Mark Blitz on Natural Rights, Liberal Democracy, and the American Regime

Conversations with Bill Kristol

Government, News, Politics, Society & Culture

4.7 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 29 August 2016

⏱️ 63 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In his second conversation with Bill Kristol, Claremont McKenna professor of political philosophy Mark Blitz discusses American liberal democracy. Blitz explains the meaning of individual natural rights and why they form the basis of American government. Blitz and Kristol then consider critiques of American liberal democracy—most prominently, that the American regime promotes inequality or leads to a lowering of standards. Blitz addresses these criticisms and explains why the American regime remains solid and defensible.

Transcript

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0:00.0	And the Hi, I'm Bill Crystal.
0:15.0	I'm Bill Crystal. Welcome back to Conversations.
0:18.0	I'm very pleased to be joined today by my old friend and teacher, Mark Blitz,
0:22.0	professor of political philosophy at Claremont McKenna College,
0:25.6	author of important books on Plato and Heidegger, and also on liberal democracy,
0:29.7	which I thought we would talk about today.
0:32.1	Welcome, Mark.
0:33.0	Thank you.
0:34.0	So, freedom, I thought we could talk about freedom.
0:37.0	America is about freedom, I think, is that true?
0:39.0	It's an alley?
0:40.0	People say that all the time, and what does it mean?
0:42.0	And how do that happen?
0:44.0	Yeah, it is about freedom and the heart of it is individual natural rights and you can
0:50.4	basically substitute the word freedom for rights if you'd like.
0:55.0	Look at the ground of the country and the Declaration of Independence,
0:59.0	which speaks, of course, of natural rights, speaks of liberty. The Constitution is meant to be a
1:05.8	structure of government that secures individual rights for all of the citizens.
1:13.3	So really the ground of the US is freedom
1:16.9	because it means to secure as a country,
1:19.7	we mean to secure as a country individual natural rights.
1:23.5	And it's also in a certain sense
	...

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