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CHAUTAUQUA--A law professor has articulated a principle infrequently heard from higher-education faculty.
Why infrequently? Because many colleges and universities hire few non-liberals.
The law professor is George Washington University's Jonathan Turley, a frequent contributor to broadcast-television and cable-television news programs.
Speaking to Advocates for Balance at Chautauqua, or ABC, on July 13, Turley said rights came not from government but from God.
That's framed differently than, yet on the same side of the philosophical spectrum as, what you, faithful reader of this column, have seen here: In the United States, government has only those limited and enumerated powers that We the People surrendered to government in the first place.
In this country, this understanding is the default setting. It's analogous to default settings on your computer or your cellular telephone.
And this understanding is one understanding of:
● The Ninth Amendment to the United States Constitution: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people," and
● The Tenth: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
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Is that the default setting in every country? No, it's not. In America's mother country, the default setting is that all power lies with the Crown, with the people having those powers that the Crown, by its grace, has granted to the people, beginning with the Magna Carta in 1215.
Now, it's one thing for that to be the case in a country such as the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, steeped as it is in Western history.
It's another thing for government in, well, some other countries--let your imagination run on that one--where respect for individual liberty is, shall we say, less than in the West.
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Yet make no mistake. Not everyone in the West, including the United States, shares that perspective.
Turley recalled that U.S. Sen. Tim Keane, D.-Va., had said a Senate-committee witness asserting rights come from God was an Iranian-mullah-like extremist.
But if that were true, then all Declaration of Independence signers would have been such extremists. After all, those putting their pen to that document on the first Independence Day referred to being "endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights."
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That Western conservatives and Western liberals vary in their skepticism of government's accruing power to itself is a function of multiple factors.
One of them is that they see human nature differently.
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Western conservatives--understanding correctly that human nature is a mixture of good and evil--tend to be more skeptical than Western liberals of surrendering power to government officials.
As Turley rightly told the ABC audience, human beings have in them the ability to be monsters.
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By contrast, Western liberals tend to see human nature as basically good, so they tend to be less skeptical than Western conservatives of surrendering power to government officials.
Hence, beginning with the administration of President Woodrow Wilson, liberals have been happier than conservatives to surrender, to government, power of Us the People and to establish the administrative state, meaning the bureaucracy.
What liberals do with such power once they've amassed it to themselves becomes one of the problems with liberalism.
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Furthermore, relabeling liberalism as progressivism creates the impression that those opposing liberalism oppose progress.
Which is, of course, false: They just oppose progress as liberals define it.
A good current example of such "progress" is the rise among liberals of what they call democratic socialism.
Putting the word democratic in front of the word socialism can, to the ears of some, make socialism sound palatable.
Which it is not.
Liberals misuse the words progressivism and democratic in these respects, perhaps knowing that--to borrow a phrase--"a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down."
Correction: Their medicine.
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Indeed, socialism can turn into international socialism, which took power in Moscow in 1917 via a coup, or national socialism, which took power in Berlin in 1933 via an election.
Yes, an election.
The two, rather than being opposites--as liberals at least in effect imply when they mislabel conservatives as national socialists--are competitors on the same side of the philosophical spectrum.
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We'll pick up with this next week with ABC's July 20 speaker, retired Lt. Col. Allen West, whom ABC's website identifies as a Christian constitutional conservative, combat veteran, and former member of the U.S. Congress.
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At https://jonathanturley.org/2026/07/18/a-gathering-at-the-ironic-chautauqua-new-york you may read Turley's reflections on his visit to Chautauqua.
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On its website, https://www.abcatchq.com, ABC posts videos of most of its speakers.
ABC was formed in 2018. Its mission is "to achieve a balance of speakers in a mutually civil and respectful environment consistent with the historic mission of Chautauqua" Institution. ABC is its own Section 501(c)(3) organization, legally separate from the institution.
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Dr. Randy Elf's Aug. 20, 2020, ABC presentation, on "How Political Speech Law Benefits Politicians and the Rich," is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3ebymA7xOo.
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