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.”
