Justice, dwelling with the gods beneath the earth, ordain such laws for men. Nor did I think your edict had such force that you, a mere mortal, could override the gods, the great unwritten, unshakable traditions. They are alive, not just today or yesterday: they live forever, from the first of time, and no one knows when they first saw the light. These laws—I was not about to break them, not out of fear of some man’s wounded pride.”

These traditions, plus the New Testament—the Gospels and the letters of Paul—were interpreted and clarified by St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, who integrated Platonic and Aristotelian concepts, respectively, into Christian theology. All of this formed the foundation of a civilization dedicated to the Jeffersonian notions identified above.

This civilization—Western civilization—was summed up succinctly and poignantly by one of its last true heroes, Martin Luther King, Jr., who in 1963 put it this way in his famous “Letter from the Birmingham Jail”:

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights [emphasis added] . . . Now . . . how does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.

All of this and more—much, much more—is the inheritance of the West. Aquinas and Bracton begat Fortescue, who, in turn, begat Jefferson, Madison, and the political apotheosis of natural law and individual liberty. Likewise, the Reformation begat John Calvin and the Scottish Presbyterians, who, in turn, begat David Ricardo and Adam Smith and the economic apotheosis of natural law and liberty.

Tim Kaine and his compatriots on the left despise the notion that man’s rights are endowed by his Creator for a handful of reasons. First, and most practically, there are some rights they dislike intensely and want to be able to take away from their fellow citizens. If, in the American tradition, rights are deemed to come from God, then they know good and well that they’ll never be able to take them fully and permanently.

Second, they absolutely hate the idea that religion might have had anything to do with the Founding and with the great American Experiment. Jefferson was a deist, they shriek, and Madison rarely went to church! This is a secular nation, they insist. They’re wrong, of course, but that won’t stop them from insisting otherwise. The Founders may not have been personally religious, but the civilization into which they were born, the very waters in which they swam, were overtly and inarguably religious.

Finally, those on the left have been conditioned to loathe the idea that any culture might be better or more conducive to human flourishing than any other. And certainly, they don’t want to believe that Western Civilization might have come to a more righteous and civilized understanding of man’s nature and what James Q. Wilson called “The Moral Sense” than other cultures. If rights come from God, but not all cultures believe in and defend the same rights, then somebody must be wrong. And the contemporary left cannot tolerate the idea that Westerners might be right while non-Westerners might be wrong. That’s inimical to everything they have been taught to believe.

In short, Tim Kaine is neither dumb nor alone. He is representative of a political faction that is sizable, stubborn, and woefully maleducated.