Conservative Attorneys Protect Liberty; Liberals Serve Power

When I point out that fellow constitutional defense attorney John Adams was, like me, a conservative, indeed he was an originator of the American conservative movement, it causes confusion in the minds of some, who think conservatism and rights-protection are dipolar concepts; naïve people think individual rights are protected by liberals and power is advanced by conservatives.  Nothing could be further from the truth, the concepts properly understood.

It is actually the “liberal,” under the modern usage of the misunderstood term, who sides with police power and away from individual liberty, because, as we see from their standard bearer Barack Obama, they are more into collectivization of decision-making than into individual liberty.  What does that have to do with the question?

As Obama let slip recently, to the horror of some liberals who do not like too, too much truth coming out, the liberal view is that individuals are not responsible for what appears to be their achievements; it is the collective that is to be given credit for individual's only apparent successes; indeed, Obama was almost insulting in his declamations against those who would have the temerity to propose that they were responsible for their own successes.  And that attitude translates to the discussion of liberty, and to the nature of defense of those accused of crimes by the collective police power of the state.

You see, if the collective power of the state decides you are a disruption to the peace or security or safety of the community, liberals, who are agents of that collective idea, are far less likely to aggressively attack that collective to save the individual, because individual liberty to liberals is not the ascendant value.

But for conservatives [true conservatives, not police power extremists, who can be of the left or of the right], individual liberty is the intended default position in this Republic.  Therefore, government action which invades precincts of individual liberty is anathema to those devoted to the founding premise that liberty must always trump power, individualism must always trump collectivism.

Indeed, one of the classic examples that modern liberalism is anti-individual liberty can be found in the line-up of justices in the odious Korematsu opinion, which held that the collective interests of the state, even when based on fraudulent paranoia,  was more important than individual liberty.  The Justice Douglases of the world unrepentantly sided with the collective values and against liberty and authorized the incarceration of American citizens, and the government theft of their property, based solely on race, against the conservatives who were aghast at the notion, while we were fighting a war where people were singled out and savaged by another government solely on account of race.  That is, we fought against race-based butchery in Germany and practiced its second cousin right here ourselves, because liberals were in power here.

And you see what I am talking about in this by the nature of my own criminal law practice.  In my true defense of those accused of crimes, I advance a no-holds-barred attack on government when it invades people’s individual liberty, while some of my “liberal” colleagues approach their supposed defense of those accused of crimes by trying to get the best deal or the most comfortable punishment or rehabilitation in lieu of punishment.  That is, I command the Hun to back down; they consort with the Hun to not be so harsh, but with sympathy to the Hun’s “need” to preserve order.

Conservatives work to protect liberty; liberals work to make one’s lack of liberty as comfortable as possible, within the framework of the collective powers’ interests.  Conservatives rebuff power and elevate liberty; liberals genuflect to power and sneer at liberty.  Do you want a rebuffer or a genuflecter?  You are free to choose: that is an attribute of Liberty, but not of Power.  http://www.kennedyforlaw.com