Can Team Trump save Western Civ?

“Rights are not something that are created by governments. Natural rights belong to all human beings on account of their nature as human beings, they’re unchanging, and they can’t be reserved to particular groups or identities of people.” So says Samuel Samson, a 27-year-old deputy assistant secretary in the US State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, or DRL. As used in this sense, the term “natural rights” derives from the early-modern age, when thinkers like Hobbes and Locke radically reprogrammed Western political philosophy. Where ancient and medieval thought had viewed the human subject as naturally social — naturally inclined to cooperate for the good — the moderns framed him as naturally turbulent and self-seeking, and forced into a social contract in order t