What if they gave a culture war and nobody came?

Now, I am no big fan of David Frum, but I think he's one of the more thoughtful conservatives around these days. I would prefer to see him in Canada working on Canadian problems, but there seem to be issues with that sort of plan. On the other hand, I am a fan of Frank Rich, despite the fact that I think he goes overboard from time to time. It is sometimes difficult to tell just when political commentary turns into satire and vice versa. This excerpt from Rich's column yesterday is an excellent example of why I enjoy reading both of these fellows.

As the former Bush speechwriter David Frum recently wrote, the new president is an “apparently devoted husband and father” whose worst vice is “an occasional cigarette.”Frum was contrasting Obama to his own party’s star attraction, Rush Limbaugh, whose “history of drug dependency” and “tangled marital history” make him “a walking stereotype of self-indulgence.” Indeed, the two top candidates for leader of the post-Bush G.O.P, Rush and Newt, have six marriages between them. The party that once declared war on unmarried welfare moms, homosexual “recruiters” and Bill Clinton’s private life has been rebranded by Mark Foley, Larry Craig, David Vitter and the irrepressible Palins. Even before the economy tanked, Americans had more faith in medical researchers using discarded embryos to battle Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s than in Washington politicians making ad hoc medical decisions for Terri Schiavo (via The Culture Warriors Get Laid Off - NYTimes.com).

This is a very interesting way of characterising the Republican (and dare I say, conservative) implosion in the US.  Frum is dead-right here: insofar as the conservative movement is led by Limbaugh and the Republican Party is the electoral expression of that movement, moderate, independents, and centre-leaning conservatives are seeing exactly what 'The Movement' is all about. You have to wonder just how great these 'conservative principles' are when we see the mainstays of The Movement so egregiously disregard them. If they were so damn wonderful, why aren't these people living them?Well, perhaps this sin't the best way to think of it. Perhaps we should see it from the perspective of a document that The Movement's leader likes to quote (when he can get it right):

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness (via The US Declaration of Independence).

Of course, the fellows who wrote this were, for the most part, pretty smart. They did not mean by 'pursuit of Happiness' some sort of quest for sensual satisfaction (Rush, read that again, please). They meant something like what Locke meant in his Two Treatises when he wrote about freedom from harm with respect to one's life, health, liberty, or possessions.In a US Supreme Court ruling, Justice Field expands on this somewhat:

Among these inalienable rights, as proclaimed in that great document, is the right of men to pursue their happiness, by which is meant the right to pursue any lawful business or vocation, in any manner not inconsistent with the equal rights of others, which may increase their prosperity or develop their faculties, so as to give to them their highest enjoyment (via Butchers' Union Co. v. Crescent City Co., 111 U.S. 746 (1883), my emphasis).

Perhaps this will simple be decried as 'judicial activism,' but let's look at this more closely. The phrase about 'lawful business or vocation' notwithstanding, clearly the intent here is to interpret 'the pursuit of happiness' in such a way as to see this right as a negative one: a restriction on others not to interfere with a person's increase in their prosperity or development of their faculties so as to give them their highest enjoyment. Given the kind of people who wrote, signed, and inspired the Declaration, I think 'highest' needs to be interpreted in a fashion consistent with the greek idea of 'eudaemonia.' I suppose there will still be those who are ideologically dedicated to the idea that there are some kinds of people (i.e., teh gheys) that simply do not fit into this description; that increasing one's prosperity is to increase one's material wealth. To those people, I can only say that you are simply captured by a picture of what you wish to hear and read and to which you will assent. You are not letting the argument persuade you; you are re-interpreting the argument to fit your narrow idea. Prosperity can mean a lot of things and I cannot reconcile the idea of 'happiness' with the inability to, say, marry whomever assents to marry you or full participation in the legal life of the nation. Is it not a harm to deny two people who love each other the right to marry? Do we not prosper when we marry whom we love and who love us? To those who answer this last question in the negative, I can only say that you are doing it wrong.It seems to me that the Culture War can only be fought where there are at least two factions. It also seems to me that one of these factions has simply left the battlefield, leaving the other without purpose or direction. I suggest to those standing around wondering what happened to beat those swords into ploughshares and build a life that is based on something other than opposition to someone else's pursuit of happiness. Perhaps you could pursue your own happiness? Just a thought.