Vote the leadership out

A right is not a right if it is not enforced. Our country started with the statement that all men are created equal, meaning that all men have equal rights before the law. At some point in the last 250 years, this has come to be seen as a “liberal” point of view. Certainly, supporting the rights of various minorities has been an issue almost exclusively for people seen as liberal. Such a platform now defines a person as left wing—even “radical left wing.”
Why is that? Why is the attempt to enforce the rights of anyone seen as anything but conservative? I mean, equality is from the founding document of this country.

Most of the Declaration of Independence complains about perceived threats to property rights and capricious imposition of laws—taxation without consent, quartering troops without consent, cutting off of trade, more than a dozen accusations of improper legal methods and actions. Property rights are the heart of conservative philosophy. They trump everything. President Reagan famously said, “I’m all for the environment, but we can’t let it interfere with business.”

Both personal rights and property rights are in the Declaration, but we seem to have developed a value system that pits one against the other.
Left-wing people favor individual rights. Right-wing people presumably favor property rights. In Mississippi, this is complicated by racial animus, but it seems to be the bedrock of our differences. Unfortunately, this leads to a very grim place.

Democrats, supporting what may be called human rights, support democracy. Republicans, supporting property rights, support what Henry Kissinger called Realpolitik—might makes right (he once called morality “sentiment.”). Today, we see undisguised attempts by the GOP to fix elections in their favor, everything from gerrymandering between censuses to passing voting restrictions. The will of the people is declared to be fraudulent in the face of overpowering evidence to the contrary, or even illegal, as in Virginia. President Trump has even said, “Democrats will never win another election.”
The GOP may be republican but they are clearly not democratic. Might makes right.

Our only hope is to turn out massively as the voters did in Hungary: win by so much that no one can fail to concede. We need to hold our elected officials responsible for every lie, theft, foolish action or abuse by our president, the crushing economic burden of his self-aggrandizing, war-mongering policies, the threats to our personal life and liberty from his lawless enforcement army, or the destruction of our health protections, air and water quality, or food safety to which they did not object. There are plenty of good reasons to throw these bums out. Let’s do it!

Bill Gillmore
Columbus