Liberalism Besieged

Here’s a historical bullet that I’ll happily bite: The “miracle” of the American founding was as much about tribal affinity and aligned incentives as it was about any higher notions of liberty or republicanism.

I’m both simplifying and vulgarizing an event for which I feel an irrational amount of patriotic ardor. But I am willing to stipulate to any shrieking liberal-arts student in western Massachusetts that we got the American liberal order in part because these men considered themselves like enough to afford one another reciprocal courtesies. It was because Jefferson and Franklin and Adams were antecedently and in actuality equals that they could declare, after the fact, that all men are created equal.