I have long been perplexed, and more than perplexed, by the seeming contradiction between the more intelligent right wingers’ stirring defenses of ‘freedom,’ ‘the rule of law,’ and ‘small government’ and their cheer-leading for George Bush, who under-mined these values more than any other president in my life time.  I think I now understand – and oddly, my being a Pagan has helped.  

Being of a minority perspective often enables us to see what others see from a new vantage point.  This can be useful for all concerned.  I think my Pagan based sensitivity to relationships and harmony trumping atomistic isolation has helped me to finally come to an understanding of why so many conservatives are utter hypocrites.

A person can support freedom, limited government, and the rule of law for at least two reasons.  First, from a respect for other people, a respect that is in harmony with traditional spiritual insights as to how we appropriately relate with one another. With Christians respect is a less demanding quality that can culminate in love and charity.  For Buddhists, it can culminate in compassion and kindness.  For many Pagans, including this one, respect is the basis of how we seek to relate with all life, not just human life,.  This concept also extends into compassion for all beings.  There is no paradox between respect for all beings and kindness, charity, compassion, or love for them.

But we can also support freedom, limited government, and the rule of law to prevent the arbitrary intervening of others’ will against my own.  I am lord of my own home, my own castle, and oppose others’ interference with my desires.  In my own realm, I am king.

This is the retail despot’s defense against wholesale despots, and because respect for others need not be involved, when the small time despot finally enjoys the power to rule over others, his or her concern about limitations on government evaporates like ice on a hot summer sidewalk.  When that power is then lost, once again concern for limited government, freedom, and the rule of law reappears, almost like magic.  

The hypocrisy grows from rank egoism.

Our Founders’ devotion to the values of the rule of law, limited government, and freedom came from a strong sense that no one should be subject to arbitrary power.  In the last letter he ever wrote, shortly before he died on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence,  Thomas Jefferson wrote: “the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”  

Too many of today’s ‘conservatives’ who speak as if they owned the American tradition repudiate Jefferson and our other Founders, and only care that they should not be subject to the will, or even considered judgment, of others.  They dress their conceit up in the language of liberty.  But they have the hearts of slavemasters without the tortured conscience of a Jefferson.

Two paradoxes then emerge.  First, these self-described defenders of freedom do not care about freedom for others at all.  When they have the power, they act like the despots they always were at heart.  

Second, while they continually and correctly tell us America’s most basic founding principles are in harmony with spiritual truth, they themselves live and act in complete repudiation of both.