Neither Inalienable nor Self-Evident

Reflections on the Chimera of Human Rights

American exceptionalism consists of many myths.  Very few of these myths should withstand close scrutiny, and yet most of them are earnestly clung to by a surprisingly high number of people. Among the most absurd and yet most cherished is the fiction that man is endowed with certain “inalienable rights.”  We are all taught about “inalienable rights” in high school civics class and elsewhere, and while some of us learn to develop a more skeptical eye on what we have been taught or rather propagandized, far too many never come to discern how the concept of alienable rights makes so little sense intellectually, as that principle is not always adhered to practically. At best, talk of “inalienable rights” are not much more than merely strong rhetorical hyperbole. Indeed, these rights are so very often disregarded in practice that it is mystifying that anyone really believes any of this civics class jargon at all.

The philosophical foundation on which these rights are founded and through which thinkers discern these rights is tenuous at best.  John Locke famously asserted that these inalienable rights include “Life, Liberty, and Property.” He declares that these rights are granted by God, as he further asserts that they are inherent to the nature of man. The Second Treatise on Government of course makes many absurd assertions that should leave modern readers wondering why much of this is taken seriously at all. These include, among other things, that the dominion God gave to Adam was limited in scope to Adam and does not extend to absolute monarchy, that all men are created equal in the state of nature (most are unfit to survive in a state of nature, as some men are far more equal than others), that the state of Nature is inherently peaceful, and that violence or conflict among men in what would otherwise be “the state of nature” is not in that state of nature at all, but a state of war. 

In the American tradition specifically. Thomas Jefferson switched property with “Pursuit of Happiness” in the Declaration of Independence, asserting that as “all men are created equal, . . . they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” These “truths” he holds as “self-evident.” Some things are self-evident, but to simply cite something as “self-evident” as the argument without submitting facts or reasoning to advance the position argued for is to engage in circular logic. Compare and contrast with transgender lunacy. The madness of transgenderism is indeed self-evident, but one can submit how sex is immutable, that the vast majority of “transgender ‘people’” are instantly identifiable as the sex they were born as, that transgender surgeries attempting to create genitalia of the sex a person desires to be are at best a very poor counterfeit of the genuine article, and on and on and on.  No such argument is proffered or submitted to bolster this blithe assertion that man is endowed with these “inalienable rights.” To simply state something is self-evident should not persuade anyone who is not already deeply convinced of the argument that is being advocated.

The Declaration of Independence of course is not the Constitution. But while the Constitution is first and foremost a legal document, the legal guarantees and protections it establishes do enunciate central, core values of the Anglo-American tradition.  This is why The First Amendment is often regarded not just as a legal proscription against government censorship, but as a stand-in for societal values emphasizing free expression as an intrinsic moral good, as these societal values also condemn government censorship as morally repugnant.  As for John Locke asserting that inalienable rights of “Life, Liberty, and Property” come from God, one might retort that has as much force in human, earthly affairs as God’s mercy and salvation. God may have mercy for any one person, but that does not mean men or governments will if given a reason, opportunity, and motive to show no such mercy. So it is with these “inalienable rights.” One of course may further retort that “God is dead.”

The actions of the US government in the past and present further reveal this to be a farce. How well did those inalienable rights hold up when Lincoln arrested, brutalized, or killed citizens of Maryland (among other places) simply for expressing agreement with the Confederacy or even the more abstract proposition that, given that various states agreed to join the Union, they could also leave?  How inalienable were the rights of those who were killed or lost everything when General Sherman burned down Atlanta? When World War I broke out, ordinary Americans were convicted for sedition for simply expressing their opposition to America’s entry in the Great War (and were correct to do so). These convictions were upheld by the Supreme Court in the famous Schenk decision, from which the tired cliché about “yelling fire in a crowded theatre” originates.  It only took this country fifty years to correct this error, when Schenck was largely overturned over 50 years later in Brandenburg v Ohio.  More recently, how well are those “inalienable rights” holding up for January 6 protestors, who were simply “petition[ing] their government for grievances,” albeit with a more rowdy, lively temperament.  Those grievances of course were open and obvious election fraud, the allegations of which were rarely if ever adjudicated on the merits but were disposed of with spurious legal technicalities like “standing.” One can certainly add some of the more onerous Covid policies to the list of government actions that violate these supposedly inalienable, human rights.

Some might object that the examples above are in the context of war, civil war, insurrection, or national emergency, but this simply means that the state is highly motivated to trample or otherwise infringe on these “inalienable” rights. War is after all merely an implementation of state policy by other means. A declaration of insurrection or national emergency or whatever else is simply a decision by the state of its intention and desire to resolve a particular situation through more extraordinary measures.

The United States Constitution is by no means the only legal instrument declaring certain rights to be natural or inalienable, especially since the proliferation of democracy (at gun point) since 1945.  There is perhaps no more comical proof that a document declaring something to be an “inalienable” right does not mean it is so than the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” Written and ratified by the United Nations in 1948, the first preamble of this document states that “the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world….” Some standout provisions include:

Article 2: Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.

Others include:

· prohibition against “torture or… cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment (article 5)

· right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country. (Article 13. 2)

· “the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” Article 19

· “right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.”

It goes on and on,  and it is a laughing stock.   More countries impose cruel and unusual punishment than honor the prohibition against it.  Singapore’s harsh criminal justice system is just one example demonstrating this is likely a good thing. Harsh, brutal punishment deters the criminal conduct that it sanctions with remarkable efficacy. These and many of the other articles are preposterous on their face as they are more often disregarded than honored.   

Across the pond in Britain and Europe, a whole body of so-called hate speech laws have been promulgated that directly violate the stated “right to freedom of opinion and expression,” including the “freedom to hold opinions without interference….” How are those “inalienable rights” of patriots and right-thinking persons who speak out against the Great Replacement and the transgender menace holding up?  How about the “inalienable” rights of Sam Melia, husband of Laura Towler and father (who has recently been denied any contact with his children).  How can anyone hear this-and-that talk about “inalienable rights” without laughing in the face at anyone who dares utter such fairy tales when a man has been put in prison for disseminating stickers the ruling class deems unsavory?  This in Great Britan no less, with the legacy of John Locke, the Magna Carta, and so on.

The United States government—and any other democratic republic or more particularly vassal state installed by the American empire such as the Bundesrepublik Deutschland—has failed to live up to this standard because a brief survey of human history shows these whimsical ideas about “inalienable rights” for what they truly are: at best aspirational, at worst seemingly empty rhetorical flair that convinces far too many people simply by drawing heavily on certain sentimentalities in the Anglo-American tradition. Such rhetoric should be seen as the sentimental sap it is, but, alas, it has proven incredibly powerful.  Imagine the sea of human history over the centuries and envision the abyss of killing, war, and naked brutality, from the ancient Assyrians who wrote about how they would torture and mutilate the condemned with glee, to the sadistic ruthlessness of Vlad the Impaler, to the centuries of brutality that defined rule under the Ottoman Empire, from the harsh sadism of the Barbary Pirates inflicted on those held captives as slaves, to horrors imposed by so many governments of the 20^th Century, of which the do-goody Allies are by no means innocent of.

The supposed inalienable rights may have been vindicated, to a point, by the victors in the Nuremberg Trials when those rights were violated by the Third Reich before it was vanquished. How tell were these inalienable rights vindicated for the East Prussians and Silesians, who bore the brunt of a marauding Red Army that raped and killed German civilians wholesale, as those who did survive were dispossessed of their ancestral homeland by way of the Yalta conference in which Churchill and Stalin happily agreed to shift the borders of the Soviet Union, Poland, and Germany with three matchsticks? Or the victims of allied terror bombings that purposefully targeted civilian populations?[1] How well did the inalienable rights of Chinese who bore the brunt of Mao Zedong hold up? A brief, cursory glance of Chinese history and civilization in particular demonstrates that the notion of “inalienable rights” is utterly foreign and even anathema to them, as a people and as a civilization, as seen from drastic measures regarding the Covid-19 pandemic to the oppression of the Tibetans and more recently the Uyghurs. Nor is it the case that the Chinese people and civilization are by any means an exception.  Moreover, these examples from history and foreign civilizations as well as modern examples in the Anglo-American world, from convictions on so-called hate speech laws in Britain to matters regarding political prisoners from the January 6 protest to excessive responses to Covid-19 further show that if these perceived rights are inherent to man, the compulsion and desire to trample these rights are just as if not more inherent to the nature of man, as sizeable contingents of the populace from different civilization across different periods of time want and desire these measures for their own particular ends and motivations. This proves that, at best, the concept of “inalienable rights” is a cultural norm, backed to some extent by bodies of laws and, as will be demonstrated, above all by both overt and dormant violence. These “rights” are neither universal nor inalienable in any sense of those words as they are properly understood.

This of course reveals that the construct of “inalienable rights” are peculiar to our civilization and culture, but how can an aberration unique to a particular culture and civilization be “inalienable?” Do people, from Locke and Jefferson themselves to those reciting platitudes from civics class like good little school boys not know what “inalienable” means?

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With good reason, some thinkers have balked at the notion that these rights are “inalienable,” as the term is properly understood. Jeremy Bentham, as the father of Utilitarianism, can never receive a very high recommendation overall. This caveat notwithstanding, he astutely observes the following:

Rights are, then, the fruits of the law, and of the law alone. There are no rights without law—no rights contrary to the law—no rights anterior to the law. Before the existence of laws there may be reasons for wishing that there were laws—and doubtless such reasons cannot be wanting, and those of the strongest kind;—but a reason for wishing that we possessed a right, does not constitute a right. To confound the existence of a reason for wishing that we possessed a right, with the existence of the right itself, is to confound the existence of a want with the means of relieving it. It is the same as if one should say, everybody is subject to hunger, therefore everybody has something to eat.

It is quite short-sighted to suggest they stem from law alone, as laws reflect the morals and values as well as general policy considerations of the society that enacts and enforces them.  Prohibitions against murder are not merely backed by legal sanctions criminalizing murder, as those laws reflect how murder is a deep social taboo as well as part of the social contract whereby it is in the collective interest to prevent and deter murder through severe criminal sanctions.  This applies to other criminal laws that enunciate moral standards and social mores of that society, from theft to animal cruelty to sex crimes.  By the same token, if the Constitution and the federal states and local governments were to vanish overnight, the moral standards and social mores that the Constitution and our body of criminal law both enunciate and reinforce would, in all likelihood, greatly inform whatever order that would eventually be established in the midst of the chaos and mayhem that would ensue.

Despite these and other errors, Bentham is correct that it is a fallacy to posit that a normative ideal means that normative ideal exists, let alone exists on an immutable, inalienable basis. Locke and those influenced by him all too often conflate “ought” with “is.”  Whether things ought to be as he claims does not mean that they are, and certainly not on a permanent, inalienable basis.

Robert Heinlein may have best revealed the hard truth about these happy platitudes in the unfortunately titled Starship Troopers. One laments that he could not find a more fortunate title for a seminal work that is equal parts science fiction novel and treatise on political philosophy. The salient passage from a powerful monologue by Colonel DuBois reads in pertinent part:

…[A] human being has no natural rights of any nature.”

. . . “Sir? How about ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’?”

“Ah, yes, the ‘unalienable rights.’ Each year someone quotes that magnificent poetry. Life? What ‘right’ to life has a man who must die if he is to save his children? If he chooses to save his own life, does he do so as a matter of ‘right’? If two men are starving and cannibalism is the only alternative to death, which man’s right is ‘unalienable’? And is it ‘right’? As to liberty, the heroes who signed the great document pledged themselves to buy liberty with their lives. Liberty is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes. Of all the so-called natural human rights that have ever been invented, liberty is least likely to be cheap and is never free of cost.

“The third ‘right’? - the ‘pursuit of happiness’? It is indeed unalienable but it is not a right; it is simply a universal condition which tyrants cannot take away nor patriots restore. Cast me into a dungeon, burn me at the stake, crown me king of kings, I can ‘pursue happiness’ as long as my brain lives - but neither gods nor saints, wise men nor subtle drugs, can insure that I will catch it.”

As stated before, a very brief survey of human history demonstrates these ideas about “inalienable rights” are not only far from inalienable, they are an aberration to the general rule of brutality and violence that is more typical of humanity through the ages.

As Heinlein explicates elsewhere through another monologue by Colonel DuBois, all political power is backed by violence, both dormant and active:

“Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedoms”

Heinlein further explicates how state policy, including such state policy directly voted on, is backed by violence:

“When you vote, you are exercising political authority, you're using force. And force, my friends, is violence. The supreme authority from which all other authorities are derived.”

We have these rights because the American revolution prevailed in the Revolutionary War. In other words, the instrument establishing these rights and guarantees, to the limited extent they are observed in practice, was established through violence. Backed by violence of the state, the values expressed in the Constitution have been allowed to ferment and marinade in the public conscience for centuries through the power of the state, a power that is derived from this violence. Civics classes and other portents in everyday life in America are backed by the dormant violence of the state (with intermittent fits of active violence), as evidenced by truancy laws, or the tax system that pays for schools and other government agencies that inculcate these values in generations of Americans, tax laws that are backed by prisons, guns, handcuffs and other auspices of the state and its police power.  

Conversely, leaders of the Confederacy had a strong, abiding conviction that abolitionism violated their “alienable right” to property[2], and that various states, having agreed to join the Union, could just as well secede, a conviction that is not exactly without merit.  If only such things were only determined on the intellectual and philosophical merits alone.  The resolution of military conflict in the Civil War—that is, violence—resolved the disposition of their claims in the negative. Violence can also impose values of one civilization on another, as seen in Japan and, most regrettably, Germany.  Consider what the national conscience of Germany was during Bismarck’s time, then during the Nazi regime, and finally in the almost 80 years of allied occupation and lot as a vassal state.  A similar comparison of modern Japan and its pacifism with its historical predecessor reveals the same truth.

Of course, the transformation of the German national conscience was not achieved by military conquest alone, but was facilitated by a comprehensive “denazification program,” as well as assistance and direction in the drafting of the Grundgesetz (under full military occupation of course).  These efforts were then succeeded by incorporating war guilt, propaganda on the prodigious advantages of liberal democracy and other Allied talking points both in the reformed German education system and media, supplemented with the infusion of American pop Unkultur to poison the minds of each new generation of Germans as well as sully the German language with thousands of English loan words in advertising, pop music, and other insidious portents of Pax Americana.  These propaganda and cultural projects are however in the backdrop of violence, both in respect to the Fall of Berlin at the end of the Second World War, the military occupation and division of Germany, and the continuing presence of American troops on German soil, such as it is, to this day.  This violence is both the precursor and backing to these educational, cultural, and propaganda campaigns that have transformed the German national conscience.

The ability or lack of ability to impose these values through violence and conquest further explains why the inalienable rights envisaged in the Constitution are taken much more seriously than those in the ridiculous “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” by the United Nations discussed above.  The US government has both jurisdiction and the means to impose its will, through violence, on its citizenry by way of law enforcement, the FBI, and even the military, all of which is justified through an extensive and well executed propaganda campaign in both education and many facets of modern American “culture,” to the extent one can call it “culture” at all.  

Conversely, the United Nations is not able to exert such violence and power on much of the world, and likely will never be able to.  This explains why any number of countries disregard this “universal declaration of rights,” including North Korea, China, Israel and many others. Demonstrating how utterly preposterous this Declaration of Universal Rights is, any people in the United States are not afforded a reasonable limitation of hours and do not receive holiday pay.  And as far as freedom of opinion and expression, that simply does not exist in Europe, not in Germany, not in the United Kingdom.  Quite crucially, the existence of that right in the States may be very short-lived as a majority of millennials and zoomers, indoctrinated by an ideologically corrupted education system, do not believe the First Amendment ought to protect so-called hate speech.  If they get their way, and so far establishment conservativism has responded with its usual brand of paid-to-lose, ineffectual methods of feigned opposition, that will prove once again that rights, if they are inalienable, are only inalienable until political will and the exertion of power and violence (dormant or otherwise) has coalesced beyond that tipping point where those rights are proven not to be so inalienable after all.

Some skeptics thought these ideas would strip the government of any ability to govern.  During the time period of the American revolution, Josiah Tucker observed that Locke’s notion about so-called inalienable rights is a “universal demolisher of all governments, but not the builder of any.” That these constructs categorically prohibit governments from enacting policies with swift carriage has been flatly debunked, as the truncated list of violations of these so-called rights set forth in this essay readily demonstrates. They do deter or encumber, but not flat out prohibit, governments from implementing policy in ways that contravene these niceties about human rights.  Going beyond that however, and most relevant to the existential threats facing the Occident today, what these constructs do accomplish however is cloud political or intellectual judgement by those so deluded into believing all this claptrap. Stated another way, these niceties serve to deprive large sections of the populace not indoctrinated into cultural Marxism of the political will and intellectual framework which are necessary precursors to those stern, drastic measures that could solve most of our troubles, if those opposed to the left ever secure the political power and means to do so.

It is true that the Velvet Revolution of 1989 and various reforms of Victorian Britain were mostly peaceful and unfolded in a way cognizant, for the most part, of these perceived human rights. Most of the monumental changes in human history and most especially modern history however did not happen with any regard to so-called human rights. Did the French Revolution acknowledge the “inalienable rights” of the aristocracy in implementing land and other reforms or any of its other policies, with some of these policies much more onerous than others? One may rightly denounce Leninism and Bolshevism, while still acknowledging how awful Tsarist Russia was. With such excess allowing Alexandria to have 10,000 unworn dresses requiring some sort of drastic reform or revolution of a different sort, any such reform would have required—in all instances—a jettisoning of these fanciful ideas about “inalienable rights.”  Would Franco have been able to save Spain from the communist rabble of Republican Spain if he scrupulously observed such inalienable rights? What about Augusto Pinochet and his glorious junta that saved his country?

Two other examples from history are of particular note, as they are instructive as to what measures Europe will almost certainly need to implement to save herself against the impending migration crisis and the Great Replacement. Spain saved herself from Islamic incursion through the Spanish Inquisition.  This movement paid no heed to the “inalienable rights” of the hostile, alien populaces of Moors they rightly expelled in order to defend the future of Spanish culture and posterity.

Feudal Japan and the drastic measures she undertook to save herself from European colonialism are also illuminating. Events associated with the Spanish galleon San Felipe compelled Japanese Warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who had just unified Japan, to take drastic measures that, while violating the so-called human rights of Japanese and Europeans alike, saved Japanese Civilization. Crippled by a tsunami, the San Felipe sought emergency docking at Japan on her way to South America from Manilla.  Spanish delegates on the ship told members of Hideyoshi’s court how the Spanish proselytize subjects in the New World as a precursor to colonial expansion.  Hideyoshi had already seen what Spain was doing to the Philippines.  This combined with what had been divulged by these Spanish delegates prompted a firm, drastic, but necessary response. He expelled all Christians from Japan and executed 26 Christians, including several Japanese, by crucifixion, making a gruesome example of them to the Japanese populace.  In addition to banning Christianity, he prohibited Japanese from travelling abroad absent express permission by the state, and prevented foreigners from entering Japan without express permission.  As previously stated, Japan was one of the few civilizations to avoid being subject to European colonization.

Considerations such as these are directly relatable to so many of our current troubles, matters that are an immediate and existential threat to our civilization and posterity.  Attempts by Great Britain to expel African refugees, with the intention of sending them to Rwanda have been blocked by courts in the European Union on the grounds that they violate “human rights.” These and other examples make it clear that any attempt to save Europe from mass migration of third world hordes and the Great Replacement will require an outright rejection, both legally and normatively, of these fanciful ideas about so-called human rights or “inalienable rights.”  

These considerations do not merely apply to the sort of merciless brutality and steely resolve that may be the only way to save Mother Europa.  Very often when there is discussion of whether indoctrinating children with transgender nuttery, the more tepid conservative establishment types will object that “people have rights,” not as a consideration of practical legal constraints on any such proposal, but as a normative one.  The notion of inalienable rights is a powerful force in the Anglo-American life (except when it is not).  Tepid conservatives who draw the line only at so-called transgender care and balk at taking action against the proselytizing of transgender lunacy to children object that such an enlightened response violates fundamental principles regarding perceived “inalienable” rights.  “These people have rights” was a refrain uttered by one prominent mainstream conservative in particular on this very matter, a meritless objection that, in addition to everything else set forth in this essay, fails to discern that child abuse can be both mental and physical, as it also encompasses child neglect and omissions, rather than affirmative acts, which fail the custodial duty of care that all parents owe their children.

Whether sincere or just disingenuous, this sort of intellectual encumbrance that hinders and impedes the political will—the will!— to take effective action if and when political and other power is ever realized becomes even more untenable when juxtaposed with how the left regards the “inalienable rights” of its ideological enemies. January 6 has already been alluded to. The Supreme Court of the United States already has three far left justices who would conjure phantom penumbras to exempt so-called “hate speech” from First Amendment protections, violating the supposed inalienable rights of their ideological enemies.  The United Kingdom, from which we inherited English Common Law, these Lockean Ideas, and the legacy of the Magna Carta, has, as already stated, already promulgated a vast network of hate speech and other laws, with many everyday Britons being imprisoned or suffering other legal repercussions for speaking their mind (correctly) about the reverse colonization that has been taking place, or even speaking out against the utter madness of transgenderism that insists people can change sex—or gender[3]—by way of inner thought, belief, or feeling.  The dire implications involved in this asymmetry between the intellectual and ideological frameworks of the left and right[4] should be open and obvious; those who want to win will prevail over those who want to leave well enough alone, as those who want to win will also prevail over those who preoccupy themselves with parlor games concerning trite platitudes taken from high school civics class.

While it is never good to believe fairy tales into adulthood, it is still worse to never disabuse one’s self of such fairy tales at all.  This is just one reason why these quaint notions about “human rights” and “inalienable rights” are best dispelled by those who possesses the faculties of reason and discernment. Going beyond that, to the extent major political movements have rarely been effective while acknowledging such rights, clinging on to these fanciful notions deprives patriots and nationalists of the intellectual and ideological framework with which to even have a chance of solving so many of our troubles. By the same token, it is sheer madness to suppose our ideological enemies actually afford those who dissent from their insidious worldview such inalienable rights, as evidenced by the number of patriots and nationalists who have faced criminal sanctions for speaking out against a whole host of evils, from mass migration of third world hordes and the Great Replacement to speaking against the orthodoxies mandates by the transgender menace.  These feel-good platitudes are of course deeply ingrained in the national conscience. It will require a sustained effort by those so enlightened to dispel such niceties.  The process begins with small cracks and fissures in the unwieldy structure, but potentially ends with its very dismantling in much more spectacular fashion.

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[1] For a general history on war crimes committed against the German people during the Second World War, this author recommends these books:  A Terrible Revenge by Alfred Maurice De Zayas, After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation by Giles MacDonogh, Hellstorm; The Death of Nazi Germany 1944-1947 by Thomas Goodrich. There are of course other excellent books to be recommended.

[2] The institution of slavery and viewing persons as property is assuredly anathema to all modern readers, however this was the legal status of slaves at the time leading up to and during the Civil War, a legal status acknowledged by many different bodies of laws and the Constitution itself before the Thirteen, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments were ratified into the Constitution during Reconstruction.

[3] As this author has articulated before, the term “gender” is properly understood and defined as effectively synonymous with sex. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary of Historical Principles defines the word gender, in its most pertinent part, as follows: Gender n. LME. 3 The state of being male, female, or neuter; sex; the members of one or other sex.  Now chiefly colloq. or euphem.  LME b Sex as expressed by social or cultural distinctions. (emphasis added). Source: The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 1993 edition, p. 1072.

[4] As argued in Conservatism Defined, there is scarcely a real right-wing in this country, as conservatism has been a failure for decades, a failure that may be ordained through linguistic determinism when bothers to look up the word “conserve.”