Trashing the Truth

The “rule of law” cannot work or function without the truth.  Just as the human body cannot function without a heart, so the “rule of law” cannot function without its heart—the existence of a thing called truth. I find myself in agreement with a Conservative who writes:   “Law and order cannot coexist with condoned falsehood….Any nation or culture that comes to granting license to lying has initiated its own death warrant.”  Where the writer and I disagree is in who we think is telling the lies, or trashing the truth.

The writer sees the trashing of truth emanating from “the practitioners of the ideology which is now popularly referred to as ‘liberalism.’”  He immediately equates liberalism to Marxism, socialism and communism, suggesting that they all “proceed from the same brood house.”  With this declaration, the writer himself,  begins to trash the truth, because his statement is blatantly false.

Liberalism (a political and moral philosophy) came into being long before Marxism or communism.   It arrived in the Age of Enlightenment (17th & 18th centuries). It espoused  replacing the norms of hereditary privilege, state religion, absolute monarchy, the divine right of kings and the “traditional conservatism” of the time with representative democracy and the rule of law.  Without the emergence of Liberalism, the American Revolution would probably not have taken place, nor would the Constitution have been written in the way that it was.  You can check this understanding of Liberalism out for yourself in any history book for there is much more to be said about it than I can possibly say here.  

It was Liberalism that sought and established a nation that prized important individual freedoms (freedom of speech, freedom of association); an independent judiciary and public trial by jury, and has advocated gender and racial equality.  Let’s not trash the truth.  Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy just as Conservatism is a political and moral philosophy.  It is not Marxist or communism, or even socialism.  That labeling just doesn’t fit the historical facts.  It trashes the truth.