Natural Right(s) Are the Foundation

There is an ongoing gentlemanly dispute over Governance:  should it be based on 'historicism' or 'natural right', where 'historicism' is comfortable with eliminating God and 'natural right' sees God as essential.

Michael Anton is a member of the Natural Right group; Paul Gottfried (and by the way, Z-Man) is a proponent of the Historicism bunch.

Your assignment will be to read Anton's Looooooooonnnnnnnng Essay on the topic.

Here's a little piece:

...To repeat a point from last time, no actual tradition self-understands as mere tradition. It is true that one feature of the pre-philosophic world is the identification of the good with the ancestral. But there is always a connection to the divine, some assertion that “our tradition” is “the truth” or at the very least “true-for-us.” (We may leave aside for present purposes the problematic or self-contradictory character of the latter assertion.) It is thus hard to think of a tradition that does not have recourse to God, however understood, in some way. For myself, I can’t think of one. 

It seems to me that what the neo-traditionalists want is tradition without any underlying metaphysic—tradition without God. Not that they are all hostile to God (though some of them clearly are). But if they believed they could base their preferred solution to the problem of late modernity on God, they would or could just say so. 

Tradition without a metaphysic, without God, without genuine belief, is not viable as the basis for social and political order. It is especially not viable in an age of reason (or rationalism) and science, which is what our age purports to be. The revelations of Judaism and Islam offer complete packages, but ones that are viable for but a few in the West. Christianity, to be viable, requires a rational supplement to govern politics. The two available today—historicism and natural right(s)—turn out on reflection to be one because the former is rationally implausible, incompatible with Christianity, and pernicious in its practical effects. ...

He goes on to dismiss Judaism, Muslimism, and paganism as viable political foundations.

...That leaves Christianity, which—as noted in the earlier essay—makes religion primarily a matter of faith, severs the connection between the divine and the law, and separates civil from religious authority. Christianity does offer a metaphysic, but not a political solution or civic code. In medieval thought, natural law supplies the basis for that code. In the modern world, natural law is first reinterpreted as natural rights (plural) and later discarded in favor of historicism. ...

Note well:  while he dismisses Christianity as a viable political foundation, he does argue that Natural Law is the viable solution--so long as it is not the 'historicism' variant.  In dismissing Christianity (et al) he at least partially joins Deneen.

The resolution?

...I would argue that in the final analysis, Christianity is incompatible with historicism. Historicism does hold that Christianity was an essential step in the historical process, but stops well short of asserting (or even accepting the possibility) that Christianity is simply true—i.e., it replaces the Christian metaphysic with a rationalistic one of its own. Natural right(s), by contrast, is entirely consistent with Christian theology and its metaphysic. 

This is but one reason why I prefer natural right(s) to historicism. The others are that I believe natural right(s) theory is much more likely to be true, and I am certain that historicism is the philosophical root of the present neoliberal oligarchy (even if most of its leading lights don’t realize that). This is before we even come to the fact, however unfortunate, that most of the West is now post-Christian and will not accept any but a rationalistic account of the basis of morality, the good, and political order. ...

Read the whole thing, but set aside a good chunk of quiet-time to do it.