Sometimes, being a conservative means jabbering about your philosophical views, however rickety, over a plate of overcooked chicken. Last year at the National Conservatism Conference in Florida, I sat down to dinner and found myself discussing John Locke with Ofir Haivry of the Edmund Burke Foundation. I repeated an argument I had made before, that Locke’s Second Treatise, which expounds on the rights of men, could not be separated from his theological views in favor of a “Reasonable Christianity” and his commentaries on scripture. Wielding a salad fork and leaning over the table, I said my problem with Locke is that he replaces the Divine Father of scripture with a Divine Whig, who owns mankind as a kind of property. The analogy then allows him to make the earthly Whig as unaccountable to tradition and custom as he imagines God to be. I repeated the criticism aimed at Locke by his Anglican contemporary, John Edwards, and said that his doctrine reduces to “political atheism.”
Reflecting back on it, there’s something slightly ridiculous about me in that moment. Locke will be read and studied for centuries to come; I dropped out before I could finish a degree in medieval studies. I’m a conservative journalist and autodidact, not a would-be professor. But at this point, Yoram Hazony, the conference organizer, leaned over to me and said more or less that he was deeply pleased to hear my views. Why didn’t others see Locke for what he plainly was — a Machiavellian in sheep’s clothing? Having respect for Hazony, I felt bonded to him and Haivry afterward. As dinner ended, the keynote speaker, Governor Ron DeSantis, arrived on stage — and we cheered him like crazy.
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