"It's a Privilege not a Right"

(On Monday’s I repost material that I think is still relevant. This was originally last June)

With the many fronts MAGA Republicans are advancing their agenda it can be confusing to perceive any underlying philosophies or ideologies. After all what could the removal of millions off of Medicaid or the decision to reverse the legal status of hundreds of thousands of immigrants or revoke student visas all have in common? While it might be tempting to think that Republicans are being cruel for cruelty’s sake, there is a moral underpinning that runs through all of these. If you don’t know this you won’t know why Republicans are justifying themselves with non-existent “slackers” with Medicaid, or saying visas are a “privilege”, or why a Senator when pressed admitted “everyone dies”. Much of this comes down to how conservatives have been trained to view rights and morality.

Nobody Really Has Any Rights

Many Christian Nationalists and Christians made a stink after Heidi Przbyla made a very important distinction during a MSNBC panel in which she stated, “What unites all Christian Nationalists is that they believe that our rights as Americans, as all human beings, don’t come from any earthly authority. They don’t come from Congress, they don’t come from the Supreme Court, they come from God,” she added, “The problem with that is that they are determining- man, men and it is men- are determining what God is telling them.” While Prezbyla was forced to somewhat apologize for her statement I believe she was spot on (evidence for her accuracy was the amount of “Christian” outlets that utterly lost it and wrote long essays about how rights “come from God”).

The problem with the notion that rights “come from God” is not that God is the ultimate originator of rights, or that because we are endowed with the image of our creator we have worth, rather it is what is implied with the ideology that rights “come from God”. What is often really indicated in Christian and conservative ideology is that the “rights” given by God are given only to those who “use them rightly”. It is a common theme in Christian and conservative circles that, “You aren’t free to do what you want, you’re free to do what you ought.” Thus, God gives rights to those who are submitted to Him. What this means is practically no one has any “rights” they have privileges that their obedience and morality afford them.

This explains how conservatives seem “hypocritical” on so many issues. “Free Speech” is speech that aligns a certain way morally and politically no matter what is said, and “immoral” speech is to be censored regardless of how it is presented. A woman has no bodily autonomy if she decides to do something considered “immoral” but forcing someone to wear a mask or get vaccinated violates a moral rightness to make an “informed choice”. We can regulate and ban recreational drugs as “dangerous to society” because they’ve been deemed immoral, but God help anyone who dares suggest someone’s moral right to buy as many guns as possible (and whatever type of gun they want) be impinged in any way.

This assumption of the necessity of “moral rightness” is also accompanied with an assumption that economic success is an indicator of such “moral rightness”. This often gets expressed by conservatives as persons or people as being “deserving”. As I’ve written about before there is a fundamental presumption that people with means and privilege have such because of their presumed “submission” to God/the system. There is a fundamental ideological distinction with what “fair” means. For conservatives “fair” means those with ability and means get to enjoy their superiority that presumably came through their greater moral character. To remove that privilege (or even to note it) is to impugn the moral nature of that supremacy. So, taxation becomes “wealth redistribution”, offering anyone a governmental benefit that negates a benefit someone has presumably through “hard work” is “socialism”.

What this does is it effectively create a class of privileged persons both financially and socially. Those with “rights” have them because of their moral superiority and their alignment with preferred social norms. Those who lack have it because of their lack of character and opposition to what it means to be “American”. I’m consistently haunted by these quotes by famous 19^th century pastors Henry Ward Beecher (brother to Harriet Beecher Stowe), and Russell Conwell. Beecher said, “no man in this land suffers from poverty unless it be more than his fault—unless it be his sin.” From Russell Conwell, ‘the number of poor who are to be sympathized with is very small.’ Like Beecher, he justified this seemingly heartless view on the ground that “there is not a poor person in the United States who was not made poor by his own shortcomings, or by the shortcomings of some one else.” He said elseware, “To sympathize with a man whom God has punished for his sins, thus to help him when God would still continue a just punishment, is to do wrong, no doubt about it.” The underlying presumption of Beecher and Conwell is that the person “submitted to God” simply will not be poor.

One can simply put the “system” of capitalism in the place of “God” for all intents and purposes for many conservatives. This is because conservatives are almost pathologically indoctrinated to see the “system” as almost divinely infallible and failures as individual faults. This mostly is because conservatives themselves benefit most from the system they seek to “conserve”. Therefore, poverty is seen as a primarily moral problem that requires repentance, submission, hard work, etc. The person who can afford, who has means, is morally “robbed” of their individual excellence and the obvious reward for their morality.

Take healthcare for example, the person who has a good job and insurance has that because they are being both moral and productive (also why healthcare is tied to employment), the person without healthcare is obviously not producing with the level of excellence the person who has it is. To go to a single payer governmental healthcare system would be immoral because that would “rob” the one with insurance and give their advantage to the one without. When progressives claim X thing is a “right” like healthcare, conservatives will immediately say that very thing is not a “right” it’s a privilege.

The problem is that essentially in their view everything is a “privilege” not a “right”.

“It’s a Privilege not a Right”

Tammy Bruce the spokesperson for the US Department of State recently reiterated Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s repeated assertion that student visas are “a privilege not a right”. On one hand this seems to have some legitimacy to it because we all admit that rights are eventually limited (except for far-right speech and guns apparently). Yet here is the problem, what if you functionally don’t believe in “rights”? What if, in essence, everything is a “privilege”? If you have no real inherent rights the criteria for your “privilege” for whatever can change (especially if we can somehow “morally” justify it).

This is seen now in the MAGA justifications for almost everything that is being done with immigration. It makes sense that the through line of propaganda has been that only citizens get due process (false), and that visas can be revoked and someone summarily deported for seemingly no reason. It’s why now even people who are going to court and doing what they are supposed to do legally are being abducted and processed for deportation. Those in Trump’s administration have simply decided that the “privilege” of living in America now requires more. Many, if not most are not the hardened criminals that Trump promised he would remove but people that are being essentially “made” “criminals” by changing their status or not allowing them to follow the law (particularly in the cases of asylum). The constant propaganda coming from MAGA is that somehow by simply existing these foreign persons are taking advantage of the “privilege” of being in America (including the constant reiteration that illegals are receiving aid that by Federal law they do not get despite the fact that many of these same actually pay taxes).

The moral ground keeps shifting as well. It was that dangerous drug gangs needed to be deported (to a foreign prison without due process). Then it was that “criminals” were going to be removed. Then what constituted a “criminal” was someone in the country illegally (a civil offense). Then the “fault” wasn’t whether someone has legal status but how they got it. Then the grounds for withdrawing or reversing protected, paroled or legal statuses was somehow because Joe Biden just let too many people in, and they weren’t “vetted properly” (regardless of whether that person had done anything wrong at all). The “moral excuse” has nothing to do with reality it is merely a pretext to remove people. What is revealed is WHY these persons (including Afghani refugees that are Christian and who have materially helped America) are now “illegal”. When you press the issue as to why it was wrong for Biden to offer “amnesty” to persons who on the whole are not criminals and are not a threat to anybody you get……. they’re….. not….. white….. And if you don’t think that’s a factor consider that the ONLY “refugees” the Trump administration has literally paid to emigrate with private planes and red carpets is white South Africans.

The Go-To Justification that Hides the Real Moral Objection

Once you realize that foundationally conservatives do not believe in inherent rights, and that “rights” should only go to the “deserving” it makes their propaganda make sense. Not just what is being said about immigrants but the justifications for cutting Medicaid and Medicare. The repeated line is now that they are simply removing from the rolls the “30-year-old sitting on his mom’s couch”. Much could be said about the social transition from the go-to “scapegoat” no longer being a black “welfare queen” to now presumably a white able-bodied man but the use of the “scapegoat” is still the same, to “morally” justify what they don’t actually want to justify.

The reality is they don’t morally believe the Government should be subsidizing healthcare at all, or SNAP, or OSHA, or NPR, or PBS… They literally wrote an entire document called Project 2025 that outlined all of the things they fundamentally don’t believe the government should be doing (including Public Education). However, the argument they are employing across multiple fronts is not that the Government should not be morally doing said thing, but rather that those receiving said thing are a part of “waste and abuse”. Either they label the government doing that thing as “wasteful” or imply that those receiving those benefits somehow are wasting services that they don’t deserve.

It's important to note that they aren’t explicitly saying (except in Project 2025) that there is a particular moral objection to what they seek to dismantle. Rather they are giving themselves a moral pretext for saying why they are doing what they are doing while they are dismantling.

For example, if I were to want to dismantle Public Education, I’m not going to say I want to dismantle public education because I believe that only people with privilege and means (white) should be educated (also that I believe what I believe about everything should be indoctrinated in the young). I’m going to defund, underfund, and over stress the system with vouchers under the supposedly “moral” guise of “parental choice” and when it collapses in 10 years, I’ll be able to blame anyone else because “I” just wanted to “give parents a choice”. This is because I don’t believe “every child has a right to a good education”. I believe those with means should have the “right” to preferred (religious, indoctrinated) education, and those without (unless they are exceptional and reinforce the illusion of meritocracy) should just get to work. (The fact that the recent “Beautiful bill” renegotiated the “dependent” age from 18 to 7 for SNAP recipients exemplifies this)

“But What if People are Hurt?”

The problem conservatives currently face is that the “system” of American governance simply isn’t what they have been told is ideologically morally correct. We’ve had some form of “welfare” for over 100 years if you include the New Deal. We’ve had government assisted healthcare for 60 years. We’ve had “Obamacare” for 25 years. Public Schooling has existed in some form or another for over 100 years (The Texas Constitution mandated Public Schools in 1869). The world that Conservatives and by extension Evangelicals believe is “natural” and “moral” simply doesn’t exist and hasn’t for a long time. Those who want to say “the church should be doing” are presuming a moral imperative that has not existed for decades if not over a century. These beliefs that these moral imperatives and some form of “common sense” dictates their view of government are the products their think tanks and universities and in a large part only exist in theories. This includes a presumption that the best thing to do for the “needy” is not to help them.

Jessica Calarco has mapped the trajectory of Libertarian economic theory, funded by wealthy businesses since the 1930s, that essentially argued for every position conservative Republicans have ever espoused. What is most important is the work of Austrian economists including Friedrich von Hayek who was against social nets as they supposedly impede the “free market”. Calarco notes what became known as “neoliberalism”, “which is basically the idea that societies are better off without social safety nets because, in the absence of support and protection, people will make better choices to keep themselves safe.” Anti-union, low if not non-existent taxes, defunding all social safety nets, all these things have been presented as giving people more “freedom” and thus have some supposedly inherent moral worth.

But what happens when the theory of “social order” meets up with the reality of a world that doesn’t look like your ideology? Assume your political Nirvana is attainable but the “pain” will be worth it. People might get sick, die, lose their jobs, their homes, but because we are doing what we believe is “right” under the guise of giving people “freedom” from “government” their fate is ultimately their fault.

It's this mentality that Republican lawmakers simply cannot help but to display in the defense of Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill”. You have Senator John Thune saying, "The best health care is a job." Along with him you of course had Senator Joni Ernst with her now infamous dismissal of people dying with, "well we all are going to die". This is coupled with the main defense of Republican Congressmen that not only will the bill not kick people off of Medicaid (lie) but the only people being removed are "able bodied".

It is absolutely essential to understand that these people don’t accept that their actions will directly result in the death of people. They are merely maintaining a system that they have concocted in their imaginations is ultimately fair. This explains the resistance of “Red States” to Medicare expansion which was essentially “free money” from the government. Even as rural hospitals closed, and people literally died, that was simply a natural expression of the system that they had ultimate faith in was fair. If the overall “system”/God was going to allow those people to die death is inevitable, there was nothing anyone could do to stop it. Even more problematic is they believe intervening in the “system” is actually WORSE.

There is a realization that needs to be made that conservatives and many Evangelicals truly believe, in their vaulted halls of ideological black money think tanks, that helping people actually causes MORE suffering than it alleviates. They will argue, over and over again, that ANY form of social welfare actually HURTS society as a whole. None of this is practical. None of this is empirical. Absolutely none of this is backed up by any sociological study (because to them all of the universities who actually study things are “communist). But you need to know that they take this as presuppositionally TRUE. (That most of these same people have never had a real job but have gone from college to congressional intern, to think tank, to political appointment, to backed Congressional run, and never have had to wonder about their income or healthcare much less have lived most of their lives on governmental healthcare and government subsidized housing including a daily governmental allowed food subsidy never occurs to them. See Speaker of the House Mike Johnson)

And the reality is that they are willing to burn America to the ground to prove their ideology right.

A Response to Conservative and Evangelical Presumptions about Rights

There are two issues, political and theological, that need to be addressed in our current moment. While they are both interrelated, I think it important to address each separately.

When it comes to the political issue, I think it is important to understand that we as a nation are at an absolute crossroads. The idea that “rights” are “given” by God in the way that only the submissive have them is utterly antithetical to the Declaration of Independence. This is about what it means to be American. After Heidi Prezbyla’s “outrage” I responded to multiple “pastors” who loudly proclaimed that God and Thomas Jefferson declared where “rights” come from with, “What ‘rights’ did ‘God’ give in the Declaration? It’s clearly stated that the ‘God given rights’ are to reasoned self-governance.” Not one person responded to that.

It is essential to understand that rights cannot be dictated by a sovereign and be reasonably self-determined at the same time. They are ABSOLUTELY ANTITHETICAL ideas. This means that whether we are around the dinner table, in social media, in the State Legislature, or in the halls of National Power we are dealing with a sizable amount of our fellow neighbors and family that FUNDAMENTALLY DISAGREE ABOUT WHAT ESSENTIAL RIGHTS ARE. We cannot appeal to supposedly “shared values” because they, quite frankly, don’t share those values. We cannot appeal to “free speech” because they only believe certain moral perspectives have that “right”. We cannot appeal to the “freedom of religion” because only the “right” religion should be publicly promoted (regardless of historical tragedy).

It's very important to understand that THEY DO NOT SEE AN IDEOLOGICAL FLAW. In part because they have never really been fundamentally challenged. As long as they THINK liberal democracy affirms them (they assume they are in fact the overwhelming majority) they assume they are comfortable in their presumption. Once that is challenged, they are more than willing to abandon “classical liberalism” for what they perceive as “truth”.

This is the struggle we are in as a nation, either we will accept some form of democratic co-existence where we accept various expressions of self-governance (including sex and gender) and negotiate their constraints, or we slide into a theocratic and ideologic autocracy that only pays lip service to democracy.

From a theological standpoint there are two arguments to be made against this "rights go to the deserving" ideology. The first is about the nature of God himself. God does not force anyone to obey him. God gives everyone the gift of free will. Not only this but he gives grace to both the "righteous and unrighteous". Jesus even says that God loving those who are his "enemies" is something singular to his character as Father (Mat. 5:44-46). Respecting other people, who may have differing even contradictory beliefs and lifestyles is literally what God does. A mutual on Substack Summer Rottinger pointed out to me last week that, "...if Jesus didn’t go around overlooking people’s material needs in favor of the status of their souls, why should the Church?" Jesus reflected God by healing and feeding thousands simply because they were hungry and sick, never once asking what they had done to "deserve it".

Secondly, theologically, there is an utterly poor view of ourselves when we think we "deserve" as opposed to those who supposedly don't "deserve". There is a refusal to see everything we have, be it status, wealth, health, social standing, political power, et al, is ultimately a "good gift" from God. The refrain God gives to people of means over and over again is "remember you were saved" "remember you were once a slave" "remember you were once a foreigner". The attitude that says "only the deserving" is subtly also putting oneself in the "deserving" category. Every. Time.

The impetus for generosity in the Bible is never, from God the Father to Jesus' example, whether the people receiving it "deserve" it but the ability of the giver to provide. We honestly need to ask ourselves, especially as Christians, where our default when it comes to the way we fundamentally think of ourselves and others is we assume a privilege we do not give to others. We need to ask we assume we are "deserving" of God's good gifts, and what it says to the world when we assume others don't deserve them. Ultimately we need to ask why we've put ourselves in the position of God determining who is "deserving" or not.

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