Conservatives believe in the rule of law, and there are two types of law: those that define the scope (and limits) of government, and those that restrict the freedom of the people. To a conservative, the first kind of law is the most important, with the Constitution as the highest law of the land. Conservatives call this the ‘rule of law,’ as the law rules both the governor as well as the governed. To conservatives, the role of government is to govern faithfully, within the limits of power specified by law.
Liberals don’t believe in law so much as they believe in authority, and as a consequence, they spend a great deal of their time trying to push the authority of government beyond its legal limits. Liberals have no problem passing laws that restrict the people, but they do not believe laws should restrict government. Liberals, rather, believe that their status as the intellectual and moral elite should grant them whatever authority over the rest of us the elite feel they need.
Liberals will chaff at how I am characterizing them, but we can see this at play all around us. We see it in the way liberals attack personality rather than policy, and in the way they find someone either guilty or innocent right out of the gate, and then apply or ignore evidence in order to make it fit their pre-existing narratives. Hillary Clinton could never be found guilty of anything because Hillary Clinton can never be guilty of anything. Trump is guilty of something because Trump must be guilty of something. Liberals still say, “hands up don’t shoot” in spite of the fact that it is predicated on a lie. Actual innocence or guilt is irrelevant; the accusation (or rebuttal) of guilt is a political weapon, and nothing more. Liberals love to refer to the conservative love of the rule of law as ‘cultish,’ while projecting, instead, their cult of personality. To the liberal, everything is results-oriented, and facts become true or false based solely on how well they fit the leftist agenda. Everything on the left stems from the need for the intellectual and moral elite to rule, with facts, science, law, reason, and reality being nothing more than tools to use, or not, based on how well they create the right political outcomes. To the left, it does not matter if something is true; what matters is whether or not something helps.
Since conservatives believe in the rule of law, they also believe that laws should apply equally to all people. Conservatives abhor laws that treat different people differently, such as affirmative action laws that allow colleges to insist that Americans of Asian descent need to score 450 points higher on the SAT to gain admission, than do other ethnic groups. Liberals like such laws, as they allow justice to be metered out piecemeal, giving each American whatever advantages or disadvantages the liberal feels each American needs. Somehow, the inherent (and open) racism in believing that individual people need a leg up or down, based solely on their ethnicity, is lost on the liberal – racism, like everything else, being nothing more than a tool used to gain authority.
The liberal focus on authority over law gives liberals a distinct political advantage. By believing in the rule of law, conservatives are also constrained by law. Liberals do not feel politically constrained, and are thus free to do whatever they feel it will take to win. Liberals use the law as a weapon against conservatives, while simultaneously violating the law themselves. We see this with the Mueller investigation, in which Donald Trump is being investigated for possible Russian collusion, based on a discredited dossier that was itself created through collusion with Russian agents. There is no working around the fact that the Democrats colluded, and yet all of the attention is on Trump, where there is no evidence of collusion at all. The Hillary Clinton campaign, the DNC, and the Obama Administration openly colluded with the Russians to try and discredit Donald Trump. Think about how crazy it sounds to say that the Democrats colluded with Russia to try and create Russian collusion within the Trump campaign, and yet that is exactly what happened. The message is clear: collusion is cool as long as the right people are doing it.
Interestingly, the Mueller investigation seems to be giving up on finding Russian collusion, and is focusing instead purely on obstruction of justice. If all Mueller finds is that Trump fired James Comey and Andrew McCabe, and tweeted mean things about Mueller’s investigation, Mueller will not have found anything at all, but fear not, for the liberals will scream bloody Mary about Trump’s so-called obstruction of justice, and how it is an impeachable offense, no matter how flimsy the accusations are. Accusations are tools that need not be true to be effective.
Republicans are not going to impeach President Trump over a flimsy obstruction of justice charge, which the Democrats will use to their political advantage in 2020, all in spite of the fact that the Obama Administration was obstructing justice every day on Benghazi, Fast and Furious, the Clinton e-mail server, the Steele dossier/Trump investigation, and a host of other issues. The law is a tool the left is free to obstruct whenever doing so is politically advantageous to them, whereas conservatives actually believe in the law, and hold our own accountable when they violate it. You will find no accountability on today’s left.
Many conservatives think that liberals are hypocrites, but liberals are not. To liberals, it is the agenda that counts. The law is but a tool, so of course it gets applied differently for Republicans than it does for Democrats.
Another advantage Democrats have is that, as each encroachment on the Constitution becomes established law, the Constitution becomes a weaker and weaker force in restraining government. The actual powers of Congress, are surprisingly limited. Each new encroachment only further weakens the Constitution, and with it, the Conservative position.
To make matters worse, while liberals promise free things to anyone who will give them more power, conservatives fail to make conservative ideology the central part of their campaigns. Reagan ran on statements like, ‘Government is not the solution; government is the problem,’ but today’s Republicans are so afraid of being labeled ‘anti-<insert identity group>’ that they shy away from saying anything that would indicate opposition to anything. Unless conservatives run on conservative values, all we can do is run against liberal attempts to gain more authority, and when those calls for authority come with what the public looks at as free handouts, conservativism becomes a divided, and then conquered, party.
It is long past time for conservatives to speak with vision for a better future, and one bathed in freedom and liberty. It is time for us to preach the praises of the American experiment, countering the argument that ‘America was never great,’ with the statement that, ‘together, we can make America even greater than before.’ It is time to stop retreating from liberalism and to start hitting it squarely on the chin, calling it out as the anti-American ideology it has become. It is time for conservatives to take the moral high ground, and with it the offensive in our political discourse. I published an article yesterday on how the Republican Party can succeed in 2018 and beyond. If you have not read it already, I urge you to do so. After you read it, send it to your Congressperson and Senator. Send it to the President. Tell the Republican Party that it is time for us to fight to win.
Note: Some lawyer is going to try and discredit this post by pointing out that in law school they were taught that the two types of law are civil, and criminal. Really there are many ways to categorize laws, just as there are many ways to categorize anything, and the correct categorization varies by context. I categorized based on the correct context for this article, and I recognize that there are other ways to categorize, in other contexts.
