The Objective Standard Blog

Monday, April 20, 2009

John David Lewis's Charlotte Tea Party Speech

Posted by Craig Biddle at 9:42 PM

Dr. Lewis has made available an edited version of his excellent Tea Party speech. The opening paragraphs are below. The whole speech can be found here.

The Charlotte Tea Party Speech
Dr. John David Lewis
Dept. of Political Science, Duke University
First delivered: April 15, 2009, Charlotte, North Carolina
Revised for publication: April 20, 2009.

[Permission is given to read this in full, wherever defenders of liberty may gather. Thank you to Char Cushman for the transcription, Andy Clarkson for the original video, and to Matthew Ridenhour for arranging the Charlotte Tea Party. A text version, in Word, may be seen here.]

It is high time for a tea party in America!

But to do this right, we need to understand what it means. So I want to think back for a moment to what happened over 200 years ago, at the time of the original Boston Tea Party.

The Founders of this nation brought forth a radical idea. It was truly radical, practiced nowhere before this time.

This idea was the Rights of Man. The Founders saw each of us as endowed with certain inalienable rights, rights that may not be separated from our nature as autonomous beings.

These inalienable rights are:

  • The Right to Life—the right to live your own life, to choose your own goals, and to preserve your own independent existence.
  • The Right to Liberty, which is the right to act to achieve your goals, without coercion by other men.
  • The Right to the Pursuit of Happiness, to act to achieve your own success, your own prosperity, and your own happiness, for your own sake.
  • And the Right to Property—the right to gain, keep, and enjoy, the material products of your efforts.

Unless I’m mistaken I don’t see anything here about a right to happiness. I see a right to the pursuit of happiness: the right to take the actions needed to attain one’s own happiness. Nor do I see any rights to things at all—no rights to food, clothing, healthcare or diapers. There is only a right to act to achieve those things. This is called freedom.

These rights to act—the rights to life, to liberty, and to the pursuit of happiness—are founded on a certain view of man. Each of us is an individual, autonomous, moral being, with the right to choose his own values and capable of directing his own life.

Look at the person next to you, and look in the mirror—do you see the individual sovereign human being, existing for his own sake, with the right to live, to love, and to act?

This idea—the Founders’ idea of the individual Rights of Man—led to a radical view of government. Government was not to be inherited by the force of an entrenched aristocracy as in Europe, imposed by the divine right of kings through generations of oppression, or enforced by the force of a club.

Government in America was to be designed and instituted by thinking men, for a single purpose: to protect and defend the Rights of Man.

This is what the American Declaration of Independence says: “To secure these rights, governments are instituted among men.” Thinking men, armed with the idea of rights, created a government limited to the protection of individual rights.

For centuries in Europe, the relationship between the people and the government had been that of serf to master: everyone was a servant of the ruling elite. In America, this was turned upside down: government became the servant of the individual. The very reason for a government—and its purpose—is to secure our inalienable, individual rights.

Read it all.