{"id":976,"date":"2013-12-08T20:51:05","date_gmt":"2013-12-09T01:51:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/?p=976"},"modified":"2013-12-08T20:51:05","modified_gmt":"2013-12-09T01:51:05","slug":"conservatives-mandela-and-the-founders-what-do-conservatives-believe-about-liberty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2013\/12\/conservatives-mandela-and-the-founders-what-do-conservatives-believe-about-liberty.html","title":{"rendered":"“Conservatives,” Mandela, and the Founders: What DO “Conservatives” Believe About Liberty?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the wake of Nelson Mandela\u2019s death, National Review Online <\/i>(NRO) published comments from several self-avowed \u201cconservatives.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

John Boehner, for example, alludes to Mandela\u2019s \u201c\u2018long walk to freedom\u201d while praising him as \u201ca champion of peace and racial harmony.\u201d\u00a0 Marco Rubio went even further. Lamenting that \u201cthe world has lost one of history\u2019s most important figures,\u201d Rubio reassures us that just as \u201cmen and women striving for justice and fairness around the world have drawn inspiration from Nelson Mandela,\u201d so his \u201cexample will live on for generations to come.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Tim Scott lauded Mandela for being a \u201ctransformational figure, a man who truly changed the world.\u201d Mandela, he continued, \u201cwalked a long road to freedom and embraced the fundamental human belief in equality.\u201d\u00a0 Scott insists that \u201call freedom-loving people mourn his passing.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

Tea Party idol Ted Cruz said of Mandela that he \u201cwill live in history as an inspiration for defenders of liberty around the globe,\u201d for he was a man who \u201cstood firm for decades on the principle that until all South Africans enjoyed equal liberties he would not leave prison himself [.]\u201d\u00a0 \u201cBecause of his epic fight against injustice,\u201d Cruz concluded, \u201can entire nation is now free.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

These judgments on the part of conservatives of a man who was an avowed \u201cdemocratic socialist\u201d and communist sympathizer, a man who was on America\u2019s list of terrorists until as recently as 2008, reflect, at best, the height of moral confusion.\u00a0 At worst, they reveal gross intellectual dishonesty.<\/span><\/p>\n

To cut to the chase, American \u201cconservatives\u201d claim to prize the Constitution and the \u201climited government\u201d that it enshrines.\u00a0 But the vision of liberty for which the Constitution\u2019s Framers seceded from England, a vision for which they pledged all, is antithetical to that of Mandela. \u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Though few people, and even fewer public figures\u2014regardless of their politics\u2014will say it, the liberty bequeathed to Americans by their ancestors is seen as a species of bondage<\/i> by those on the left. That is, Constitutional liberty as it was conceived by the Patriots of the 18th<\/sup> century can only be thought of as an obstacle to be surmounted by those who think of \u201cliberty\u201d in terms of a material condition that government must bring about for its citizens. <\/span><\/p>\n

To put it even more simply, Constitutional liberty must be anathema to \u201cdemocratic socialists\u201d and other communist sympathizers, for liberty, as the residents of the Anglo world once conceived it, consists in a decentralization of authority and power, a government with many voices, so to speak, severely limited in scope. \u00a0This form of government in turn entails a robust system of private property, for only under such a system is power diffused far and wide. \u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Now, Mandela was a \u201cdemocratic socialist.\u201d He was also a communist, or at minimum, a communist sympathizer.\u00a0 Translation: the man who our \u201cconservatives\u201d are now extolling as a great apostle of liberty disdained <\/i>private property, or what, in good socialist fashion, he derisively referred to as \u201ccapitalism.\u201d\u00a0 Mandela was an adamant advocate of redistribution who thought that \u201ccapitalism\u201d was the vehicle by which whites in his country privileged their own racial and class interests. <\/span><\/p>\n

To those self-described \u201cconservatives\u201d who acknowledge Mandela\u2019s violent past while attempting to dismiss it on the grounds that he matured while in prison, there are two responses in the coming.<\/span><\/p>\n

First, two years after <\/i>he was released from prison, Mandela was captured on video\u2014a video that can be found on YouTube\u2014singing along with the members of his African National Congress and the South African Communist Party his organization\u2019s anthem.\u00a0 The anthem affirms the need for all members to \u201ckill the whites<\/i>.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Second, as Ilana Mercer notes in her excellent study of the plight of her former homeland, Into the Cannibal\u2019s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa, <\/i>Mandela\u2019s presidency launched his country on a trajectory that has resulted in making the new South Africa a place in which \u201cmore people are murdered in one week under African rule than died under the detention of the Afrikaner government over the course of roughly four decades.\u201d\u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

None of this, of course, is to justify or even sympathize with apartheid. Mercer\u2019s family, for example, lead by her father, a Rabbi, was anti-apartheid long before it became fashionable to be so.\u00a0 Nor is to detract from the fact that Mandela was indeed a man with conviction who was willing to sacrifice all for what he believed was right.<\/span><\/p>\n

The point here is that so-called \u201cconservatives\u201d contradict their own cause when they recognize in an avowed socialist, a communist sympathizer, a champion of liberty.\u00a0 To see that this is so, Cruz and company should ask themselves but two questions:<\/span><\/p>\n

Is Barack Obama a great champion of liberty?<\/span><\/p>\n

Would the Framers of the Constitution have regarded Mandela as a great inspiration of liberty?<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the wake of Nelson Mandela\u2019s death, National Review Online (NRO) published comments from several self-avowed \u201cconservatives.\u201d John Boehner, for example, alludes to Mandela\u2019s \u201c\u2018long walk to freedom\u201d while praising him as \u201ca champion of peace and racial harmony.\u201d\u00a0 Marco Rubio went even further. Lamenting that \u201cthe world has lost one of history\u2019s most important…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-976","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n"Conservatives," Mandela, and the Founders: What DO "Conservatives" Believe About Liberty?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2013\/12\/conservatives-mandela-and-the-founders-what-do-conservatives-believe-about-liberty.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\""Conservatives," Mandela, and the Founders: What DO "Conservatives" Believe About Liberty?\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In the wake of Nelson Mandela\u2019s death, National Review Online (NRO) published comments from several self-avowed \u201cconservatives.\u201d John Boehner, for example, alludes to Mandela\u2019s \u201c\u2018long walk to freedom\u201d while praising him as \u201ca champion of peace and racial harmony.\u201d\u00a0 Marco Rubio went even further. 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