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I should hope there's a lot more than just two! Humanity is very adaptable!
Individuals are absolutely real. Group dynamics are also real. It's not an either-or proposition - humans are social individuals. As I originally said, trying to regulate groups but not individuals is ridiculous because the group is the individuals.
I don't know what you mean by "disproven" here, but this also just goes to show how trying to distinguish between "groups" or "organizations" and "individuals" is a lot harder than you'd think. Founder-effects and path-dependency are very real forces that impact individuals and their development and outlook! So is heritability, which gives rise to the subtle, yet substantial differences between populations that we observe all over the world! So is the Overton Window! Group dynamics affect everybody, even if they're not formally affiliated in an "organization," and likeminded people are going to find ways to cooperate and work together no matter how you try to prevent them.
What? Which and whose traditionalism? I'm confused what this has to do with restricting organizational behavior but not individuals.
Then they shouldn't have used the word "inalienable," which means "can't be taken or given away."
Who's abandoning rights? I'm not. I very much like the rights I have as an American, and am frequently rather obnoxiously patriotic about it with my friends. I just don't think that those "rights" are anything other than fragile current social consensuses that need to be handled with care - like beautiful Faberge eggs - in order to keep them around and pass them along, more-or-less-intact, to future generations.
Everyone's.
But they can't be given or taken away, only violated. Locke is very explicit about this. The man who is trampled by the tyrant still has his right. Because the right itself is a metaphysical construct of logic.
Fascism is so radical in its claims of the primacy of the State (which to a fascist is a metaphysical entity, not an administrative government) that the mere observation of one's individual will suffices to disprove it in my opinion. The Fascist has to dismiss such a conception as mental illness or renounce the more radical parts of his doctrine, which are the parts that interest us in this conversation anyway.
Then you don't believe in rights. You believe in traditions. Which is as I expected but has its own specific shortcomings which I point out. You are missing the metaphysical point that Liberalism has against such traditions which allowed it to destroy them so effectively.
We can very well defend the Liberal conception of Rights as a tradition instead of a metaphysical doctrine, indeed that is how they originated, as the traditions of Englishmen. But those are fit only for Englishman not for Man.
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