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This interview with Ted V. McAllister and Bruce P. Frohnen, authors of Coming Home: Reclaiming America's Conservative Soul, covers topics including the necessary connection between history and idealism and the enduring relationship of opportunity and equality in the American experience.

In a nation defined by progress and reinvention, what do you mean when you say as one of your key claims that "conservatism is the most powerfully American tradition because conservatives seek to preserve American principles and norms"?

Ted: At its heart, the conservative American tradition is about liberty and, particularly, about political liberty. By emphasizing political liberty, we stress the right of groups of people to take care of themselves, to establish the rules and laws and norms that they use to govern themselves collectively, whether in families, churches, cities, or the YMCA. In the American context, this right of self-rule was exercised countless times as people moved west or groups organized to solve some new problem. In each case, some new community organized itself--invented itself--through social contracts. In other words, the art of self-rule necessarily meant creativity, reinvention, new beginnings.

While Americans love the word progress and they seem determined to tinker, invent, improve, change things, I believe the best way to understand this tendency is through the idea of opportunity. America has always been about opportunity, most famously with opportunities to start over or to leave behind restrictions or statuses or customs that hold one in a certain social, political, or economic place. This lure of opportunity (or, if you like, progress in the sense of having the chance to make one's life better) has always served as a check on the lure of equality. Equality--the ideal of all leftist ideologies--ultimately eliminates opportunity in favor of some distributed justice. And so, while Americans have always loved equality, their deeper love of opportunity has caused them to love equality moderately, and to love it this way is to love both liberty of the individual and political liberty (liberty of the community).

The deepest American tradition is, therefore, the jealous regard for protections of our liberties, and it is because we defend our tradition of liberties that we empower individuals and groups to pursue opportunities that give to American life a vibrancy and a certain kind of progress without slipping into the deadening ideal of equality.

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