Our New Civil Rights Regime
The civil rights regime in which we now live is incompatible with a self-governing constitutional republic.
After the 1960s, the United States became something fundamentally different than what it was before the 1960s: A progressive civil rights regime that is incompatible with a self-governing constitutional republic.
To explain this transformation—and the incompatibility of a progressive civil rights regime with a constitutional republic governed by its citizens—let us first recall some basic terms and definitions.
Natural Rights
The American Founders were steeped in Enlightenment moral and political philosophy, sometimes referred to as classical liberalism. This philosophy focuses on the natural liberty of each individual human being, rooted in the metaphysical freedom of the human mind.
To say one is a free being by nature is to assert that one’s mind can think and choose freely. Your mind, therefore—not the mind of someone else—should govern your body. This is the essence of self-government.
From this fundamental premise, Enlightened American statesmen concluded that if some people have free minds but unfree bodies—if someone else is forcefully and unjustly enslaving them—then slavery must be wrong, because each human mind is inherently free. This moral spark ignited the greatest anti-slavery movement in history, beginning with the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and culminating in the 13th Amendment in 1865.
Within the context of Enlightenment and classical liberal thought, influential thinkers often used the term “natural rights” to refer to those rights that all human beings possess by nature. Regardless of who you are, where you live, when you live, or what you look like, you have a rightful claim—by virtue of your own human nature—to your life, your liberty, and your property.
If the laws under which you live fail to respect or protect your natural rights—if they violate your natural rights—then those laws are unjust. For American Enlightenment thinkers, the universal natural rights of all individuals serve as standards by which to judge various governments and laws, not the other way around.
Natural rights are the most fundamental and universal rights precisely because they are possessed by all human beings, including those who are unaware of them or openly reject them. Even if someone claims to have no natural rights, it would still be morally wrong for anyone else to enslave or harm them.
Natural rights are unalienable, as stated in the Declaration of Independence, because they cannot be separated from the individual. While others might use force to violate your rights—which is, by definition, a moral wrong—they cannot take your rights away.
You always have a natural right—a rightful claim—to your own life, liberty, and property, which is the foundation of morality. When one person violates another's natural rights, it is for that very reason, wrong. A slave, for instance, possesses equal natural rights, which is why slavery is immoral, unjust, and wrong.
Civil Rights
In modern Western political philosophy, the term “civil rights” refers to the legal rights that protect the natural rights of citizens and enable them to participate in the governance of civil society.
Unlike natural rights, which exist by nature, civil rights must be established through legislation; they are dependent on the law. Civil rights include:
The right to vote in elections.
The right to a trial by jury when accused of a crime.
The right to be elected to and hold a government office.
The right to be secure in one’s home from unjust government intrusion.
The right to own property and demonstrate title of ownership in a court of law.
These rights must be created by law. Elections, for example, do not occur naturally; they must be planned, announced, and regulated by laws, which also define voter eligibility, the kind of ballots that will be counted, deadlines for submitting ballots, etc. Similarly, trials and jury systems, government offices, and titles and deeds require legal frameworks to exist.
Ultimately, the purpose of individual civil rights is to acknowledge and protect the natural rights of citizens. For example, the legal civil right to vote supports your natural right to legitimize governance through the consent of the governed. Conversely, civil laws that enforce the rule of a hereditary king or unelected bureaucrats violate your natural right to consent.
Because we understand natural rights as the rightful claims to life, liberty, and property, Americans can recognize when the civil rights movement has succeeded: when civil laws provide equal protection for the liberty and property of all citizens. When every citizen has legally ensured rights to vote, to seek justice in courts, to be tried by peers, to hold office and exercise constitutional powers, to speak and worship freely, the civil rights movement has achieved its aim.
However, in the 1960s, progressives transformed our constitutional republic into something quite different: a civil rights regime where the definition of “civil rights” continuously evolves and justifies expanding government powers beyond constitutional limits.