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Progressivism, conservatism, and the nature of rights
According to conservative political commentator, George Will, we who are progressives hold a political philosophy that is contrary to the founding principles of the United States. In his view, expressed in his book, The Conservative Sensibility, our nation is supposed to have a limited government whose only job is to protect the rights of individual citizens. Everything else is a deviation away from this ideal that creates a condition of dependency that builds on itself, requiring deficit spending to sustain this largesse.
Despite describing himself as an “amiable atheist,” Will sticks with the belief of the founders of our nation that each person possesses natural rights — a belief that he acknowledges were imperfectly applied, given how we treated Africans and aboriginal peoples. I mention his lack of religious affiliation because the typical understanding — the one that I see time and time again when talking to conservatives — is that natural rights depend on a supreme being to have granted them.
Will’s grounding of natural rights is in what he assumes to be the fixed quality of human nature, though he accepts the science of our evolution. What this permanent nature might be is not fleshed out, and perhaps he had no choice here. Asserting specific inherent characteristics would open his claim up to scientific and historical…
