Excellent Article From Real Left About The Primacy Of Individual Rights

An excellent article from Real Left (formerly known as Left Lockdown Sceptics) makes an excellent case for the primacy of individual rights, and how without individual rights, there can really be no common good worthy of the name.  This is a very important and necessary corrective for a grave and perennial error that has long plagued the political Left (both genuine and phony) for at least two centuries (on and off) to one degree or another.  Namely, the specious idea that group rights > individual rights is essentially a form of moral relativism that ends up hurting not only the individual, but the collective/community as well.

(Quite frankly, this is one of the very, very few things the Left could and should agree with Ayn Rand on.)

If we can't hold onto our hard-won civil and human rights and liberties in a crisis (whether real or manufactured), then we cannot hold onto them at all, as they would thus not really be rights, but mere privileges doled out by the powerful, with more strings attached than a spider's web.

Genuine rights and liberties are NOT conditional, after all. 

Now, this does NOT mean we should endorse hyper-individualism either, as in "I got mine, screw everyone else," or, as Margaret Thatcher said, "there is no such thing as society".  That's the essence of neoliberalism, which is, in a word, evil.  No man or woman is an island, after all.  But affirming the common good need not, and must not, mean trampling individual rights either.  The false dichotomy between individual and community is exactly that, false.

Without the primacy of individual rights (and the rule of law, to back up such rights), any attempt at democracy ultimately devolves to oligarchy, tyranny, and/or most likely of all, ochlocracy (mob rule).  It basically becomes like two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner.  Natch.

The key takeaway:  If the genuine Left ever wants to rise again in any way, shape, or form, they had best take heed!  Or else, the phony neoliberal pseudo-left, the right-wing (including the far right and "alt-right"), and/or the "tankies" on the extreme authoritarian far left, will all gladly and eagerly vie with one another to fill in the moral vacuum left by the grave error of hyper-collectivism.  And yes, hyper-collectivism is just as bad as hyper-individualism, if not worse still.  They are two sides of the same ugly coin.

Long article, but definitely worth a serious read.  We ignore it truly at our own peril.

P.S.  In case the reader wants to trot out that old chestnut, we are well aware that shouting "FIRE!" in a crowded theater is not, and should not, be protected as free speech, for example.  Duh!  Indeed, there are nuances and edge cases, to be sure.  But these are essentially the exceptions that prove the rule of (largely) absolute individual rights.

Liberty Is Not A "Luxury Belief". It Is A Birthright For All

The term "luxury beliefs" has gained quite a lot of traction since it was coined in 2019, and especially since 2022, by Rob Henderson.  Per Wikipedia:

A luxury belief is an idea or opinion that confers status on members of the upper class at little cost, while inflicting costs on persons in lower classes.  The term is often applied to privileged individuals who are seen as disconnected from the lived experiences of impoverished and marginalized people. Such individuals supposedly hold political and social beliefs that signal their elite status, yet which are alleged to have negative impacts on those with the least influence. Exactly what counts as a luxury belief is not always consistent and may vary from person to person, and the term in general is considered to be controversial.

Make no mistake, it is typically only (social) conservatives that have been using the term in recent years to describe their opponents' views on various hot-button issues (bail reform, criminal justice, policing, MMT, immigration, net zero, environmentalism, marriage and family, sexual freedom, reproductive rights, drug legalization and decriminalization, etc.).  Occasionally the left and center-left have used the term (much more accurately, we would argue) to describe conservative beliefs like "supply-side economics", "trickle-down theory", austerity, artificial scarcity, weak or nonexistent social safety nets, and stuff like that, but the use of the term on the left in that context is relatively rare.

On the right, and even somewhat on the "third way" neoliberal left since President Clinton, there seems to be this specious idea that too much personal liberty is somehow apocalyptically worse than too little, particularly for the poor, downtrodden, and vulnerable members of society, and especially for racialized minorities (who says conservatives don't "play the race card" when it's convenient?).  We argue that this is a patronizing and paternalistic attitude towards people that the talking heads (consciously or unconsciously) feel smugly superior to, and it essentially robs such people of agency.  And to be blunt about it, as the saying goes, "crap always rolls downhill".  That is, granted, ANY policy can have unintended consequences per Murphy's Law, and as a well-known corollary, those negative consequences tend to accrue disproportionately to those who lack the means to insulate themselves from such consequences, particularly those at the bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy.  For example, in that regard, we can call the War on (people who use a few particular) Drugs just as much if not more of a "luxury belief" as full drug legalization would be in practice, as the adverse consequences (which are not entirely unintended!) fall disproportionately on poor people and/or racialized minorities. 

As Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) famously said, "you can get over an addiction, but you will never get over a conviction".  And that clearly applies tenfold to the poor as it does to the rich.

The real problem is systemic, as must any real solution be.  But liberty per se is not the problem.  While the utterly patronizing and paternalistic protectionism and "tyranny of the weaker brother" is the real luxury belief here, as are the economic ones like "trickle-down theory", austerity, and neoliberalism. ("Catch and release" and "defund the police" are the only ones that Henderson mentions that even come close in that regard.)

The TSAP supports liberty and justice for all, in contrast to liberty for "just us", NOT all.  To quote Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, "I would rather be exposed to the inconveniencies (sic) attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it".  Truer words have never been spoken indeed.

(Mic drop)

Negative And Positive Liberty: Two Sides, Same Coin

If you are reading this right now, there is a very good chance that you have been feeling "politically homeless" recently.  You may find yourself torn between progressivism and libertarianism, and have thus sought out what we call "progressive libertarianism".  You may strongly oppose lockdowns and related restrictions as egregious violations of civil and human rights, but yet still just as strongly support things like Universal Basic Income, single-payer Medicare For All, fair and progressive taxation, labor rights, racial justice, gender and reproductive justice, environmental justice, and stuff like that.  And take it from us, you are NOT at all alone.

One thing all tyrants and their lackeys both today and throughout history have in common is that they convince the masses that negative and positive liberty ("freedom from" vs. "freedom to", respectively) are somehow at odds with one another or even mutually exclusive, when in reality they are (when properly understood!) two sides of the same coin.  And those who follow the "power-over" or "dominator" paradigm of social interaction (as opposed to the "partnership" paradigm per Riane Eisler) simply cannot see that you really can't have one without the other.  That is true whether one is a Marxist or Neo-Platonist (preferring only positive liberty at the expense of negative liberty), or a Republican or Libertarian (preferring only negative liberty at the expense of positive liberty).  And by cynically pitting one type of liberty against the other, We the People ultimately end up with neither as a result.

If literally everything has strings attached and/or requires one to beg permission from the state or others higher up in the social dominance hierarchy, can one really consider oneself to be free?

If there is no firm social floor below which one cannot fall, then there is a "race to the bottom" which inevitably results in economic coercion.  And economic coercion makes negative liberty into a cruel joke:  the "freedom" to starve under a bridge in a world of natural abundance but artificial scarcity.

The same is also true for individual rights vs. collective/community rights as well, by the way.

To quote the late Mikhail Bakunin, "We are convinced that liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; and that socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality."  Simply insert "negative" before "liberty", and replace "socialism" with "positive liberty" and the quote in fact makes even more sense, regardless of how one feels about that rather nebulous snarl word, "socialism".  That basically sums it up.  QED.

We at the TSAP have one and only one agenda:  liberty and justice for all.  What's yours?