ANTI-RATIONAL:

Are American conservatives the real liberals? The question transcends semantics, for paradox is infused in America's bloodstream, the Founders having been at once revolutionary and conservative. The War for Independence was fought not so much to reject the nation that gave the world representative government as to uphold that principle, which the colonists had accused their mother country of betraying. It was by invoking the English tradition that the Founders turned the tables on the British King and Parliament, charging them with violating its sacred values. This was no idle posturing. As Harvard Professor Louis Hartz observes in his seminal book The Liberal Tradition in America, "[a] series of circumstances had conspired to saturate even the revolutionary position of the Americans with the quality of traditionalism--to give them, indeed, the appearance of outraged reactionaries."

But the irony didn't end there: "America piled on top of this paradox another one of the opposite kind," namely, the ineffable novelty of its enterprise. Hartz writes, "It had been a story of new beginnings, daring enterprises, and explicitly stated principles....The result was that the traditionalism of the Americans, like a pure freak of logic, often bore amazing marks of antihistorical rationalism." Hartz is referring to the revolutionary constitutions of 1776 "which evoked, as [Benjamin] Franklin reported, the 'rapture' of European liberals everywhere." The concept of a written constitution thus transcended even the British experience with common law liberalism, thereby becoming "the darling of the rationalists--a symbol of the emancipated mind at work." The secular rationalists evidently failed to appreciate not only the Founders' respect for experience and tradition but also their common embrace of Athens and Jerusalem, which they considered fully complementary.

That was how they understood the system of natural liberty. "Liberalism," by contrast, is of recent vintage. Was the original commitment to what eighteenth-century British thinkers referred to as "the system of natural liberty" rationalist, traditionalist, conservative, radical, universalist, nationalist, democratic, individualistic? Clearly, or rather unclearly, it was none and all of the above. Eminently practical men, the Founders were convinced by facts that freedom is both efficient--that is, conducive to the maximum aggregate prosperity--and right. The impetus was thus profoundly moral and spiritual, based on the principle that each of us had been endowed by our Creator with unalienable rights. That we were all equally unequal--in talents, abilities, and personalities--was to them self-evident.

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