OPINION:
If you want to understand why Democrats are so angry and why they have devolved into little more than a bunch of petulant children who can’t even bring themselves to applaud the arrests of violent drug cartels or vote for a bill that would keep men out of women’s locker rooms, look no further than President Trump’s governing philosophy of “common sense.”
For decades, Democrats have disparaged the very idea of “self-evident truths,” and they have called those of us who believe in such things closed-minded and intolerant. Over and over again, we have heard their mantra: “It doesn’t matter what you believe as long as it works for you.” “There is no such thing as Truth with a capital T.” “All paths lead to the same summit.” Blah, blah, blah. This worship of feelings over facts has become the foundational premise of the political left. For them, there is no such thing as any common standard. If the presidential address Tuesday proved anything, it proved that Democrats are now officially the party of relativism, not reality. In other words, they have no common sense.
Relativism is a philosophical argument that there is no objective truth that governs us or our culture; instead, everyone constructs their own subjective truth to suit their relative needs and circumstances. This is the idea that what is true for you may not be true for me and vice versa. There is no such thing as a consistent standard. Everything is relative to the person and the culture. The idea of an innate understanding of right and wrong being “endowed to us by our Creator” is a ruse of Colonial times, male toxicity and White privilege. What is just and unjust is constructed by society. It is a product of the collective. The judge is now the government and the gang, not God.
Relativism says that what is right for one person is right for him, but if someone else believes the exact opposite, that is “right” also. It ignores the law of noncontradiction. It is summed up in the oh-so-common postmodern retort: “Whatever.” In fact, if I may coin a phrase, Democrats are now champions of nothing more than adolescent “whateverism.” Want to steal? Whatever. Want to lie? Whatever. Want to cheat? Whatever. Want to be a woman even though you’re a man? Whatever. Want to kill babies just before they’re born? Whatever. You get the point.
Absolute truth, on the other hand, isn’t flexible or fluid. It doesn’t bend to the whims of politics or power. It isn’t subject to change just because of someone’s feelings. In the words of Os Guinness, “Truth is true even if no one believes it, and falsehood is false even if everyone believes it. Truth is true, and that’s just the end of it.” This worldview argues there is always a measuring rod outside of those things being measured and that this yardstick, ruler or scale is self-evident and not self-referential. It is endowed by God and not created by the consensus.
All of us (liberals included) assume the existence of such absolutes. In fact, we couldn’t live life in any normal way without them. It’s an absolute that 2 + 2 = 4. Try building airplanes and bridges if it’s not. The law of gravity is another absolute. What goes up will come down. Moral absolutes are just as concrete and immutable. We all know rape is wrong and that slavery should be reviled. How we “feel” about such things is irrelevant.
The denial of absolute truth is also a denial of logic. To say there are no absolutes, you must claim that it is absolutely true that there are no absolutes; this is a self-refuting claim if there ever was one. Democrats prove with their every pout and protest that they cannot live by their own rules. Disagree with them, and suddenly, their big liberal group hug of “live and let live” turns into angry shouts: “I don’t care what you believe! Your intolerance cannot be tolerated!”
The bottom line is that the Democratic Party is one that now rejects any notion of common sense. They have become the party of radical relativism, and, as such, they are quickly becoming radically irrelevant.
Everyone intuitively knows that you can’t pretend to be a feminist if you deny the feminine, and you can’t be pro-science if you deny biology, physics and DNA. We also know that you can’t pretend to be pro-America if you deny the common sense of defending its borders, protecting its children and honoring its Constitution. Rejecting the “common sense” of Mr. Trump will be the death of the Democratic Party. May it never rise again.
• Everett Piper (dreverettpiper.com, @dreverettpiper), a columnist for The Washington Times, is a former university president and radio host. He is the author of “Not a Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth” (Regnery).
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