Conservatives Without Conscience

Early conservative scholars sought to establish the conservative tradition in America, often doing so by turning history upside down. They began with the Declaration of Independence, which involved an attempt to co-opt such profoundly liberal concepts of inalienable rights and equality. The Declaration, which formalized the end of colonial American allegiance to the monarchy of George III, has long been considered a classic statement of liberal political theory.[25] Echoing the words of the liberal philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Locke, Jefferson proclaimed as self-evident truths that “all men are created equal” and “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” including “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” These are concepts that are hardly articles of faith in conservative thought.

Nash admits that the Declaration was “troublesome” for the early conservatives, and reports that one scholar suggested conservatives should claim that, in fact, the Declaration’s egalitarian ethos had not been carried over to the Constitution; rather, that the Declaration was just that, a declaration and not a governing document.[26] Nash explains that it was ultimately decided “to stress the compatibility” of both the Declaration and the Constitution with conservative views, although that compatibility was created by brazenly reinterpreting the founding events and documents.[27] Accordingly, for conservatives the clause “all men are created equal” would be construed to apply merely to equality under the law and not to “some misty ‘pursuit of happiness’ [as] the true foundation of our polity” and certainly not to the brand of egalitarianism favored by liberals. Most conservatives, in fact, oppose equality, and there is ultimately no clearer underlying distinction between conservatives and liberals than their views on this issue.[*] Nash concludes that in “a variety of ways, then, conservatives sought to drain the Declaration of its explosive [liberal] rhetorical potential.”

Removing equality from the American tradition, however, created early divisions within conservative ranks, because deliberate tampering with history simply was not acceptable to everyone. In 1965, for example, conservative political scientist Harry Jaffa, a highly respected Lincoln scholar, concluded that no principle was more fundamental than the Declaration’s assertion that “all men are created equal.” This did not apply merely to equality under law, but to political equality. According to Nash, the gist of Jaffa’s position was that “no man is by nature the ruler of another, that government derives its just powers from consent of the governed—that is from the opinion of the governed.” Thus, majority rule could not be separated from “the principle of the natural equality of political right of all men” (italics in original).[28] Jaffa had no doubt, unlike some conservative scholars, that the “Founding Fathers adhered to the principles of the Declaration of Independence” when writing the Constitution.[29]

Another example of a conservative attempt to rewrite history is in the interpretation of the American Revolution. Because revolution is the antithesis of conservatism, Nash explained, conservatives relied “on the work of such conservative scholars as Daniel Boorstin,” later head of the Library of Congress, who argued in The Genius of American Politics (1953) that the American Revolution was, unlike the French Revolution, not a cataclysmic upheaval, but rather a “limited war for independence” fought by colonialists to obtain the traditional rights of their forefathers. Others have pushed the argument even further, insisting that the American Revolution was merely an effort to place a check on Parliament and the out-of-control king of England. These conservatives “tended to stress that the American Revolution was a moderate and prudent affair—hardly a revolution at all,” Nash reports.[30] Of course, a distinctly different reality is portrayed by almost all legitimate historical accounts of the American Revolution (whether written by conservatives or liberals), from David McCullough’s highly praised 1776 (2005) to Merrill Jensen’s The American Revolution within America (1974) and Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967). The war for independence was America’s longest war (lasting eight years) and its deadliest until the Civil War. Especially given its outcome, to call it a “moderate” or “limited” war borders on the absurd.[31] For example, McCullough wrote in 1776, “The war was a longer, far more arduous, and more painful struggle than later generations would understand or sufficiently appreciate.”[32]