Thread by @PubliusorPerish

Are modern conservatives the true heirs of the American Revolution?

This article by @DrSamuelGregg makes the case that today's conservatives should claim the revolution for themselves.

This is sort of a pet peeve of mine, so please excuse this long 🧵.

nationalreview.com/2022/02/why-th…

Gregg insists that, like conservatives today, the American revolutionaries were realists who accepted “human imperfectability.”

Instead of trying to regenerate humanity like the French Revolution, the American revolutionaries created institutions built on human weakness.

This is a pretty narrow view of the revolution! As Gregg notes, it requires that we dismiss Jefferson as an “outlier.” You’d have to ignore Paine too, of course.

But that’s it, right? We all know that Jefferson and Paine were the wild radicals, and everyone else was less utopian and more realistic about human nature.

Maybe not.

In fact, Americans of all kinds, and not just Paine or Jefferson, believed that the American Revolution promised a radical regeneration of society—one ordered not by how things were, but how they ought to be.

As they looked around the world in the 1770s and 1780s, Americans saw a “flame of liberty” destroying empires and kindling a global regeneration (one chapter of my forthcoming book is basically all about this).

Events in the Netherlands, Geneva, the Andes, Ireland, and elsewhere convinced Americans that the “flame of liberty” was spreading throughout the world.

This was incredibly important to Americans. It seemed to confirm that all humans everywhere could enjoy liberty—and not just those who built institutions to restrain human nature.

Many early state Constitutions in the 1770s and 1780s, most famously Pennsylvania’s, were built on the optimistic premise that ordinary people could and should control the reins of government.

Yet it turned out that the state constitutions built on this premise didn’t serve the interests of elites very well. The new state governments created economic policies that weakened the power of large landowners and elite merchants.

Based on this, some elite leaders started to conclude that humans were actually fallible and that institutions needed to reflect those weaknesses.

George Washington wrote in 1786, “We have errors to correct. We have probably had too good an opinion of human nature in forming our confederation.” founders.archives.gov/documents/Wash…

And so documents like the Constitution and the Federalist reflect that moment. They don’t necessarily reflect the views of the entire revolutionary generation, or steadfast beliefs of leading figures, which changed over time.

And in fact, quite a lot of Americans thought that the Constitution represented a reversal of the principles that guided revolutionaries a decade before: that a “realist” view of human nature was a betrayal of the contest for liberty.

The fearful view of human nature that was common in the late 1780s quickly gave way, though, to a new, radical revolutionary universalism in the early 1790s in response to the first years of the French Revolution.

As historian Matthew Hale has shown, in civic festivals, newspapers, and pamphlets, Americans extended the utopianism of the early French Revolution to their own nation. They sought to remake U.S. society in France’s image.

This wasn’t a small minority. In some of these parades and civic feasts, thousands of people participated—in some cases, they may have included most of the inhabitants of the small communities they took place in. (from Hale’s @JournAmHist essay on the topic)

In the early-to-mid 1790s, American leaders often viewed the French and American Revolutions as twins. They believed that the French had emulated them, and gone further in the pursuit of liberty. (George Blake oration, 1795)

The early French Revolution convinced many Americans that political regeneration was possible anywhere, for any group of people—even those emerging from centuries of monarchy with no experience with republican government.

Even news of violence and anticlericalism in France couldn’t shake some Americans’ belief that the direction of history was toward liberty, and that a global regeneration beginning in America would inevitably prevail. (Benjamin Wadsworth, 1795)

In the 1790s, this prediction seemed to be confirmed by the spread of revolutionary activism in places like Poland, the Caribbean, Canada, and Ireland. American political culture was obsessed with the possibility of a “general revolution” across the globe.

This had religious dimensions for some. From the 1770s through 1790s, huge numbers of Americans believed that their revolution was the beginning of a process whereby humankind would welcome the return of Christ who would build a utopia on earth.

Of course, Americans eventually turned against the French Revolution. But there was no anti-French consensus until 1798, by which time the FR’s worst excesses were long past. (I’ve written a lot about this also!)

In the late 1790s, many Americans came to fear that Enlightenment ideas about regenerating the world were dangerous. Humanity no longer seemed capable of regeneration. (John Lowell Jr., 1799)

So it’s fair to say that during the American Revolution some people, at some times, argued that a republican government should be built around the weaknesses of humanity.

But the “Founders” and their generation didn’t have just one view of human nature. Americans’ notions about how institutions should respond to humanity changed frequently between the 1760s and 1790s.

If today’s conservatives are the inheritors of the Founders, they are the inheritors of Americans at their most fearful, or even most paranoid, moments.

Why does this matter? Because when you look beyond Madison and Hamilton and Washington, much of the revolutionary generation rejected a politics of human imperfectability, and embraced the radical idea that humanity could govern itself.

Today, a version of that argument is still playing out. Many conservatives are arguing against majority rule, insisting that American political institutions were intentionally designed to resist democracy and thwart the popular will.

And to a large extent that’s true! Because the conservatives took advantage of the national mood in the late 1780s to design anti-democratic institutions, some of which we're still stuck with.

But that doesn’t mean that the Founding belongs to conservatives. From the first stirrings of resistance to British rule to the creation of American political institutions, the so-called “realist” position was far from a consensus among the revolutionary generation.

Gregg writes that the “utopianism” of Jefferson was an “outlier.” We should also acknowledge that for much of the revolutionary era, the “realism” that he celebrates was the true outlier.