UNIVERSALISM VS iDENTITARIANISM:
Why the West Needs the American Founding: The Founding shows that the West’s deepest traditions can be reconciled and made to sustain a free society. (Samuel Gregg, June 1, 2026, American Spectator)
What unites parts of the American left and segments of the American right is skepticism about the American Founding. Many on the left seem unable to think about the Founding, save in terms of race and class. Some American conservative commentators regard the Founding as part of the broader eighteenth-century Enlightenment movement that, in their view, is directly responsible for many of America’s contemporary woes.
These pressures, however, make it more urgent than ever for those who care about Western civilization, and who want to save it from being buried under a wave of bureaucracy, technocracy, quasi-authoritarianism, and endless professions of guilt, to remind both elite and popular audiences of the power of the American Founding to serve as a model for what that civilization is ultimately about.
By “the Founding,” I mean not only specific documents like the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, or even some of the powerful personalities of the period. These are all important reference points and will surely remain so. Instead, I have primarily in mind the specific combination of ideas that animated the period in which there was an effort to establish a republican form of government that upheld and promoted certain principles which have deep roots in the broader and deeper cultural patrimony of the West. If this admixture of ideas can be maintained and even magnified in the United States, I think we can have some confidence in its ability to animate other parts of the West.
What, then, is the nature of this set of ideas that characterized the Founding? Broadly speaking, it amounts to a mixture of the thought of Greece and Rome, the religions of Judaism and Christianity, the heritage of England and its institutional expressions of liberty, and the various Enlightenment movements that assumed prominence in the eighteenth century. In America’s case, we are really referring to the “moderate Enlightenment” associated with minds like Adam Smith and Montesquieu. All these things came together to different degrees and in varying ways to shape the principles and emphases of the American Revolution and the constitutional framework that, in fits and starts, gradually formed in the revolution’s wake.