Ben Carson, who has ranked as high as third place in preliminary 2016 GOP presidential polling, is taking heat for comments he made Thursday at the Republican National Committee winter meeting:
"A bunch of rag tag militiamen defeated the most powerful and professional military force on the planet. Why? Because they believed in what they were doing. They were willing to die for what they believed in," Carson told a luncheon audience of national committee members. "Fast forward to today. What do we have? You've got ISIS. They've got the wrong philosophy, but they're willing to die for it while we are busily giving away every belief and every value for the sake of political correctness. We have to change that."
Carson then preemptively criticized the press, whom he said would seize on the comments.
"Now I recognize that there's press here and some of the press will say, 'Carson said that ISIS is the same as the United States,'" he said. "They are just so ridiculous, so ridiculous."
Carson is right: He isn't saying that ISIS is the same as the United States, he is saying that the fundamentalists' ethos of being willing to die for their ideas is something Americans should aspire to. Which is equally daffy, yet distressingly common in political discourse.
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The Founding rebels (pictured) were fighting an imperial government that oppressed them from afar, denying them basic human rights. Modern-day Americans may suffer from many ills, but not precisely those. (And would Carson really like to see the small minority of folks who do consider their own government untenably oppressive start routinely dying for these beliefs? I doubt it.)
Thomas Jefferson did not write "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of self-sacrifice." He did not sketch out a vision of the idealized free man as someone who continued the life-and-death struggle for the sheer bloody struggleness of it. No, the point of being free—even at a time in history where wars and skirmishes were near constant—was being free, to choose your own path as you see fit.
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Ben Carson has many questionable policy beliefs that should be of concern to the party he aims to represent, and a history of bizarre hyperbole. But what I worry most of all in this case is that his we-need-to-die-for-our-beliefs sentiment is actually pretty mainstream in the Republican Party, helping lead it down more authoritarian paths. As RNC Chairman Reince Priebus told NBC,
"I think what he was saying basically was that you have to believe in what you stand for, and that we have to believe in the ideals of America, I didn't think anything odd of it," he said. "I think he was making a point, and I think his point was to stand up for the things that you believe in."
