justice.gov/opa/speech/att…
"Good afternoon, everyone.
It is wonderful to be in Nashville, and I am deeply honored to be with you at such an important gathering.
We live at a time when religion – long an essential pillar of our society – is being driven from the public square.
Your members courageously affirm that entertainment and moral education are not mutually exclusive.
You have boldly shown that media can serve higher ends:
As such, NRB’s members offer an alternative and essential platform for believers and non-believers alike.
It has infiltrated and overtaken nearly every aspect of life: sports, entertainment, apparel, technology – of course, religion too – even our eating habits.
It is omnipresent.
Why is that?
It seems to me that the passionate political divisions of today result from a conflict between two fundamentally different visions of the individual and his relationship to the state.
It subverts individual freedom in favor of elite conceptions about what best serves the collective.
This system is responsible for unprecedented human freedom and progress.
We providentially enjoy its blessings today.
According to St. Augustine, man lives simultaneously in two realms.
Each individual is a unique creation of God with a transcendent end and eternal life in the City of God.
As Augustine writes in his Confessions, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”
But this world is a fallen one.
Man is stubbornly imperfect and prone to prey upon his fellow man.
It saw the state as a necessary evil, with the limited function of keeping the peace here on earth.
What has resulted from these centuries of experience is a system that takes man and society as they actually exist.
To the contrary, it is the apparatus of coercive power.
Under our system of liberal democracy, the role of government is not to forcibly remake man and society.
This has been referred to as “totalitarian democracy.”
Its prophet was Rousseau, and its first fruit was the French Revolution.
Totalitarian democracy is based on the idea that man is naturally good, but has been corrupted by existing societal customs, conventions, and institutions.
This form of democracy is messianic in that it postulates a preordained, perfect scheme of things to which men will be inexorably led.
Although totalitarian democracy is democratic in form, it requires an all-knowing elite to guide the masses toward their determined end, and that elite relies on whipping up mass enthusiasm to preserve its power and achieve its goals.
Their sacred mission is to use the coercive power of the state to remake man and society according to an abstract ideal of perfection.
Whatever means used are justified because, by definition, they will quicken the pace of mankind’s progress toward perfection.
And some of these self-proclaimed “progressives” have become increasingly militant and totalitarian in their style.
Probably the greatest chronicler of American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville, foresaw that American democracy would be susceptible to this evolution.
The tyranny that results, Tocqueville wrote, “does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them and directs them; it rarely forces action, but it constantly opposes your acting; it does not destroy, it prevents birth; ...
As Tocqueville summed it up: “By this system the people shake off their state of dependence just long enough to select their master and then relapse into it again.”
The sad fact is that all three have eroded in recent decades.
Let me first address religion.
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.
It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.”
He believed that religion was democracy’s most powerful antidote to any tendency toward a tyrannical majority hijacking the system for despotic ends.
How does religion protect against majoritarian tyranny?
Men are far likelier to obey rules that come from God than to abide by the abstract outcome of an ad hoc utilitarian calculus.
According to Tocqueville, in America, religion has instilled a deep sense that there are immovable moral limits on what a majority can impose on the minority.
Thus, it is safe to give the people power to rule, but only if they believe there are moral limits on their power.
Messianic secular movements have a natural tendency to hubris.
Their goal is to achieve paradise in the here and now.
But religion usually has a built-in antidote to hubris in the form of sharp warnings against presumption.
In the case of Christianity,Christ repeatedly warned against self-righteousness:
“Judge not, that ye be not judged.”
“Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”
And so on.
The mission is not to make new men or transform the world through the coercive power of the state.
“Remember, Man, that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return.”
In recent years, we have seen the steady erosion of religion and its benevolent influence.
That is directly contrary to the Framers’ views.
Without it there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments.”
The next essential check on despotism I would like to discuss is decentralization of government power.
That is the level of government at which the individual was most empowered.
The Framers conceived that the vast majority of collective decision-making by the people about their affairs would be done at the state and local level.
It was primarily supposed to handle two things that had to be achieved at the national level: first, conducting foreign relations and providing for the national defense and, second, ...
The Framers included the Commerce Clause for this second purpose, but that provision has since ballooned far beyond its original understanding.
Virtually any federal measure can be justified no matter how much it invades the prerogatives of the states.
I believe that the destruction of federalism is another source of the extreme discontent in our contemporary political life.
You have a problem?
Let us fix it in Washington, DC.
One size fits all.
That is because they recognized that not every community is exactly the same.
The federal system allows for this diversity.
It also enables people who do not like a certain system to move to a different one.
If people do not like the rule in a state, they can vote with their feet and move.
The result is our current acrimonious politics.
That, too, erodes an important check on despotism.
In addition to religion and the decentralization of government power, the free press was an institution that Tocqueville believed would serve as a check on the despotic tendency of democracy.
On the contrary, he generally took a dimmer view.
Tocqueville’s view was that a free press did not so much perform a positive good, as prevent an evil.
The multiplicity of newspapers, even in one city, cultivated a wide variety of views and localized opinion.
The key to restoring the press in that vital role is to cultivate a greater diversity of voices in the media.
You are one of the last holdouts in the consolidation of organs and viewpoints of the press.
It is, therefore, essential that you continue your work and continue to supply the people with diverse, divergent perspectives on the news of the day.
So where does that leave us?
It might not seem like it, but I am actually an optimist, and I believe that identifying the problem is the first step in correcting it.
This means fostering a culture that is truly pluralistic.
And it especially means giving our respect to religion as a vital pillar of our society.
Religion is something we should celebrate, not disparage.
While the wizards in Washington might think they know best, the reality is that there is no unified “best” for every community and every person in our vast country.
And finally, this means encouraging diverse voices to speak out – whether on television, over the radio, or in print.
We need to support local journalism and local voices, and each of you needs to continue the great work you are doing.
I look forward to working together to restore the separate spheres that have long sustained our society.
Thank you all for the opportunity to talk with you today."
~ End ~
William Barr at the 2020 National Religious Broadcasters Convention:
justice.gov/opa/speech/att…