Conserving a Revolution

Executive summary Link to heading

American conservatism contains a real tension, but the inherited version of that tension was too simple. The United States did not begin as an ancien-régime society reluctantly modernized by liberals. It was created through revolution, natural-rights argument, popular sovereignty, written constitution-making, and rejection of hereditary political authority. Yet the Revolution also began as a defense of inherited colonial constitutions, English liberties, local self-government, common-law expectations, and established ways of governing that colonists believed metropolitan authorities were violating. The founding was therefore neither simply liberal revolution against tradition nor simply conservative preservation of tradition. It was a transformation in which inherited rights claims became increasingly universalized and then institutionalized in a new republican order.

That distinction changes the question. American conservatism is not incoherent merely because it conserves a regime born in revolution. Revolutions can themselves create traditions, and a later conservative can coherently defend a constitutional settlement because it has become inherited, tested, and authoritative. The deeper difficulty appears when several possible objects of conservation are treated as if they were identical:

1. the natural-rights principles of 1776;
2. the constitutional architecture of 1787–1791;
3. the inherited Anglo-American legal, religious, and local traditions that preceded independence;
4. later American social arrangements that developed after the founding.

Those layers overlap, but they can also conflict. A natural-rights argument can destabilize an inherited practice. A historically rooted local institution can sit uneasily with a universal principle. A constitutional originalist can defend a legal settlement while a post-liberal conservative argues that the settlement’s liberal premises are themselves the problem.

The strongest conclusion is therefore not that American conservatism is fake. It is that American conservatism is necessarily interpretive. It must decide what in the American inheritance is authoritative, what is corrigible, and what principle has priority when inherited practice, constitutional text, natural rights, religion, and national tradition point in different directions.

The founding itself supplies evidence for all sides of that dispute. The Declaration speaks in universal language of equality, unalienable rights, consent, and a right to alter or abolish government. But the imperial controversy that preceded it was also rooted in colonial claims to customary constitutions and the traditional liberties of English subjects. Jack P. Greene’s constitutional history emphasizes that colonists regarded post-1763 metropolitan measures as violations of long-developed colonial constitutional arrangements and English liberties. Craig Yirush likewise shows a movement from inherited English rights toward more universal natural-rights claims over the course of the imperial crisis. Greene, The Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution; Yirush, “The Idea of Rights in the Imperial Crisis”

That also explains why Edmund Burke is a poor fit for the inherited article’s sharp opposition between Burkean conservatism and the American Revolution. Burke resisted British policy toward the colonies and sought conciliation while later becoming the canonical critic of the French Revolution. Recent scholarship treats those positions as substantially continuous: Burke could defend the American colonists because their resistance could be understood through constitutional prescription, inherited liberty, prudence, and resistance to ministerial innovation rather than through an abstract right to refound society from first principles. Richard Bourke, Empire and Revolution; Martin Loughlin, “Burke on Law, Revolution, and Constitution”

The central problem of American conservatism is therefore better stated this way:

How can a conservative politics rank the different inheritances of a country whose constitutional tradition was produced by both preservation and rupture?

That question survives historical scrutiny. The older claim that the founding was simply liberal at the level of principle and conservative only at the level of institutional restraint does not.

1. Why the old paradox was too clean Link to heading

The inherited argument depended on a definition of conservatism that made the verdict almost automatic. Conservatism was associated with inheritance, continuity, prescription, gradual change, and skepticism toward abstract reconstruction. The American founding was then associated with natural rights, revolution, consent, and written constitution-making. Once the categories were constructed that way, a revolutionary founding could only appear non-conservative.

But this approach confuses three different questions:

• Was the American Revolution a rupture in imperial sovereignty? Yes.
• Did Americans justify that rupture partly through universal principles? Yes.
• Did the revolutionary movement emerge from a politics hostile to inheritance and prescription as such? No.

The last point matters most. A substantial body of legal and constitutional historiography emphasizes that colonial resistance grew out of practices and expectations already treated as inherited rights. Greene describes the imperial crisis as a collision between metropolitan assertions of authority and colonial constitutions that had developed through long practice. The constitutional conflict concerned taxation, legislation, representation, prerogative, and the extent of local autonomy. In this reading, the colonists did not begin by asking how to design an ideal regime from a state of nature. They began by insisting that Britain was violating liberties and institutional settlements they already possessed. Greene

The Revolution nevertheless transformed those claims. Yirush argues that colonists initially defended rights as part of their English legal inheritance and increasingly moved toward natural-law claims that presented life, liberty, property, and consent as rights of persons more generally. This is a crucial transition because it means inheritance and universalization were sequentially connected, not mutually exclusive ideological worlds. Yirush

The founding can therefore be described as a process in which inherited constitutional grievances generated a revolutionary break and a new theory of legitimate government. That sequence is much harder to classify as simply liberal or conservative.

2. Four layers of the founding Link to heading

A more useful model separates four layers that the phrase “the founding” often compresses into one event.

This four-layer model avoids the temptation to turn one document into the whole regime. The Declaration of 1776 is indispensable for understanding revolutionary legitimacy, but it is not the Constitution. The Constitution of 1787 is not the whole social order. The First Amendment’s restriction on Congress is not a description of every state’s church-state settlement. Nor do exclusionary practices prove that the natural-rights language was meaningless. The historical problem is precisely that universal principles and unequal institutions existed together.

Alan Gibson’s survey of founding historiography reaches a similar methodological conclusion. Liberal, republican, Scottish Enlightenment, constitutional, and “multiple traditions” interpretations continue to illuminate different features of the founding; no single school has made the others obsolete. Gibson describes a broad historiographical movement toward recognizing that the founders integrated multiple intellectual traditions. Gibson, Interpreting the Founding This does not mean every interpretation is equally strong. It means the founding should not be reduced to a one-word ideological essence.

3. Revolution as defense of an inheritance Link to heading

The colonial constitutional argument is the strongest correction to the inherited report.

Before independence, American colonists often described themselves as protecting the rights of Englishmen. Colonial assemblies had accumulated powers and practices over generations. Local political life operated through institutions that colonists regarded as constitutionally legitimate even when metropolitan authorities rejected their interpretation of the imperial constitution. Greene emphasizes that imperial governance had long been plural and negotiated; the crisis after 1763 sharpened disagreements over whether Parliament possessed unlimited legislative authority over colonies that had their own constitutional arrangements. Greene

This matters because resistance to innovation can itself become revolutionary. If a governing center claims a new or newly expansive authority, actors defending an older distribution of authority may eventually secede rather than submit. Political form can change radically while the immediate self-understanding of resistance remains restorationist.

Burke is the obvious test case. His support for conciliation with America and his later attack on the French Revolution are not best treated as hypocrisy or a change from liberal to conservative. Scholarship on Burke instead emphasizes a durable suspicion of abstract political reconstruction and a concern with historically embedded constitutional relations. His American position was shaped by prudence and by the practical impossibility of governing colonies whose inherited liberties and habits of self-rule could not simply be erased by assertion from Westminster. Bourke; Loughlin

Burke therefore undermines the proposition that support for the American Revolution automatically places a thinker outside conservative politics. He also prevents the opposite simplification: the American Revolution was not merely a Burkean restoration. By 1776, revolutionary Americans had moved beyond inherited English rights into a new claim about legitimate authority itself.

4. The universalizing turn of 1776 Link to heading

The Declaration of Independence goes farther than a complaint about violated colonial precedent. It asserts that people possess unalienable rights; governments derive just powers from consent; and a people may alter or abolish a government destructive of the ends for which government is instituted. At the same time, the Declaration immediately invokes prudence and warns against changing long-established governments for light causes. National Archives, Declaration transcript

The combination is revealing. The document contains both a universal criterion of legitimacy and a presumption against casual rupture. That is not equivalent to Burke’s later attack on metaphysical rights, but neither is it a manifesto for permanent revolution.

The natural-rights dimension remains historically important even after the “republican turn” in scholarship displaced older accounts that treated Locke as the sole key to the Revolution. Oxford’s survey of republicanism notes that Bailyn, Wood, and Pocock redirected attention toward radical Whig and classical-republican languages that had been obscured by a hegemonic Lockean interpretation. Oxford Bibliographies, “Republicanism” Later scholarship did not simply return to the old Lockean monopoly. It increasingly treated liberal and republican languages as overlapping or competing components of a larger intellectual field.

Thomas West represents an important dissent from that synthesis. He argues that natural law and natural rights provide the most coherent account of the founders’ political theory and that republican virtue can be understood as part of, rather than a rival to, a natural-rights republic. West, The Political Theory of the American Founding West is especially useful here not because his interpretation settles the historiography, but because it demonstrates that even a strongly natural-rights reading need not imply the atomized, morally neutral liberalism criticized by later post-liberals.

5. 1787 was not merely “liberal ends with conservative restraints” Link to heading

The inherited report described the Constitution as essentially liberal in its ends and conservative in its institutional engineering. That formulation is too neat because the institutional architecture was not merely a brake placed on an already complete liberal philosophy. Representation, federalism, divided sovereignty, the size of the republic, the structure of the Senate, the judiciary, and the relationship between state and federal authority were themselves substantive answers to the problem of republican government.

The Constitution speaks in the name of “We the People,” forbids titles of nobility, rejects a federal religious test, and creates a republican government without hereditary office. Those are decisive breaks with many European forms of political authority. Yet its republicanism is heavily mediated. The original Senate was selected by state legislatures. The president was chosen through an Electoral College system. Federal power was enumerated rather than general. The constitutional structure divided authority horizontally and vertically. National Archives, Constitution transcript

Federalist No. 51 is often read as an example of skeptical institutional design because it assumes that officeholders cannot be relied upon to act virtuously and therefore makes ambition counteract ambition. But this is not “conservative” in the simple sense of preserving an inherited institution. It is an engineered constitutional solution to the republican problem of power. Library of Congress, Federalist Nos. 51–60

Anti-Federalist opposition complicates the picture further. Critics of the Constitution feared consolidation, distant rule, inadequate representation, and threats to local political life and rights. Some of those arguments have a family resemblance to later conservative localism, but they were still arguments within a republican political world. The Federalist/Anti-Federalist conflict should therefore not be translated mechanically into modern liberal-versus-conservative categories.

The best conclusion is that 1787 created a new constitutional tradition. That tradition was revolutionary in historical origin, republican in authority, deliberately designed, and quickly capable of becoming an object of inherited loyalty.

6. The social order was thicker—and less liberal—than the federal text Link to heading

A second weakness in the inherited analysis was its tendency to treat federal constitutional principles as if they described the full American social order.

Religion is a clear example. Article VI prohibited religious tests for federal office, and the First Amendment prohibited Congress from establishing religion. But state arrangements varied dramatically. The Library of Congress documents that Massachusetts retained tax-supported religion under its 1780 constitution and that early Americans frequently described religion and morality as supports of republican government. The federal non-establishment settlement therefore coexisted with state establishments, religious tests in some state systems, and widespread public assumptions that republican liberty depended on moral and religious formation. Library of Congress, “Religion and the State Governments”; Library of Congress, “Religion and the Federal Government”

Suffrage likewise varied by state. Property and wealth qualifications were widespread, although their practical restrictiveness differed because property ownership among white men was relatively broad in some places. The Constitution left House voter qualifications tied to qualifications for the most numerous branch of each state legislature rather than establishing universal federal suffrage. Women, most Black Americans, Native Americans, and some white men were excluded from political participation. National Constitution Center, Article I, Section 2; Library of Congress, “The Founding Era”

Most importantly, slavery was not an accidental social fact external to the constitutional order. The Constitution accommodated it through representation rules, the fugitive-person clause, and temporary protection of the international slave trade. These provisions make a simple “liberal founding” description inadequate even if natural-rights language remained politically consequential.

Rogers Smith’s “multiple traditions” argument is particularly important here. He criticizes accounts that treat America as the uncomplicated expression of liberal democratic ideals and emphasizes the persistent role of ascriptive hierarchies in American political development. Smith, “Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz” The historical United States was not merely a liberal creed imperfectly implemented. Liberal, republican, and hierarchical political traditions interacted and competed.

7. Hartz survives as a provocation, not a complete description Link to heading

Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America remains central to the paradox because he argued that the absence of a feudal past made American political conflict occur largely within a liberal horizon. That thesis helps explain why American “conservatism” often defended property, constitutional rights, markets, and individual liberty rather than aristocracy, monarchy, or established church in the European sense.

But Hartz is not a neutral historical baseline. Later scholarship has repeatedly challenged the idea of a single hegemonic American liberal tradition. Gibson’s historiographical survey preserves the liberal interpretation as one powerful school among several. Smith’s multiple-traditions account argues that racial, gendered, and other ascriptive hierarchies cannot be treated as mere deviations from an otherwise singular liberal essence. Gibson; Smith

Recent reassessments continue to treat Hartz as containing an important insight while criticizing its reductionism. A 2026 Cambridge volume on major interpretations of U.S. political development describes Hartz’s claim that American ideologies emerged from a liberal core as containing a “kernel of truth” while arguing that American ideological development was substantially more complex. Cambridge excerpt, 2026

The useful residue of Hartz is therefore narrower: American conservatism developed inside a polity without a surviving hereditary ruling estate, established national church, or monarchical constitution to conserve. That fact shaped its vocabulary. It does not prove that American political life was wholly liberal.

8. Modern American conservatism was constructed, not inherited whole Link to heading

Another historical correction is necessary. “American conservatism” in its familiar movement sense is not an unbroken ideological substance transmitted intact from Washington or Madison.

Historians of twentieth-century conservatism describe a heterogeneous coalition assembled around traditionalism, libertarian or free-market thought, anticommunism, religious activism, constitutionalism, and later neoconservatism. The historiography itself has moved away from treating fusionism as the complete history of the right and toward emphasizing varieties, local movements, race, religion, foreign policy, and organizational development. Oxford Bibliographies, “The Historiography of Twentieth-Century American Conservatism”; Critchlow, “Rethinking American Conservatism”

This matters because movement conservatives selected and reconstructed a usable American inheritance. They did not merely receive one.

Conservative constitutionalism is a good example. Ken Kersch’s study of National Review finds that constitutional fidelity became an increasingly ecumenical language for the postwar conservative coalition from the 1950s onward, while a shared commitment to “originalism” emerged only later, especially in the late 1970s. Kersch, “Ecumenicalism Through Constitutionalism” A 2025 legal-history study pushes the point further: Cold War conservative constitutionalists in the late 1940s and early 1950s often relied on natural-law arguments rather than the original-public-meaning method associated with later conservative legal movements. Wieboldt, “Ideas With(out) Consequences?”

Originalism, natural-rights constitutionalism, fusionism, and religious traditionalism should therefore be treated as historically related conservative projects, not as interchangeable expressions of one timeless founding ideology.

9. Three contemporary projects on the American Right Link to heading

The present dispute becomes clearer when the right is separated into three ideal types. Real institutions and thinkers often combine them.

Constitutional traditionalism Link to heading

This project treats the Constitution and accumulated American constitutional practice as an inherited political achievement. Its conservative case does not require proving that the framers themselves were “conservatives.” A regime can be revolutionary in origin and traditional in later authority. The conservative claim is that long experience, legal continuity, institutional restraint, and settled forms deserve a presumption of respect.

This is the least paradoxical form of American conservatism. Its vulnerability is that historical continuity alone cannot tell the conservative which parts of the inherited order should be preserved when the inheritance contains internal conflict.

Natural-rights foundingism Link to heading

This project gives special authority to the Declaration’s natural-rights principles and reads the constitutional order through them. It can be strongly conservative in contemporary politics while remaining universalist at the level of political principle.

The tension here is not logical incoherence but priority. If inherited practices conflict with natural rights, the natural-rights principle can authorize reform against tradition. A foundingist conservative therefore conserves a principled regime, not inherited practice simply because it is inherited.

Post-liberal and national conservatism Link to heading

The contemporary New Right has made the older tension explicit by rejecting important parts of fusionist conservatism. Scholarship in International Affairs describes the post-Trump American New Right as, in substantial part, a rejection of postwar fusionism and identifies Claremonters, post-liberals, and national conservatives as distinct but interacting tendencies. “The New Right and the Future of American Foreign Policy”

Patrick Deneen’s Regime Change explicitly proposes moving beyond liberal ideology toward a more substantive common-good politics and a new governing elite aligned with ordinary citizens. Deneen, Regime Change The National Conservatism “Statement of Principles” gives nation, religion, family, national sovereignty, constitutional inheritance, and a strong but limited state explicit priority; it also rejects both socialism and an absolute free market. National Conservatism, “A Statement of Principles”

These arguments are not simply “more conservative” versions of foundingism. They alter what is treated as politically primary.

Internal critics on the right understand this. Charles Kesler’s critique of National Conservatism argues that some versions of the New Right downgrade the distinctively American natural-rights regime in favor of a more generic nationalism or traditionalism. Kesler, “National Conservatism vs. American Conservatism”

The debate is therefore real, but it is more precise than “conservatives secretly hate the liberal country they claim to conserve.” It is a disagreement over which American inheritance has final authority.

10. A coherence test for American conservatism Link to heading

American conservatism becomes analytically coherent once the object of conservation and the ranking rule are made explicit.

This framework preserves the strongest insight in the inherited article while removing its loaded setup. There is a recurring American conservative problem of self-description. But the problem is not that conservatives conserve a revolution. The problem is that American political history supplies several rival inheritances, and conservative rhetoric often moves among them without acknowledging the change in standard.

11. What the founding can and cannot settle Link to heading

The founding cannot settle every modern conservative dispute because many objects of modern political conflict did not exist in eighteenth-century form. Industrial capitalism, the administrative state, mass political parties, modern corporations, national mass media, twentieth-century civil-rights law, the welfare state, digital platforms, and modern sexual politics all postdate the founding settlement.

Appeals to “what the founders believed” can therefore become a category error when they are used as if every modern policy dispute had a latent eighteenth-century answer. A more disciplined approach distinguishes:

• founding principle — claims about legitimate political authority;
• constitutional rule — what the legal settlement actually establishes;
• historical tradition — practices that accumulated later;
• prudential application — how old principles or institutions should govern new conditions.

These categories can support different conclusions. Constitutional fidelity is not identical to historical traditionalism. Natural-rights reasoning is not identical to originalism. National tradition is not identical to the founders’ subjective expectations. Post-liberal common-good arguments are not identical to restoration of the 1787 settlement.

The conceptual gain from separating them is large. Political disagreement becomes visible instead of being hidden inside the word “conservative.”

Conclusion Link to heading

American conservatism does not suffer from a simple logical contradiction because the United States was born in revolution. That formulation mistakes political origins for permanent ideological content and ignores the restorationist, constitutional, and inherited-rights dimensions of the Revolution itself.

The stronger paradox is historical and interpretive.

The American Revolution began with inherited constitutional grievances and ended with a universalizing declaration of natural rights and independence. The Constitution then created a new republican institutional order that was neither an ancien régime nor a direct implementation of abstract individualism. Early American society remained religiously, racially, sexually, and economically hierarchical in ways that cannot be read directly from the federal text. Over time, the constitutional settlement itself became an inheritance.

Modern American conservatives consequently inherit several things at once: a revolutionary natural-rights language, a designed republican constitution, Anglo-American legal traditions, local and religious institutions, exclusionary historical practices, and two centuries of subsequent constitutional development. There is no automatic rule telling them how those inheritances rank.

That is why modern conservative projects diverge. Constitutional traditionalists emphasize accumulated legal order. Natural-rights conservatives emphasize the principles of the Declaration and the regime those principles authorize. Post-liberals and national conservatives argue that liberal principles or fusionist interpretations of them have undermined goods that politics must again protect more directly.

The intellectually serious question is therefore not “Can a revolutionary country have conservatives?” Of course it can.

The serious question is:

When America’s inherited institutions, universal principles, constitutional text, and social traditions conflict, what exactly deserves to be conserved—and why?

That question does not dissolve the tension in American conservatism. It finally locates it.

Sources Link to heading

• Bernard Bailyn. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Belknap Press, 1967; fiftieth-anniversary edition 2017. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv24trcdr
• Richard Bourke. Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke. Princeton University Press, 2015/2017 online edition. https://doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691175652.001.0001
• Donald T. Critchlow. “Rethinking American Conservatism: Toward a New Narrative.” Journal of American History 98, no. 3 (2011): 752–755. https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jar390
• Patrick J. Deneen. Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future. Sentinel, 2023. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/618154/regime-change-by-patrick-j-deneen/
• Alan Gibson. Interpreting the Founding: Guide to the Enduring Debates over the Origins and Foundations of the American Republic. Revised edition. University Press of Kansas, 2009; JSTOR edition. https://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.19307111
• Jack P. Greene. The Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge University Press, 2011. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/constitutional-origins-of-the-american-revolution/D14B6012698105D9B710D09E3CE4F9A5
• Ken I. Kersch. “Ecumenicalism Through Constitutionalism: The Discursive Development of Constitutional Conservatism in National Review, 1955–1980.” Studies in American Political Development 25, no. 1 (2011): 86–116. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0898588X10000106
• Martin Loughlin. “Burke on Law, Revolution, and Constitution.” In Political Jurisprudence. Oxford University Press, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198810223.003.0005
• Rogers M. Smith. “Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America.” American Political Science Review 87, no. 3 (1993): 549–566. https://doi.org/10.2307/2938735
• Thomas G. West. The Political Theory of the American Founding. Cambridge University Press, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316492840
• Dennis J. Wieboldt III. “Ideas With(out) Consequences?: The Natural Law Institute and the Making of Conservative Constitutionalism During the Cold War, 1947–1951.” Law and History Review 43 (2025): 847–875. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0738248025000021
• Craig Yirush. “The Idea of Rights in the Imperial Crisis.” Social Philosophy and Policy 29, no. 2 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1017/S0265052512000166
• Library of Congress. “Religion and the Founding of the American Republic: Religion and the State Governments.” https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/religion/rel05.html
• Library of Congress. “Religion and the Founding of the American Republic: Religion and the Federal Government.” https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/religion/rel06.html
• National Archives. “Declaration of Independence: A Transcription.” https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript
• National Archives. “Constitution of the United States: A Transcription.” https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript
• National Conservatism. “National Conservatism: A Statement of Principles.” 2022, with later signatory updates. https://nationalconservatism.org/national-conservatism-a-statement-of-principles/