Why the American Founding Must Remain Central to Conservatism

W hile much of today’s debate about American conservatism’s future revolves around economic issues, an even more fundamental division presently haunts the Right.

On the one hand, there are those who regard promotion of the principles, documents, writings, and even personalities that constitute the American founding as central to American conservatism’s identity and future direction. To varying degrees, this commitment is increasingly questioned by those more or less intent on reducing the Founding’s significance in the American conservative pantheon.

Some conservatives do so because they regard the Founding as tainted by a relativism derived from a vision of rights untethered from a thick conception of the good. Others consider the Founding to be incoherent in many ways, and question its capacity to help conservatives address contemporary challenges like family breakdown.

In yet other cases, the emphasis is on reinterpreting key Founding texts to establish what amounts to an authoritarian corporatist state in the name of the common good. The America desired by such conservatives appears to be one in which the 20th century’s leading European intellectual defender of authoritarian politics, Carl Schmitt, becomes a primary reference point for thinking about the role of government instead of, say, William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England.

I and others have disputed these conservatives’ assumptions about the Founding, the logic of their arguments, and even their command of basic facts. But any response to this growing Founding-skepticism must also include a positive explanation of why American conservatives should continue to regard the Founding as the lodestone of their vision for the United States, and resist any drift toward the progressive view of regarding it as largely redundant. There are many reasons why the Founding remains indispensable for 21st-century American conservatism, but here are two of the most important.

The first and perhaps foremost reason for the Founding’s ongoing centrality for American conservatism is that the Founding represents a type of apotheosis of Western constitutionalism.

The 18th century was a period in which modern constitutionalism, with its particular emphasis on limited government and liberty under the rule of law, began taking on decisive form. Older ideas going back to the medieval documents such as Magna Carta and concepts such as the Rights of Englishmen came together with particular Enlightenment emphases expressed in the writings of thinkers such as Montesquieu and Locke on restraining monarchical absolutism. In the American states, for example, the 18th century’s last quarter was an era of frenetic constitution-making. Ten of the original states had ratified constitutions by 1777.

For contemporary conservatives, however, what should matter is that the constitutionalism of the Founding era and its emphasis on limiting arbitrary power wasn’t an exercise in legal positivism, let alone in promoting an open society untethered to any fixed moral, political, or economic principles. Thirty-five of the 55 delegates who attended the 1787 Constitutional Convention had formal legal qualifications or training. Like most Anglo-American lawyers of the time, their working assumption was that positive law (and natural rights, for that matter) was in some way derived from and limited by the idea of natural law, especially as expressed in the writings of Blackstone as well as older figures like Richard Hooker, Sir John Fortescue, and Cicero. Scholars like Robert R. Reilly and Paul R. DeHart have illustrated that the Founding in general and documents like the U.S. Constitution in particular are essentially incomprehensible without this background.

In other words, American constitutionalism emerged in a decidedly anti-relativist philosophical context. People generally understood, for instance, that liberty and license are not the same thing. The Founding consequently points to an ideal of ordered liberty of the type to which Edmund Burke referred: one that rejects liberty’s separation from natural reason, truth and virtue, while simultaneously disassociating order from a Schmittian exaltation of state authority.

That should be front and center in modern American conservatism’s self-understanding, insofar as it distinguishes it from two groups. The first are those who think that the essence of liberty is doing whatever they feel like whenever they feel like it as long as they don’t directly hurt others. The second are those conservatives who now share the progressives’ desire to use the administrative state to remake America from the top down.

A second and related reason why the Founding should remain central to American conservatism concerns the Founding’s realism about the human condition.

By “realism,” I don’t mean pragmatism, let alone cynicism or realpolitik. One key difference between the American founding and the politics of the French Revolution is the former’s attention to the permanent reality of human imperfectibility and its attendant belief that any political system needs to reflect this. Most French revolutionaries made no secret of their confidence that their creation of a new society purged of what philosophes like Voltaire and Rousseau regarded as religious superstition and obscure customs would lead to the emergence of a new humanity.

The Founding’s realism involved recognizing that it was better to develop institutions that directed our fallibility and limitations toward promoting the general welfare rather than seeking to remake human nature. This was not a new idea. One justification for private property, for example, offered by thinkers ranging from Aristotle to Aquinas was that people tend to take better care of what was theirs, and show little concern for things owned in common.

But it was documents such as The Federalist Papers or other writings penned by Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, James Wilson, and others that took into account in a very systematic way the inclinations of individuals, communities, and nations to pursue their self-interest in economic and political affairs. Whether the topic is public finance or foreign policy, this realism shines through in a way that is far less evident in, for example, the utopian schemes of people like Robespierre and his collaborators who tried to guillotine their way toward a more perfect world.

Of course, there were outliers to this. There was more than a touch of utopianism about Thomas Jefferson, and it contributed to his refusal to see for a long time that the French and American Revolutions were ultimately very different affairs. On the other end of the spectrum, figures like his vice president Aaron Burr didn’t hide a cynical view of life. Burr himself plainly understood liberty in essentially hedonistic terms, and was even suspected of secessionist designs.

But outliers are precisely that: outliers. The Founding’s particular integration of the idealism associated with constitutionally ordered liberty with the realism which flows from recognizing that men are not angels is harder to find in other schools of conservative thought outside the Anglo-American world.

That in itself underscores that an American conservatism that subtly or directly marginalizes the Founding is on a fast track to a conservatism — whether of the neo-integralist, MacIntyrian communitarian, or blood-and-soil variety — at odds with America’s very roots. And that is a very strange position for self-described conservatives in America to put themselves in.