By Douglas Daugherty

“We enjoy freedom and the rule of law on which it depends, not because we deserve it, but because others before us put their lives on the line to defend it.” —Thomas Sowell

Thomas Jefferson said, “In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.”

Last week, a hard-fought election for governor of Virginia was fought. In the end, principle won a narrow victory over fashion (50.7% vs. 48.6%). Separating principle from the crowd noise for fashion is probably the most difficult thing we face in life. When our friends are enthused, the peer pressure can be irresistible. At the same time, hanging onto principles — or, more exactly, to be able to articulate them — is even more difficult.

Changes to important laws and life-altering mores should not be rushed. That’s the truly conservative mindset. Yet, many in our country think we’re at an impasse. Thirty-seven percent of people in the country are willing for their state to secede from the U.S. And it’s not just conservatives. Forty-seven percent of Democrats in California, Washington State, Oregon, Hawaii, and Alaska would favor secessions. In the South, including Tennessee, 66% of Republicans favor secession. (Bright Line Watch and YouGov poll.)

What’s going on?

It’s a civil war of ideas with limited biological casualties.

First, let’s define a principle. The Oxford Dictionary says, “A principle is a fundamental truth or proposition that serves as the foundation for a system of belief or behavior or for a chain of reasoning.” Whoa! That’s heavy, and in a postmodern world of fluidity, you would think it would sink. But this ponderous idea, instead, floats like a guiding buoy on the meandering Tennessee River.

What are some principles that float all the time? How about “liberty” or “love” or “God” or “family”? Now, of special interest to me is the principle of “the rule of law.”

The rule of law is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “the authority and influence of law in society, especially when viewed as a constraint on individual and institutional behavior; (hence) the principle whereby all members of a society (including those in government) are considered equally subject to publicly disclosed legal codes and processes.” The rule of law is how you own anything, without force of arms. It protects, hopefully, the innocent from homicide. The rule of law is what makes contracts work and creates corporations, wills, and trusts. Without it you can’t create a community of any size.

So, who wants to do away with this anchor principle? Anarchists of any stripe do. Aren’t we going through rough waters now with policing to enforce the “rule of law”? Aren’t attorneys general at both the state and local level under pressure to either enforce more or prosecute less by different political groups, including the Justice and Public Safety super PAC funded significantly by George Soros? Hasn’t immigration law stood on its head, being led by the whole axis of the “open borders” crowd? Hasn’t Facebook rebranded after commercializing everyone’s privacy? And opposition to mask mandates is mostly held by people who see them as an overreach of the rule of law.

“If principle is good for anything, it is worth living up to.” —Benjamin Franklin

I use the word “fashion” because these are not top-drawer issues or perspectives. They tend to be trendy. You do what your crowd does, or you find a crowd that “thinks” the way you do. Malcolm Gladwell in his book The Tipping Point gives his observations about change. According to Gladwell, there are three variables that determine whether and when the tipping point for a product, idea, or phenomenon will be achieved: The Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, and the Power of Context.

First, a few people start embracing an idea: “Dogs are cool and need to be taken everywhere,” for example. They’re a needed accessory for trendy young people. Fashions start with a few people, others follow the fashion leaders, and the whole thing grows. Suddenly you’ve got a Goldendoodle named Murphy or Zoe, and his/her 90-pound body shares your flat … and your bed … and your pocketbook … and your time … and your vacuuming … and on it goes.

This happens with clothing to an amazing degree. Suddenly, no one wears socks. Or all women who wear jeans and are between certain ages have huge, ragged cutouts all over their lower torso, which they paid extra for.

How about this one: “Don’t spank your children … ever!” Or “Let’s try this church because they’ve got the most ‘with it’ praise band.” Or “All interior walls this year need to be grey.” (Oh, that was last year.) Or “Let’s all pay $8.00 for a latte.” Those are all fashions. They will pass, then probably come back again in 20 years.

Here’s one that’s bound to offend. Is it global warming, climate change, or just the weather? Or whatever happened to the dystopian Population Bomb everyone was hyper-concerned about in the late ‘60s and '70s. The authors of the book predicted worldwide famine. Sorry. Along came inventive man. There was an unheralded “green revolution” at the same time, and agricultural production of food grew exponentially, feeding hundreds of millions. (Family size did drop in developed countries, and now they have to import labor. Pressure always comes with massive migration.)

“Change is inevitable, change for the better is a full-time job.” —Adlai E. Stevenson

If change is a constant, and certain principles are immutable, then how does this work out? Hopefully, peacefully and in an orderly, civil process. Think of the U.S. Constitution, a document that has ruled a nation of immigrants since June 21, 1788 — some 243 years or 10 generations ago. (Even the Native Americans are said to have migrated across the Siberian Peninsula.) This document is a wonder. It holds in its institutions and processes a superstructure for these united states but allows within it the process for change. More than 11,000 amendments have been proposed for it, but only 27 have been ratified. This is good.

Blacks Africans, once viewed as less than human, now have full civil rights. Women, once not viewed as capable of voting, now vote more often than men. Those were huge changes. One took a civil war wherein 600,000 died, three amendments to the Constitution (13th, 14th, and 15th), the trudge through Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights Movement. Today, 37.7% of black American families are middle class, making between $50,000 and $150,000 a year. Another 9.9% of black households make over $150,000.000 a year. (White Americans are 45.4% middle class by family income.) The other, women’s suffrage, has brought a whole new wave of leadership, service, and innovation to our nation.

On a curious side note, Thomas Jefferson asked an interesting question to John Madison in 1789. He wrote, in part: “The question whether one generation of men has a right to bind another, seems never to have been started either on this side of the water [or the other]. Yet it is a question of such consequences as not only to merit decision, but place also, among the fundamental principles of every government.”

This query of Jefferson’s lay within the nest of a concept that is rarely talked about, but it was at the forefront of the American Revolution, in which about 5,000 colonist/soon-to-be-free citizens died during the war years of 1775-1783. That concept, referred to as “the social contract,” directly influenced the founding fathers, especially through Jefferson, through John Locke and his book On the Social Contract (1762), and through the work of political philosophers Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The social contract is unwritten and is inherited at birth. It dictates that we will not break laws or certain moral codes, and, in exchange, we reap the benefits of our society, namely security, survival, education, and other necessities needed to live. Each person agrees, the later generations implicitly, “to surrender some (or all) of his originally expansive rights and freedoms (found in uncompromised nature and divine order) to a central authority on the condition that every other person does the same” (The Social Contract by Brian Duignam).

The idea in the 20th century was championed by political philosophers John Rawls (1921-2002) and Robert Nozick (1938-2002). To the point we’re pushing towards, Nozick argued that “any distribution of goods or benefits-even a highly unequal one-is just if it could come about from a just distribution through transaction that did not violate anyone’s natural rights to life, liberty and property. Only the limited state is justified.”

This concept was part of the legitimizing of the colonist separation from the British kingdom under George III, who had overreached his capacity to enforce his will and created great resistance to his rule. We tend to forget that the United States was formerly under the rule of a king, and that the colonists had little representation and only a small voice. Stepping out historically from this tyranny needed the justification laid out in the Declaration of Independence, but it also needed the glue that would hold people together after they stepped away from a king, then the common form of government of the people and nations of the earth.

The question of the day then becomes, in light of this side note: “Why should any individual keep to the rule of law that he/she never assented to and now fashionably dissents from?” In a sense, why should a child adhere to past generations’ notions they themselves fashionably don’t hold? Great question.

The case must be made in today’s divisiveness that we are better off changing through the processes and institutions provided by the Constitution than by throwing out the old rag because we like something else and are willing to submit to a new King George-type heavy-handed rule — in education, in inflationary policies, in the unlegislated new rights granted to this or that fashionable group, in the huge administrative state that strangles initiatives both locally and nationally, etc.

If you disagree with the idea of a social contract, your heart and head turn you or your group’s fashionable ambitions into dissenters, at the very least. At most, they turn you into revolutionaries in the new civil war of ideas and political power.

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” —John F. Kennedy

So, what’s going on? A civil war, fueled by those who embrace fluidity, fashion, and bigger government on one side, and those who believe in traditions, well-tested principles, and submit to the notion of a social contract embedded in the presuppositions of the Constitution on the other. Apparently, the battle will be at the local school board, at the national level, and everywhere in between.

Can this war be won? Can a ceasefire be called? In my mind, good ideas, like great art, will prevail and can create new opportunities for every citizen to flourish. Much of what now holds sway in American culture is toxic to you and your progenies’ hopes and dreams. Is that a call to a true revolution? No. It is a call to scholars, composers, screenwriters, novelists, poets, and artists to create the 21st-century content to keep what is precious and immutable and win the heart and mind of the average American citizen who dutifully engages the culture, shows up when necessary, and vows to vote in every election. One vote is not just a number (though that is essential). It is you being engaged and making your way to the polls.