God or Man?

That’s the eternal question posed by Whittaker Chambers in Witness, the 1952 memoir-cum-masterpiece about his conversion from communism.

It’s also the question that a dim-bulb Democrat named Tim Kaine flubbed last week during a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, when he compared our Founding Fathers to Iran’s mad mullahs and scoffed at the notion that our rights come from God rather than the government.

Or did he flub it? Here’s Kaine himself:

The notion that rights don’t come from laws and don’t come from the government but come from the Creator — that’s what the Iranian government believes. It’s a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Shia law and targets Sunnis, Bahá'ís, Jews, Christians, and other religious minorities. And they do it because they believe that they understand what natural rights are from their Creator. So the statement that our rights do not come from our laws or our governments is extremely troubling.

Extremely troubling. That’s right: Kaine, the former vice presidential nominee of Hillary Clinton and the former governor of the state that produced George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, believes that the foundational principle of the American Experiment is “extremely troubling.”

Kaine’s colleague on the Foreign Relations Committee, Texas Republican Ted Cruz, who also happens to be a national debate champion and constitutional scholar, did what all good Republicans do in situations like this: He pounced.

“I almost fell out of my chair,” said Cruz, “because that ‘radical and dangerous notion’ — in his words — is literally the founding principle upon which the United States of America was created.”

Cruz then quoted Jefferson from, yes, the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

It wasn’t just Jefferson, though — as if that wouldn’t have been enough. Here’s Alexander Hamilton, the father and co-author of The Federalist Papers and the founder of our nation’s first political party: “The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the Divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.”

Let’s see now: Tim Kaine, or Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton?

The backdrop for all this was a confirmation hearing for Riley Barnes, whom Donald Trump has nominated to serve as assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor. In his opening statement, Barnes said he agreed with his would-be boss, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who earlier this year, in his first speech to State Department staff, said, “All men are created equal because our rights come from God, our creator; not from our laws, not from our governments.”

Here, it’s easy to dismiss Kaine’s major malfunction, easy to set him aside as a cartoon character and an intellectual lightweight. But doing so lets him off easy. And, more importantly, it lets the Democrat Party off easy for its willful and consistent elevation of the state over the Creator of the universe. Let’s return to the brilliant Chambers, who spelled out this struggle in his “Letter to My Children” as the foreword to Witness:

The Communist Party is quite justified in calling itself the most revolutionary party in history. It has posed in practical form the most revolutionary question in history: God or Man? It is taking the logical next step which 300 years of rationalism hesitated to take, and said what millions of modern minds think, but do not dare or care to say: If man’s mind is the decisive force in the world, what need is there for God? Henceforth man’s mind is man’s fate.

This vision is the Communist revolution, which, like all great revolutions, occurs in man’s mind before it takes form in man’s acts.

So when folks try to tell us that there’s really no difference between our two primary political strains — conservatism and progressivism — remember that the Left exalts the state because conceding power to a Creator necessarily weakens the power of the state. Or, if you’re pressed for time, simply set them straight with this singular question: God or Man?