Inheriting the American Founding

Ideas play an important role in history. They solve (or obscure) problems, transform cultures, and help motivate millions. A culture, movement, or polity can lie stagnant or dormant for decades before a transformative idea or set of words reframes imaginations and launches events forward with new energy and vigor. History is not merely material.

We are all shaped by the thoughts and ideas of thinkers, leaders, and writers who came before us. When trying to introduce history and “the past creates the present” to students, I point out that we all have ideas and insights that shape how we view the world whose origin we can’t explain. A conversational remark in passing, a thought half-remembered from a book, or a concept incompletely-explained in a video may lodge itself in our consciousness and over time become a lode-bearing pillar of our mental construct of reality. And the chain of causation for where those ideas came from can redound back a surprisingly long way, which is why almost everyone’s view of the fall of the Roman Empire is still shaped to some degree by Edward Gibbon, even when the vast majority of individuals today have never heard of him.

If we are what we eat, and are supposed to be conscious about the nourishment that fuels our bodies, we are often not so careful about interrogating the provenance of the ideas that program our assumptions and shape our perception of reality. We are all walking around with a horde of long dead philosophers echoing in our heads, telling us what to think and how to act, and even the most educated of us have never heard of half of them. We are slaves to dead tyrants who order us around, and much of the task of education (especially history) is learning who they are and where they came from, so that we can decide what to do with them.

And yet, the vividity of this image also shows the problems of studying ideas in history, and of over-prescribing clear textbook definitions. Because, as when you ask a student to repeat the main themes of a lesson, you will quickly find out that most of us, even those who have done the reading, have a very muddled sense of an idea and how to apply it. Ideas are half-understood, partially or incompletely appropriated, recombined with other unintended ideas, and repurposed for new ends. Above all, ideas have to be lived out, and anyone with a few years of adult maturation will understand how the ideas that shape our lives will over time grow, shrink, bend, reform, fade, and renew themselves.

The role of ideas in history is therefore superficially easy to talk about, but even easier to get wrong. Ideas are simple to isolate in books and printed texts, but are also easily dug up and lifted out of context. And the people most likely to read, write, and talk about them after the fact, are people who tend to value and talk about ideas themselves, opening the door to accidental exaggeration of their influence. Most of all, ideas are easy to abstract away from lived reality and turn into symbols that can be fought over without recourse to the complicated messy reality from which they came.

All of which brings me to the American Founding.

Hypocrisy is the tribute that cynicism pays to idealism

The American Founding is most often talked about and argued about in the realm of ideas and ideals. Take some John Locke, pen it with Thomas Jefferson, and trumpet a creedal nation that anyone can belong to. This narrative is simple to understand, easy to teach, and good for national unity and assimilation. Life, liberty, and the pursuit.

As a result, when the American founding is critiqued, it is also generally attacked along these grounds. There’s actually a fairly lengthy history here that extends back much further than contemporary culture-war fights.

The most obvious and in fact, most common method of critiquing such a high-minded and idealistic project, is simply to claim that the Founders were hypocrites. This is the greatest vulnerability of almost any movement or project based on ideals or lofty principles, and, given the foibles of human nature and the ability to cherry pick whatever one wants from sources, the easiest to undermine. Nobody is perfect, and any suitably important adherent of a movement can be tarred as being representative, fairly or not. Everyone knows the frustration of having the bad example of one’s side get constantly trotted out by opponents, who conveniently use it to avoid dealing with the strongest and best claims on offer.

This theme unites many of the most common criticisms of the American founding, beginning at least with the early Progressive era in the late 19th and early 20th century. In his day, Charles Beard was one of the foremost historians in America, and his “An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States” (1913) argued that the Founders’ lofty democratic ideals fell short in reality, while the American founding was instead led by a small elite class of individuals pursuing their economic self-interest. This line of attack can and has been applied in almost any direction one likes, and is clearly echoed in Marxist, feminist, racial, and Native American historiographies. Similar arguments can be found on the reactionary right today by authors such as Curtis Yarvin, who argues that the American founders were simply rebels and the first leftists, merely looking for any argument at hand in order to justify breaking away from the crown. This is another cynical form of the “Founders as hypocrites” argument, and much less novel than its adherents seem to think it is.

Perhaps one could say that these critiques are not really about the role of ideas in history, but rather the negation of ideas, since it is claimed that the principles of the founding were not truly real, but were instead a smokescreen for petty interest. And yet the charge of hypocrisy only carries any real sting if the idea itself actually matters. After all, if the baseline of human political communities throughout history has always entailed self-interested elites manipulating the public weal for their own benefit, then the Founding Fathers are nothing special. The salience of every major claim made about injustice in America, from Frederick Douglass, to Howard Zinn, to the 1619 Project, can only deliver special weight if the original principle at stake actually means something, as Frederick Douglass himself understood. The principles of the American founding must first have been real, and lived out for at least some people, in order for others to ask that those principles be extended to them.

Elsewhere, mostly on the American right, the ideas and ideals of the founding are treated straightforwardly with importance even when they come in for critique. The post-liberals in particular take aim at the Lockean social contract and the Enlightenment, and the best-known of these today is probably Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed. In these arguments, Enlightenment modernity’s pursuit for individualism and unconstrained freedom created a runaway train of self-fulfillment and desire which has no limiting principle. There is a robust and very old tradition of classical political philosophy, going back at least to Plato and Aristotle which takes virtue, civic order, and moral responsibility very seriously. Plato’s suspicion of democracies as individuals simply pursuing their base appetites has echoes today in complaints about rampant consumerism and materialism.

More recently on the political right, the notion of America as a propositional set of ideals has opened itself up to a nativist backlash which claims that a country can’t simply be a set of ideas, but must reflect a founding culture or ethnicity. It is not an accident that this argument has resurfaced over the last decade as America has become increasingly diverse and multicultural. I think opponents of this argument ought to take it more seriously than they often do, rather than trying to condemn it out of hand or simply wish it away. In a remarkably short period of time, I have seen topics of race and identity that were once taboo in mainstream discourse become much less so. And as any teacher can tell you, often the fastest way to get teenage boys interested in a topic is to tell them that, under any circumstances, they must not speak or think about it.

I think the desire for a colorblind America is a very noble one, and reflects an admirable achievement that, in historical terms, is hard to accomplish. In the 20th century, America became a global superpower in part by fostering incredibly intense national unity, and successfully assimilating huge numbers of immigrants (the proportion of foreign-born American residents only recently surpassed early 20th century levels). Our project of assimilation was so successful that we now think of the Irish, Italians, and Poles as being the same as any other Americans, which would have staggered many Americans in 1900.

But this very past success, when coupled with a great deal of self-doubt on the part of America’s elites today about the founding and what it represents (that hypocrisy again), now makes the American project harder to defend in the face of claims that America was settled by particular groups of people from specific ethnicities and cultures, with implicit (and increasingly explicit) assumptions that losing those ethnicities and cultures will erode what it means to be American. The old mainstream 20th century triumphalist narrative about the American founding became, by virtue of its very success, to be a somewhat abstracted idea.

This might reflect why the celebration of America’s 250th birthday has fallen a bit flat; indeed, flatter than I’d hoped for. I rather miss the mid-20th century’s mass outpourings of patriotic feeling, small-town parades, and more innocent enthusiasm for the country. Probably, this sentiment is still going strong in much of the country, whereas online and elite discourse is skewed negative. Online, it seems that many of the cynical critiques command the most attention.

Aside from being too “online,” I think the first major problem with most of these critiques is that they aren’t cynical enough.

The cynical case for the American founding

If we start with a cynical reading of human nature and human history, we shall rarely be surprised. Idealism and principle are so often and so easily overridden or rationalized away by the desire for power and self-interest, and the high and mighty seem to always conveniently claim that their power and status just so happens to be for the best. Cincinnatus figures are few and far between compared to nobles, kings, and emperors claiming they are the only ones worthy to rule. And some of the best, clearest, and most lucid statements to this effect come from the American Founding Fathers themselves.

If you were to travel back in time and tell the Founders that rapacious and power-hungry elites seek to abuse their position and aggrandize themselves under the cloak of high-minded principle, the Founders would have wondered why you were interrupting their reading of Polybius, Cicero, and Gibbon to tell them something they already knew. James Madison compiled a personal encyclopedia of research on almost every known historical republic and confederacy, along with detailed notes on how and why they failed, which he then used both in drafting the Constitution, and in writing the Federalist Papers, which contain some of the very best expositions ever written on the dangers of self-interest, ambition, and faction. To tell James Madison to beware of hypocritical self-interest and corruption is to think one can better the phrase, “if men were angels, no government would be necessary” (Federalist 51).

And Madison represents the restrained and genteel Virginian side of the Founding, though it’s worth noting that even the most optimistic and pro-Enlightenment of the Founders, Jefferson himself, assumed that the tree of liberty would need to be watered by the blood of patriots every couple of generations. In the North, where we find the ostensible radicals, we also have the dour John Adams, who was, if anything, even more pessimistic about human nature. Thucydides himself could hardly out-cynic a puritan schooled in the Calvinist doctrines of total depravity. They were such kindred spirits, that Adams told his son to “read Thucydides,” and wrote to Jefferson that, when reading Thucydides and Tacitus, he (Adams) felt as if he were merely reading a history of his own day.

And between North and South, there is the energetic and precocious New Yorker, Hamilton, who in Federalist 6 said that to assume that the states wouldn’t have cause for dissension would be to “forget that men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious,” and that this would “disregard the uniform course of human events, and to set at defiance the accumulated experience of ages.”

Growing up in and around classical schools, and reading the publications and periodicals my father left lying around the house that treated with political philosophy and history, I heard repeated over and over again the point that the American founders believed that human nature was fallible, and that unchecked power was corrosive, dangerous, and for most of history, the norm. Cincinnatus figures are indeed so rare that King George thought it unthinkable that George Washington would simply give up power and go home after the Revolutionary War.

This is the genesis of, and still sits half-remembered, underneath all our middle school history lessons on checks and balances and the Bill of Rights, and why it is good to hold liberty as something precious, even if imperfectly grasped or ordered. There is of course a hugely optimistic and idealistic streak in American history, but arguably much of this exuberantly upbeat naivete comes in part from the successful conditions created by this initial hard-nosed cynicism about human nature. In teaching, parenting, entrepreneurship, and in the founding of a country, eudaimonia is often the fruitful consequence of clear boundaries and realistic expectations, and one of the best positive virtues to pair with cynicism about human self-interest and misguided intentions, is genuine gratitude for when humans succeed in spite of themselves.

A contract across the generations back to Albion’s seed

Readers who know which long dead philosopher is pulling the puppet strings in my head will of course realize here that I am channeling Edmund Burke. Even if one is not a Burkean conservative in terms of policy prescriptions or in opposition to the French Revolution, Burke’s eloquence on society as a contract between generations is worth dwelling on for anyone interested in history. And it can also help untangle the messy nature of ideas within history and their transmission, and resolve the second major problem with many of the current critiques of American history. There is an Aristotelian mean between the two extremes of treating ideas as abstract principles divorced from context, and historicized words and actions that have no meaning or utility outside of their unique time and place.

In “How Magna Carta became a Big Deal” I talked about how understanding the Great Charter’s evolution across English history requires understanding how England itself changed from the days of Feudalism to the Stuarts. While the original 1215 agreement was a one-off treaty between Bad King John and his barons, and mostly concerned with narrow feudal privileges, the gradual expansion during the Late Middle Ages of English free-holders, a rising middle class, and the growing power and influence of London and other commercial cities, all created a new and larger segment of society that was not part of the feudal nobility, but also not part of the unfree class of serfdom tied to the land. As they rose through society and gained wealth and influence, these Englishmen naturally interpreted this new status through familiar categories, and began to see themselves as not just “freemen” in the old feudal sense, but Free Men, alongside the other political stakeholders of English society. This was accelerated through the growth of Parliament and the actions of kings who sought to bolster their position by extending favor and privileges to the growing middle, seeking aid in their political struggles against nobles and foreign rivals. One of the underappreciated consequences of Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy was that it incidentally gave Parliament authority in religious matters, which would later come back to bite the Stuarts (rather biting off the head of Charles I himself).

Magna Carta became the touchstone for many of these political prerogatives and privileges, because medieval kings frequently re-issued and re-affirmed the Great Charter, as a way of building support by showing their respect for rights and a settlement that, each time it was validated, became more and more binding. Once an action has been repeated twice, it quickly becomes a precedent, and starts gaining the weight and authority of tradition.

This is why Magna Carta could be repurposed by Parliament in its fights with the Stuarts, and why the early colonists who settled America in the 1600s brought with them specific notions of political liberties, royal authority, and ancient custom, which they then clung to with all the anxiety of an exile clinging to an old identity. The story of Magna Carta, and its transmission to America cannot be told as an intellectual “13th century version of Lockean liberty,” but it also cannot be handwaved away as a 13th century feudal document that was only later contorted and twisted out of its original purpose. The vital story of a tradition and its transmission over time is the missing link.

There is, frankly, a very similar issue with Locke himself, who was a more novel philosopher as a metaphysician and epistemologist than as a political theorist. Those who would deride Locke as the source of modern evils in contemporary politics have not sufficiently grappled with the fact that Locke was a popular explainer of existing ideas and traditions, and not their originator. If the post-liberals want to unwind the modern world, they will not be able to simply travel back in time to 1688 and strangle liberalism in its crib. Locke didn’t invent the modern world, but instead explained (and thereby accelerated) a society that was already coming into being, thanks to commercial cities, growing literacy, and the accompanying wealth and influence that always learns how to harness power. Even back in the middle ages, the “free air” of cities made liberated serfs free, and free to choose their destiny.

Both of those phenomena were at work on the other side of the Atlantic, where the conditions of the modern world became even more pronounced. Not only were the colonists transplants from their Old World, uprooted and put down in new soil with the opportunity to grow in new directions, but the conditions of their migration self-selected for a number of what would become distinctly American traits. The New World was sought out by people who were disproportionately bold, willing to take risks and endure hardship, and not prone to obedience. They were also, especially in the North, intensely sincere and motivated by belief and ideas. Puritan education especially helped form a people that by the time of the Revolution were more literate and more obsessed with books and ideas than the average European. Even the commercialism of American merchants and Southern planters promoted a legalistic streak that cared deeply about contracts and rights. Above all, as Winthrop’s famous “Shining City on a Hill” sermon indicated, the first Americans saw the New World as a place set apart. Many of the very conditions which linked Americans to the Old World, nudged them towards innovation in the New.

But they still spoke English, and were formed by the norms, habits, customs, literature, and ideas of the world that they left. Rather than arguing once more over critical race theory or Lockean liberalism, more people today ought to read books like David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed, which mapped the cultural topography of the four folkways that settled early America, and the different regions of England from which they came.1 Down to this day, identifiable regional traits in New England, the Mid-Atlantic seaboard, and the deep and coastal south, can be legibly traced back to different English folk-cultures. The borderer culture that used to be called Scots-Irish, and which produced Andrew Jackson, Texas settlers, and a disproportionate number of the greatest soldiers in the American military, originally hailed from the violent and lawless border regions of England and Scotland. Meanwhile, the planter class that produced the Southern Aristocracy were drawn from the Anglo-Saxon West country and cavalier nobility, while the Quaker Midland culture followed William Penn to Pennsylvania and Delaware. And of course, East-Anglian Puritan culture brought its religion and place names (such as Boston) to Massachusetts and Connecticut. Even Winthrop’s Shining City on A Hill speech with its references to a New Jerusalem was an existing Puritan trope in East Anglia.

If anyone doubts that the original stock and its cultural package of traits and literary, religious, and moral imagination mattered to the founding of America, they are invited to imagine for themselves the counterfactual of an America founded by almost any other nation or culture. We need not jump to a non-Western example; just imagine if America had been settled by Russian immigrants and their traditions of centralized government, czarism, and Byzantine literature and philosophy. The American story would look quite different.

Crucially, however, the folkway traditions that the colonists transplanted to America, became structures which outlived the initial population groups, and which succeeding waves of settlers then grafted themselves on to. The 17th century waves of migrants were not very large, mostly in the tens of thousands, but today, veritable hosts of Americans participate in these folkways without having a drop of actual blood in them. One of the strongest and clearest links Fischer demonstrates in Albion’s Seed is the persistent legacy of Puritan education traditions in New England. To this day, Massachusetts and Connecticut have some of the best school systems in America, along with the accompanying habits and norms that support educational rigor (and an intolerant streak of Yankee Puritanical busy-body moralism), even as many of their inhabitants are now themselves “old stock” immigrants from Ireland, Italy, or Poland. The traditional weakness of public schools in the Deep South on the other hand, can also be explained by longstanding border cultural traditions that cared more about outdoor life, early marriages, and violence.

There is perhaps no better proof that these cultural folkways need not be purely ethnic than the fact that the greatest champion of the borderer folkway today, who is known to hang a portrait of Andrew Jackson in his office, is a New York real estate magnate of half-German, half-Scottish descent.

Old ideas in a New World

The recombining of old things in new ways was furthered by the written inheritance of Antiquity, itself transmitted and reshaped through the Renaissance and Enlightenment. The Founders’ reliance upon Polybius’ discussion of the Roman constitution and the cyclical nature of regimes is well documented. Jefferson himself claimed in a letter to Henry Lee in 1825 that the Declaration of Independence wasn’t intended to be anything new, but was instead a well-established thing of common sense, relying upon “harmonizing sentiments of the day,” which ran all the way back to Aristotle and Cicero:

“this was the object of the Declaration of Independance. not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject; [. . .] terms so plain and firm, as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independant stand we [. . .] compelled to take. neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the american mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion. all it’s authority rests then on the harmonising sentiments of the day, whether expressed, in conversns in letters, printed essays or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney Etc. the historical documents which you mention as in your possession, ought all to be found, and I am persuaded you will find, to be corroborative of the facts and principles advanced in that Declaration.”

Ironically, Madison’s framing of the constitution was in some ways a newer and more radical innovation, even as it rested just as firmly upon a wealth of research and classic political philosophy. Madison’s federal system has worked so well (even after centralizing changes brought about by the Civil War and New Deal eras) that its original daring is easy to overlook. Prior to 1789, republican governments did not generally rule nations. Republics were almost always regimes devised for civic bodies, which is to say, individual city-states. Aristotle and Polybius generally described mixed regimes as urbanized bodies and their hinterlands, and the Roman Republic’s great success in building a civic order was destroyed as a consequence of becoming an empire. The entire medieval, Renaissance, and early modern experience with republican forms of governance, especially in Italy and Germany, was one of city-states, and the most that one could possibly find in terms of exceptions was Switzerland and the Netherlands. Madison went further in proposing a res publica for an entire nation that was larger and more fragmented than most European kingdoms. He went even further in Federalist 10, arguing that a federal republic would be a virtue for the American system, as regionalism would promote fragmented political interests, and help check the normal bane of city-state regimes, which was close and intimately violent factional civic strife of the kind that Thucydides wrote about during the Peloponnesian War, and which plagued Italian city-states in the middle ages and renaissance. Despite the Civil War and our contemporary mass-media-fueled culture war, Madison was prescient in his prediction, and federalism remains one of the great latent strengths of the American system today.

Civilization is an inheritance

The two extremes of a deracinated creedal nation of ideas, and the nativist backlash which imagines an Anglo-Saxon founding stock for the country, are opposite poles which incite the fears and resentment in each other, precisely as they push each other away from the real center. So long as they are introduced and inculcated into the American order and the institutions and liberties which grew out of 17th century England, Americans need not be of pure English descent. This was already proved a hundred years ago by Irish, Italian, and Polish immigrants, and I believe I frequently see the exact same process of assimilation at work when I observe male students of South Asian descent argue at lunch about their fantasy football teams, and vent their frustrations at the ownership group of the Dallas Mavericks, before being redirected back on topic to the history of Western Civilization.

Ironically, both wings in this divide suffer from anxiety and fear precisely where they should be most confident. The nativists who think that the Anglo-American tradition of liberty is exceptional, ought to really double down on that exceptionalism and the strength of the institutions it produced. And the universal creedalists ought to recognize that America has attracted and assimilated the globe’s huddled masses precisely because of that same exceptional founding.

Magna Carta served as a touchstone to ground the rise of the English middle class and graft them into the existing social order of late feudal England. And then Magna Carta, the Common Law, Shakespeare, and the King James Bible were carried across the Atlantic and served again as touchstones for a new order in America. Into the mix again was thrown, at the Founding, elements of Enlightenment and classical philosophy, such as when Madison repurposed the civic republicanism of the ancient and medieval city-state, and daringly proposed a federal system which could serve for a whole nation.

Cultures are not static, and they are far less blood-bound than racial ideologues ever claimed. The Roman Empire assimilated non-citizens and non-Italians into its civic order for centuries, and did this so well that the orator Fronto could train Marcus Aurelius in rhetoric despite his Libyan ancestry, and Justinian could promulgate the greatest Roman work of law from a Greek capitol. Almost certainly, the ability to assimilate outsiders and take on new identities stretches back to the earliest hunter-gatherer clans incorporating outsiders, and continues to echo in every pop-culture story of a rag-tag band of misfits overcoming their differences and learning to become a family of friends.

Culture, language, and norms all matter, but civilization has always been an inheritance that can adopt heirs into the story that it tells itself. Churchill intuited this brilliantly by linking the Anglo world together based not on blood, nor on ideals, but by the story of the English-speaking peoples.

Americans are clearly no longer just a group descended from 17th century Englishmen. However, those English origins still matter a great deal, and the subsequent story cannot be understood without remembering its beginning. A story handed down, a narrative of “this is who we are, and how we relate to the world,” is an idea that can be retold and repurposed for a very long time, and can outlast any pet theory about the cyclical rise to power and decadent ruin of civilizations.

But we do need to keep telling it.

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