It only recently came to my attention that Nathanael Blake, writing in Public Discourse earlier this month, called me a liberal. Or, if the slight is not quite so severe, he has at least lumped me in with some conservatives who have drifted left, on account of my appreciation for the American Founding and my exhortation that conservatives not abandon its principles.
After listing a host of modern ills — including but limited to the triumph of sexual-liberationist ideology, the weakening of marriage as an institution, and the decline in childbearing both in sheer numbers and in cultural strength — Blake faults certain conservatives for being “almost as bad, in large part because they do not understand what they should be conserving.” He then writes:
Many on the Right believe that the obvious answer is that American conservatives should preserve our Founding. National Review Online’s Jack Butler spoke for many when he recently asserted that “the conservative movement is organized around and ought always to be promoting . . . the founding principles.” But it is not that simple. The Founding and its principles were complex, sometimes even contradictory. Furthermore, they are not in themselves sufficient organizing principles for an effective conservatism.
The aforementioned lumping in of myself with such figures as David Brooks and Bret Stephens is at least demarcated by an “even worse.” But it is not quite as much distance as I would prefer. Such voices only value the Founding because its principles point toward an “ever more open society,” as Stephens puts it. That is not why I value the Founding. To clarify my own views will also require correcting Blake’s view of the Founding, however. In condemning Brooks and Stephens for embodying a liberalism empty of cultural content and appreciating the Founding only because they see it as the same thing, Blake to some extent agrees with their misunderstanding of the Founding itself. It’s just that, while they agree with this caricature, he disdains it.
To be sure, Blake does correctly state that “American legal history is full of moral legislation on subjects from adultery and alcohol to sodomy and usury” and that “American public education has always contained moral instruction, and it always will.” But Blake also writes that “our nation’s heritage and founding principles . . . deliberately tempered and restrained liberal ideology” and that the Founding “was devised not from ideological abstractions, but from experience and compromise.” The Founders, in Blake’s reckoning, forged a sort of synthesis of competing strands to devise their regime, including “non-liberal aspects of the American heritage” that figures such as Brooks would prefer to elide.
But if it is the fault of Brooks and Stephens for removing these elements of the Founding, it is the fault of Blake for believing that they are so alien to its principles as to mean that “the conservation of our ‘founding principles’ is not at the heart of conservatism.” To descend from the abstract, we should turn to the record of the Founders themselves. In two books, Vindicating the Founders and The Political Theory of the American Founding (as well as throughout his work), Thomas West of Hillsdale College corrects this mirror-image error made by both Blake and those he criticizes.
It’s true that the Founding principles were forged in “experience and compromise,” as Blake notes. In a discussion of the Founders and slavery, West does grant in Vindicating the Founders that “if the Constitution is read in isolation from the principles of the Revolution, it is possible to see it as an unprincipled ‘bundle of compromises.'” However, he counters:
The original intent of the Constitution . . . cannot be understood from its text alone. The document was produced by a group of statesmen who generally agreed on the principles of government. In The Federalist, Madison said that the Constitution was grounded on “the fundamental principles of the Revolution, namely, ‘the transcendent laws of nature and of nature’s God” and “the rights of humanity”‘ announced in the Declaration of Independence.
These principles, moreover, were not simply made workable by the fact that non-liberal aspects of the American heritage restrained them. The focus on natural rights in the Founding, and the focus on virtue, were, rather, two sides of the same coin. As West puts it, “The founders’ concern with natural rights and their concern with virtue did not belong to distinct categories of thought. Instead, they thought of virtue as a condition of freedom and a requirement of the laws of nature.”
Both of West’s books are full of examples of how the Founders enacted and justified laws we would today call socially conservative when it comes to sexual relations, obscenity, divorce, and more. These laws were not, however, merely “the same as that of their European forebears” in this regard, making them simply inheritors of a past tradition. When it came to the family, for instance, the distinctly novel ideology of the Founders understood “women’s role was seen as different from, but equal in rank to, men’s.” Founding-era laws about such matters were guided by, among other things, a study of human nature (in this example, acknowledgement of the distinction between men and women), a recognition of the social conditions most likely to serve the common good, and, of course, natural rights.
The theory of the Founding itself did not simply assume a virtue generated elsewhere; it inculcated said virtue, but with “natural rights and the laws of nature” as the perspective of its practitioners’ politics. The Founders “embraced ‘other traditions’ — common law, Protestantism, etc. — only to the extent they helped to ‘secure these rights,'” in West’s words. And the fact that the Founders cared deeply about virtue and enshrined it in public policy was not an aberration from their shared worldview, something they picked up from elsewhere, but a reflection thereof.
Though they may have disagreed among themselves on what means were best to accomplish these ends, there was no serious dispute among the Founders as a whole as to these means.
In The Political Theory of the American Founding, West asserts that “the founders’ principles provide real guidelines to political life.” He also admits, however, that “principles do not dictate answers to all questions of policy, law, and government structure.” We are in a different time from the late 18th century, and so statesmanship won’t look the exact same.
The Founders themselves would have agreed with this; that is part of what political prudence means, something with which they were quite familiar. But they would be uncomfortable both with the Brooks-Stephens characterization of their perspective, as well as that of Blake, for different reasons but also for sharing the same basic error. In rejecting this shared error, I stand with the Founders, and continue to believe in a conservatism that draws from their wisdom.