LIBERTY IS NOT LIBERTARIAN:

The truth about America, Lawler argued, was that our Founders had deployed a Lockean liberalism to justify and explain their act of creating a new political order.  However, this Lockean freedom had never been understood in an unrelenting ideological fashion that made America the inevitable republic of liberated individualism. That outcome could happen, and was in fact a potentiality in our Founding, but other resources were certainly present. Moreover, the freedom of the Americans had always been understood, beginning with the Puritans and by numerous other oncoming religious groups--the Baptists, Jews, Catholics, and Mormons--to be at the service of our relational personhood. A nation conceived to protect natural rights had become a home for the homeless, and this included religious wanderers. And while persecutions did exist for dissident faiths, in time, these same communions found unparalleled opportunities to practice their faiths and build their communities.

So we were free to be citizens, but we were both more and less than citizens, Peter taught in his magnificent introduction essay for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute's edition of Orestes Brownson's The American Republic (1865). Our freedom was really meant to be put in the service of our relational duties as parents, spouses, members of religious communions, workers, and, of course, citizens of America; or as Peter had taken lately to saying, we needed to employ "libertarian means in the service of nonlibertarian ends."

This meant that our Founders, in the words of Brownson and John Courtney Murray that Peter never tired of repeating, "built better than they knew." The act of constitutional founding, Peter relayed, had been done amidst the background of the natural law and the full scope of the Western legal, constitutional, philosophical, and religious inheritance. Our providential constitution was where you needed to start to understand our country.

In later writings, Peter made clear the ways in which the individualist strand in American political thought had increasingly come to dominate more and more of our social, cultural, and religious existence. What had begun as a noble liberal attempt to free humans from tyrannical government by employing a constructed government in the service of natural rights had outstripped its political bounds. And many Americans, following elite discourse, increasingly viewed the family, religion, and even thick notions of republican citizenship as collectivist attempts to rob them of their freedoms.

As Peter so eloquently put it:

The modern individual is liberated from the philosopher's duty to know the truth about nature, from the citizen's selfless devotion to this country, from the creature's love and fear of God, and even from the loving responsibilities that are inseparable from family life.

The ultimate and undying source of resistance to this Progressive logic was human nature, which, as Peter noted, always carried a mighty pitchfork. Lawler pointed out America's problems as a loyal friend. Friends tell the truth, but do not exaggerate faults. Peter, like Tocqueville, did the former without succumbing to the latter. We could actually, he insisted, see from a position beyond modernity and its limitations. He called it postmodern conservatism which affirmed "as good what we can really know about our natural possibilities and limitations," thus challenging "liberated postmodernism... and the modern premises it radicalizes." 

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