What does it really mean to be a conservative? As the 250th anniversary of American independence approaches, Dan McCarthy traces the deeper origins of American conservatism, not just to 1980s Reaganism or 1950s fusionism, but back to the political battles of Whigs and Tories in 18th-century England. This episode offers a sweeping intellectual history that places today’s debates over populism, foreign policy, and national identity in long historical context. Read McCarthy’s companion piece in The Modern Age, The Right Before the Revolution. In an opinion piece for “The New York Post” this week, McCarthy argued Vice President Vance gets it right on the question of “heritage Americans”. Read the transcript of McCarthy’s podcast:

DAN MCCARTHY: There is an essential need for conservatives to understand their own tradition in order to know who they really are, where we are really coming from as people who are on the right and who are conservatives. And since we’re coming up on the 250th anniversary of our own declaration of independence, I wanted to also look back historically at how conservatism and liberalism have co-evolved and competed over the course really of more than 300 years. So in the first year of Donald Trump’s second term, there’s been a lot of debate among conservatives about exactly what conservatism means and in particular how it relates to America’s own political tradition. And a number of conservatives, especially of an older generation, are afraid that something is being lost, that we are moving away from a focus on free trade and low taxes and perhaps internationalism abroad and the promotion of American values, the promotion of a liberal international order that would make possible free markets and also the progress of liberalism and democracy in lands far from us. And the theory is that it’s very important to have that kind of progress internationally because that’s what creates a safe global environment for the United States. So conservatives who think back to the 1980s, but perhaps even they’re really thinking about the early 2000s, they view the Reagan administration or perhaps the administrations of either the older or the younger George Bush as being the pinnacle of conservatism in America and being a standard that we should continue to meet in the 21st century. Whereas what we have now with Donald Trump is seen by them as being a deviation, certainly a move away from free trade, perhaps a move away from smaller government and freer markets, and also perhaps a retreat in their view from the kind of commitments that the United States has had around the world over the course of the 20th century and at the beginning of the 21st century as well. Now I wanted to put this controversy in a bit of historical context and since we’re coming up on the 250th anniversary of our own declaration of independence and the independence of our country, I wanted to also look back historically at how conservatism and liberalism have co-evolved and competed over the course really of more than 300 years, in particularly in the Anglo-American context, and to understand that we have to look back even before the American Revolution and the American founding. I think sometimes, you know, in thinking about history, one of the problems that we can make is by starting our narrative a little bit too late. So if you’re thinking about conservatism and you’re really starting the narrative only in the 1980s or indeed beyond that, you know, in the Bush years of the 1990s and the 2000s, that’s really too late. You need to look back earlier, certainly to the beginning of the post-war conservative movement in the 1950s, but even before that it’s useful to know something about American political history over the course of the 19th century and into the first half of the 20th century as well. When we think about the American Revolution, certainly it’s very important to focus on the Declaration of Independence itself. It’s very important to focus on the war itself, the war, the Revolutionary War, but it’s also extremely important to know the backstory, to know not only the international scene in which the United States was newly emerging as a free country, a self-determining country on its own, but also to look back at the traditions of English politics and British politics to which we Americans were heir already at the time of the Revolution. Already in 1776, George Washington and his compatriots saw themselves as being in a great line of succession of thinkers and citizens and people who were fighting for their liberties in the context of British constitutionalism. It was not the case that the world was simply a blank slate to be newly discovered and newly invented by the American revolutionaries. On the contrary, they saw themselves, yes, they were engaged in something that was quite new, but they were engaged in something new that was in fact part of a longer tradition. Hi, thank you for watching the Modern Age podcast with Dan McCarthy. I am the editor of Modern Age, which is available as a print magazine. We’re published quarterly, so we come out every three months. And we also have a wonderful website where you can find some of the most interesting and deepest conservative thought on the whole worldwide web. You can find every weekday, we have an updated article, partly new articles, partly articles drawn from the 50 plus year archives of our journal. And the website is modernagejournal.com. That’s www.modernagejournal.com. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please hit the like button. Please share this podcast with your friends. And indeed, with anyone you think could benefit from learning about the deeper traditions of American conservatism, and indeed, Western civilization. It’s not only conservatives who need to understand this, but also our friends, and in many cases, our frenemies and even enemies, who might be liberals or coming from the left, they too need to be enlightened and have a deeper sense of what the American right is actually all about. And not simply a caricatured and stereotyped idea of what the right and conservatism, or even something like populism and MAGA is all about. To find out what the true intellectual pedigree of American conservatism is, please read Modern Age. And again, follow this podcast and hit that like button. So I want to go back now about 325 years to the point where you have a two party system first developing in Great Britain. And these two parties that have emerged by the year 1700 are the Whigs and the Tories. And they have some relationship to later political configurations, both in Great Britain and also in the United States. So the Whigs are generally the more liberal of the two parties. And indeed, they are liberal in a classical sense, that is they are in favor of economic freedom, they are in favor of personal freedom as well. They are very much on the side of Parliament and the legislature against the power of the king. On the other hand, both the Whigs and the Tories, the Tories are the more royalist party. The Tories see themselves as in the tradition of the British Constitution, as it was before Parliament started to gain more and more power. The Tories see themselves not only as champions of the king, but also as champions of the established church, and that’s the Church of England. And there are two threats to the Church of England in the year 1700. On the one hand, there is the possibility that at some point England might revert to being a Catholic country again. And of course, it was King Henry VIII who separated the Church of England from the Catholic Communion. And there’s always been a concern on the part of the English up to that stage, that you might have once again, the Church of England and Christians within England starting to become a part of the Catholic Church once again. And that was something that had many theological, ecclesiological, and other posed a number of problems for supporters of the Church of England. So that was one threat. But then the other threat that was faced by supporters of the Church of England was the idea that perhaps a more radical form of Protestantism would demand changes to the Church of England. Some radical Protestants said that the Church of England was too similar to the Catholic Church in terms of its rituals, in terms of its church structure, in terms of the power of bishops and the Archbishop of Canterbury in particular. And so there were more radical Protestants who said that you had to have reforms and a purification of the Church of England to bring it more into line with Calvinism and more into line with various other forms of a more radical Protestantism. So the Tories were trying to stave off on the one hand, a return to the Catholic Church, but also a movement in direction of a more radical form of Protestantism. And they were very supportive of the monarchy. And in fact, they were even so supportive of the monarchy that they would rather have a Catholic king, which was something they were looking at with James II taking the throne, they would rather have had a Catholic king than have Parliament assert the power to choose the line of royal succession. So they really didn’t want Parliament to intervene in the line of royal succession to say that you are only going to have Protestant monarchs on the throne of England. Even though the Tories were generally quite anti-Catholic themselves, they thought it was absolutely vitally important that the British Constitution, which meant that you had a hereditary succession on the part of the monarchy, that that was not interrupted and not overwritten or overrided by, overridden by Parliament. They instead wanted to make sure that you had this traditional function of the monarchy continue without any kind of interference. Now the Whigs had a different view. The Whigs were not necessarily all radical Protestants themselves. In fact, over time, they became less and less connected with Calvinism and with other forms of Protestantism that wanted a real purification of the Church of England. Instead, the Whig party comes to be known as being in favor of religious tolerance for Protestant dissenters. Now the important nuance here is that the Whigs generally were also very anti-Catholic. They did not want to see a degree of religious freedom in England that would basically permit free worship among Catholics and that would give Catholics equal civil liberties with Protestants. The Whigs were opposed to that, but the Whigs did believe that among Protestant denominations, you should allow a variety to flourish and that you could have pluralism and that you did not have to insist that everyone was part of the Church of England and everyone had to almost literally sing from the same hymn book within the Church of England. So the Whigs were generally in favor of religious liberty for Protestants, and they wanted to expand the amount of religious liberty that England had, whereas the Tories were in favor of defending the established Church against the increase of radical Protestantism. Now keep in mind, it’s easy to see this as saying, well, this means the Tories were authoritarians, they were against freedom, but the Tories had in the back of their minds this fear that England would revert to the circumstances that had existed during the English Civil War in the previous century. And that was basically an incident where you had various forms of radical Protestantism that basically had become revolutionary in politics and that they were willing to execute a king, they were willing to create a commonwealth or a republic in place of a monarchy, and basically that you would have enormous constitutional disruptions if you gave radical Protestantism a foothold in English politics. The other fear was that if they came to power, these radical Protestants would then use the power of government to suppress any kind of Protestantism as well as any kind of Catholicism that they disagreed with. So that if Puritans came to power again, they would basically cancel Christmas and otherwise impose their own very strict interpretation of Christianity on everyone else, including everyone within the Church of England. So the Tories were worried about their own version of English liberties, which was different from what the Whigs considered to be their version of English liberties. Let’s talk a little bit, however, about how this affects the international scene around the year 1700. Now, the Tories are very sympathetic to the royal line of James II, who has been deposed as the King of England, or as the English like to say, he had abdicated, although really he was basically overthrown in a coup in 1688 and 1689. So James II goes into exile in France. James II is himself Catholic. He is in exile in France, which is a Catholic country. The King of France, Louis XIV, is the model of absolute monarchy in the world of the late 17th century and at the beginning of the 18th century. And the Tories are very nostalgic for James II and for his line of heirs, and they kind of would sympathize. They prefer to see James II’s line of heirs come back to power in England, especially once you have the last of the Stuart monarchs, who is Queen Anne. Once she dies in the early part of the 18th century, the Tories really believe this is a good time to have the restoration of James’s line of heirs. These are called the Jacobites because Jacobus is the Latin version of the name James. So both the English name Jacob and the English name James are derived from the Latin Jacobus. And therefore, if you are a supporter of the line of heirs from James II, you are called a Jacobite in English politics. So this is something that is a live possibility in the early 18th century in England. It’s one of the things that is a dividing line between the Whigs and the Tories. They have different views of who should be occupying, which line of heirs should be occupying the English throne. Now, this makes the Tories rather pro-French and rather sympathetic to the French, even though the French are an absolute monarchy. And even though the Whigs, the opponents of the Tories, are constantly saying that the Tories are, in fact, not just supportive of the line of James II in terms of his heirs, but that the Tories, according to the Whigs, actually want to create an absolute monarchy in England. And the Whigs’ rationale for keeping James II and his heirs off the throne of England is that they say that, you know, this Stuart line is very much in favor of absolute monarchy. They want to shut down parliament. And basically, they’re also claiming that, similarly to King Louis XIV in France, that James II and his heirs, they would like to not only have absolute power within their own kingdom, but they ultimately would probably like to join the Catholic Church as well, or have the kingdom rather join the Catholic Church. So it is a threat to the Church of England. So the Tories and the Whigs both see themselves as defenders of the Church of England, but they have a different sense of where the biggest threat is coming from. The Tories think the biggest threat is coming from radical Protestantism, which the Whigs are aligned with. And the Whigs think the biggest threat is coming from Catholicism, which they see the Tories as being rather insufficiently alert to or insufficiently wary of. And the Whigs think that the Tories are going to become absolute monarchists if they get the chance, and the Tories think that the Whigs are going to basically become dictatorial Republicans and oligarchs if they ever, you know, are successful in winning complete power in England. So that’s where things stand around the year 1700. The Whigs and the Tories are two rival political parties. They both have members of parliament. In the year 1700, you still have King William III, and he likes to have a cabinet, rather, that consists of the most talented members of both parties. He likes to have a balance in his cabinet. He doesn’t want to completely support one faction or the other. In part, this is because William III, who was originally a prince of the state of Orange in the Netherlands, he has been invited to power by the Whigs and by, you know, some of the Tories who were working in cooperation with the Whigs. And yet William III, despite owing his own kingship in some ways to the Whigs, he is really more sympathetic to the principles of government that are enunciated by the Tories. Now, all of this might seem very remote from American concerns, even a century later, or 75 years later, rather, as you get to the American Revolution, and they might seem entirely incomprehensible to Americans in the 21st century. And yet, even today, we are still very much concerned about the division of power between the executive branch, the president on the one hand, and the legislature on the other, Congress. And so these questions, which already were very much the dividing line between these two parties, back in 1700 in England, are still echoed by today’s political arrangements in America. And of course, one of the things that we see in America is that the relative degree of support that each political party, Republicans and Democrats, have for either the executive branch or the legislative branch tends to depend on which party is actually in control of that branch. So there are times when it seems like Republicans are the champions of Congress, because they’re against a Democratic president. And there are other times when it seems as if it’s the Democrats who want to champion Congress, because you have a Republican president in office. Right now, with Republicans having both the White House and also the Senate and the House of Representatives in Congress, it’s the Democrats who are basically outsiders completely. But if in next year’s midterm elections, it turns out that the Democrats win, you’ll see them making a great deal of fuss about the importance of Congress as a check upon the president. Now, it’s not only, however, the different branches that different parties tend to support depending on whether or not they have power in that branch. But also, if you look at political issues, there’s often a tendency for political parties to switch their positions based upon what they think internationally or domestically their allegiances line up with in terms of what they want to see happen. So let me give an illustration of this. In 1700, the Tories are seen as being a party that is in favor of peace. They are the anti-war party. They’re the party that doesn’t want to have a military apparatus that is basically being built up in England against the Kingdom of France. So an accusation that the Whigs are making against the Tories is that the Tories are really pro-French in every respect, and they think that the Tories are not doing enough to arm England against the possibility of a war with France. The Whigs are a very pro-military, pro-war party because they see France as being an existential threat and an enemy because France is an absolute monarchy and because it’s Catholic. And the Tories, it’s not that the Tories want to be Catholic, it’s not even that they necessarily want absolute monarchy, but the Tories generally see the French as not really being that dangerous. What the Tories are worried about is instead the radicalism that you might find among the Whigs who want to create what the Tories think of as being a more small-r, Republican, commonwealth kind of government rather than a truly mixed and partly monarchical form of government. So that question of foreign influence versus a subversion of the domestic constitution is a separation between the Tories and the Whigs. And the Tories at this stage also are relatively favorable towards free trade. Now that’s because England’s biggest foreign trading partner is of course France. So to be in favor of free trade means to be in favor of trade with France. The Tories are generally quite sympathetic to France, and therefore this is something that they are in favor of, whereas they don’t like, the Whigs rather do not like the idea of having a lot of economic connections and ties with what they see as being England’s greatest rival on the continent, and that’s France. Now this will change over time depending on where the parties stand on the possibility of France being a threat, and on a number of issues as well. But I point this out just to make the case, you know, right now you have in America a number of conservatives whose minds were formed during the 1980s or perhaps the 1990s, and who think it’s a real, you know, shocking thing that conservatives are now questioning the wisdom of free trade, and are saying that perhaps we need to focus more on our domestic economy, more on, you know, separating our economy from China and so forth. This is seen as being a betrayal of a free trade agenda that Republicans and the conservative movement largely embraced in the 1990s and thereafter. And some people would say that you even had hints of it in the 1980s with Reagan, and perhaps even going back earlier during the Cold War. And in fact, you’ve actually seen different times when the Tories or the conservatives in England, who are ancestors in some ways to our own American Republican Party and to our own conservative movement, that in fact in England you have a number of changes where the Tories and the conservative party after them were either pro-free trade or anti-free trade. Similarly, within America’s own historical tradition, for most of, you know, our history, especially in the 19th century, the Republican Party throughout its history was generally a party that was opposed to free trade. It was in favor of higher tariffs, in favor of more industrial production in America itself. It used tariffs partly as a barrier, largely as a revenue resource as well. Having high tariffs was an alternative to having an income tax, and Republicans generally didn’t want to have an income tax. They wanted to have high tariffs and to fund the federal government through tariff revenue instead of through income tax revenue. Well, that only changes in the 20th century, and really in the latter part of the 20th century as well. And it’s a relatively late development that you get Republicans and the conservative movement wanting to embrace free trade, wanting to get rid of tariffs and instead have a policy which historically had been seen as more of a policy of economic liberalism rather than economic conservatism. Economic conservatism, as it developed in the 19th century, was always seen as being in favor of free trade and opposed to a liberal policy of free trade and greater global economic integration. But as I say, the picture is actually very complicated, and you can find these different factions, these different parties on either the left or the right of the political spectrum changing their position on things depending upon what’s happening in the wider environment, both in terms of domestic constitutional considerations and in terms of the foreign policy environment. Now, let’s think about the American Revolution and one of the ironies here, because a lot of Americans in the 21st century who see themselves as defenders of what they think of as the so-called liberal international order think that America must always be on the side of countries that are more liberal and countries that are more democratic, and that America must always be an enemy of countries that are dictatorial or that do not have a political system similar to our own. And yet, think about the situation of the American Revolution itself, because our foreign policy during the revolution, and indeed afterwards also, was not a foreign policy guided by idealism or guided by the idea that we had to have alliances with countries that were most similar to us in terms of our values and in terms of the form of government that we wanted to have, and that we must be opposed to those forms of government that were contrary to our own, that were different from our own, and that even had values that were radically different from our own. So during the American Revolution, America is of course opposed to England and Britain, and Britain has the freest form of government, the most liberal form of government in the entire world at this point. So you actually have a war between an America, which is quite democratic and even relatively free in terms of its economic lifestyle, America versus England, which has a huge amount of economic freedom and a very large amount of political freedom as well. So you can’t simply say that this is a case where everyone who believes in freedom and elections and representative democracy is necessarily on the same side. We’re actually breaking away from England, in part because England’s form of representative democracy in parliament, in Westminster, of course doesn’t actually represent the Americans, because the Americans do not get a vote. We are taxed by Westminster, we are taxed by the British, even though we don’t get a say in British parliamentary elections. So we’re criticizing the British, and parliament in particular, for not really living up to their own ideals in terms of representation. And so we’re saying that we are more on the side actually of representative democracy than the English themselves are. And yet who is our most valuable ally, in fact our critical ally, in the American Revolution? It’s the French. And the French, you know, in the 1770s, they are still notionally an absolute monarchy. By this point you have King Louis XVI on the throne. And the French are as much opposite to America’s constitutional values as you can imagine. They’re an absolute monarchy. Today we would probably say they are a dictatorship. And they have an established religion, and it’s not just an established religion, it’s not a Protestant established religion, it is an established Catholic religion. The Roman Catholic Church is the established religion of France, and the American revolutionaries are not Catholics for the most part. The American revolutionaries are Protestants. In fact, a lot of them are dissenting Protestants. They are more radical than the Church of England. The American revolutionaries who are part of the Church of England, some of them are Unitarians. Some of them actually don’t believe in many aspects of the Christian creed going back, you know, all the way to about 300 AD. They have doubts about the Trinity. They have doubts about the real presence during the Eucharist. You have basically a variety of degrees of religious skepticism starting to be felt in the Church of England, the Anglican Church during the American revolution, including among the revolutionaries themselves. And you also have more radical Protestants who do not want to be part of the established churches, because they think the established churches are corrupt. And they in fact want to have a more purified, independent kind of church for themselves. So both of those elements, whether they are more Unitarians who are part of the Anglican Communion, or whether they are more sort of devout and strict Protestants who are not part of the Anglican Communion, nevertheless, both of those elements are opposed to Catholicism. Both of them do not want to be part of the Catholic Church. And yet, France, which with its established Catholic Church, and with its absolute monarch on the throne, France is our most important ally during the French Revolution. And that’s not for idealistic reasons. It’s not for ideological reasons. It’s not because the French have any ideological resemblance to what we’re trying to do in America. It’s rather for reasons of political realism, and Realpolitik to use the German term. The French are opponents to the British. And therefore, since we are also fighting the British, that makes the French very nearly our best friends. Think about it this way. If the American Revolution were happening in the 21st century, this would be like the American revolutionaries looking to communist China or some other kind of shocking, illiberal force in the world as being a necessary ally against whoever it was that we were fighting. Let’s say we were fighting the British even today. It’s not something that the American revolutionaries were doing out of any kind of hidden cryptic belief that actually the system was superior to our own, and they secretly wanted to embrace the French system. The American revolutionaries were not pro-dictator. They were not pawns of Louis XVI, the way that many people try to claim that Americans who think that we should have fewer obligations to Europe in the 21st century. Critics of that position will say, hey, you MAGA Republicans are just pawns of Vladimir Putin. No, that’s absolutely not true. Just as it wasn’t true that the American revolutionaries were pawns of Louis XVI, on the contrary, there is a sense in which sometimes you make strange bedfellows in international relations as a result of what’s best for your own country. That’s really what America first in the 21st century is all about. It certainly is not any kind of sympathy for Vladimir Putin. It’s not any kind of sympathy for dictatorship as a principle. Rather, it’s simply about what is best for America. In the 21st century, supporters of Trump and the MAGA movement will say what’s actually best for America is that we take care of our own citizens first, and we take care of our own security in our hemisphere first. Europe has to be more willing to pay for its own defense and more willing to fight for its own defense as well. That means fighting both against or being prepared to fight, having a security arrangement that is paid for and that ultimately involves, depending on the force of European nations themselves, both to check Russia and also to think about other threats that Europe might face, perhaps from the South, perhaps from Islamic terrorism and other fronts. This is something that the Europeans, with support from America, that’s one thing, but that Europe has to be capable of defending itself and has to have that will and resolve. It can’t be the case that America has an imperial mission to provide security for the entire planet, including for Europe. The Europeans are capable of paying for it themselves. The Europeans are capable of adopting domestic policies in Europe that will help provide them with the industrial base they need in order to provide arms for themselves. And the Europeans ultimately have to be willing to fight for their own countries and to provide for the security and defense of their own countries. And if they’re not willing to do that, the idea that the entire burden or most of it is going to fall upon the Americans, a continent away, is completely unrealistic. And it’s something that our own constitution is not designed to provide for. Our constitution of the United States is designed to provide for the defense and protection of the United States itself and of our lives and liberties. It’s not designed to provide for a permanent cold war with Russia or with anyone else far from our own borders. And if you try to have a United States, which is going to have a permanent mission in the world, because even if you didn’t have someone as terrible as Vladimir Putin in Russia, it’s still the case that the Poles, it’s still the case that a number of Europeans who share borders with Russia, or even some of those who don’t share borders with Russia, would see Russia as a permanent civilizational threat to Eastern Europe, certainly, and perhaps to Western Europe as well. And the question is, does America have not just a decades long, but a perhaps centuries long, perhaps a forever commitment to be primarily responsible for the security of Europe? Or does there come a point where now 80 years past the end of World War II, does there come a point where finally it is Europe, which must be primarily concerned with Europe’s security? Now again, this question that’s being asked about the 21st century has some relationship to some of these questions that have been asked in the 19th century, and also in the 18th century as well. Back during the 18th century, there was an enormous amount of concern that France would basically be capable of taking over all of Europe, and that it would ultimately establish absolute monarchy as the model for all the different kingdoms and states of Europe. And this was what the British were afraid of. They were afraid that, you know, not only would France be a, you know, supreme military power, but also that France would be a bad influence ideologically and constitutionally, even at England, even to England at home, and that the French influence would ultimately lead England in the direction of absolute monarchy, and this would mean the death of freedom for England. This was something that was of great concern to certainly the Whig party in England. The Tories, on the other hand, as I say, they were less concerned about the danger of French-style absolute monarchy catching on in England. And instead, by the end of the 18th century, so even after the American Revolution, as we get from the year 1700 towards the year 1800 in the turn of the 19th century, what happens to be the biggest question in British politics in the last decade of the 18th century, as you’re going into the 19th century, is precisely this question now of the French Revolution, because the French Revolution, which remember, the French Revolution actually gets started with a number of figures who are partly inspired by the American Revolution. So Thomas Jefferson himself is in France. Thomas Jefferson is very good friends with the Marquis de Lafayette. The Marquis de Lafayette had been a Frenchman who came over during the American Revolution and was one of the indispensable friends of the American Revolution. He serves within the Continental Army, and he is a great ally of America and one of the indispensable foreigners who helps fight for America’s independence. So the Marquis de Lafayette is a hero. And the Marquis de Lafayette is what you might call a moderate liberal. He wants to see a constitutional monarchy in France instead of an absolute monarchy. Well, the Marquis de Lafayette plays a very important role in the early stages of the French Revolution in bringing about the transformation of the three estates of the realm who have a meeting. The third estate instead becomes a national assembly. You basically have the creation of something that’s almost like a parliament in France, and it starts to exert its power against the king. Lafayette only wants to see this go so far to the point of a constitutional monarchy, but it runs out of control. And basically, you have more and more radical elements starting to exert power within the French National Assembly. And that’s how you get the French Revolution goes from being potentially a revolution that could be in favor of more liberalism in a moderate sense and a mixed constitution or a constitutional monarchy that’s a combination of a very powerful legislature and a relatively weak monarch to instead a very radical constitution which says, hey, we’re not only going to overthrow the king, we’re going to execute the king and his family. We’re going to execute the aristocrats. We’re going to have a thoroughgoing revolution. We’re not only going to have more state control relative to the Catholic Church, which previously had been in charge of education in France, but we’re actually going to persecute Catholicism and Christianity in France. We’re going to create a new secular reign of reason within France. We’re going to put a prostitute on the altar of Notre Dame. We’re going to make that a temple to reason. This is the kind of stuff that the French revolutionaries get into. They are really radical. They’re closer to being what would later become communists and just absolute left-wing cultural radicals. They want to revolutionize and destroy every existing institution and basically recreate everything from year zero. They are as thorough going as you can possibly get. Someone like the Marquis de Lafayette and even someone like Thomas Jefferson, they’re quite astonished by this turn of events. Now, Jefferson himself actually winds up saying that he would rather see every last part of the planet Earth decimated and depopulated than see the French revolution fail because he thinks all the hope for mankind in terms of liberty in the future rests with the success of the French revolution. Nevertheless, even Jefferson starts to blanch a little bit at some of the excesses that the French revolution starts undertaking. This idea that simply having movements in favor of greater liberalism and reform, that can actually wind up getting out of control and not always going the way that the American revolution did towards eventually having a good, strong constitution like our own, which is very moderate and has certain mixed elements to it. You can instead get into something like the French revolution that goes wildly out of control and leads to radical leftism and a complete disruption, which then leads to foreign wars as well because the French revolution tries to export its radical ideologies both by having revolutionary wars that it conducts against neighboring European states and then ultimately, of course, the French revolution collapses. You have Napoleon eventually come to power and Napoleon then tries to create a French empire and lead these French armies all across Europe, even invading Russia. There really is a chance you could possibly have a global revolution being triggered by Napoleon’s conflicts. All of this is necessary to understand and it’s necessary to understand how miraculous it was that the American revolution did not take this kind of radical course because whether you look back at the English Civil War and you look at the way in which Parliament becomes dysfunctional, Parliament becomes run by radical Puritans, they’re not able to pass laws, they can’t even agree with themselves and then Oliver Cromwell simply says, well, okay, enough of Parliament then. I’m just going to rule as the Lord Protector. I and the major generals, we will use military power to run the kingdom. It’s not a kingdom anymore at that point, it’s a commonwealth. Just as you see that course with the English Civil War and the English commonwealth in the 17th century, then at the end of the 18th century and in the 19th century, you see something very similar happen with the French revolution where it goes from initially being in favor of a rather moderate constitutional monarchy to instead being anti-monarchical, republican and then radically left-wing and then ultimately, it collapses into an imperial dictatorship with Napoleon. It is a miracle that the American revolution does not follow the path of either the English Civil War or the French revolution. We get it right somehow and we get it right in part because you not only have liberal kind of ideals in America, these ideals of freedom and greater democracy and greater representation but you also have a sense in America of a certain amount of conservative thinking as well. So when we look back at the American revolution, when we look at the Declaration of Independence, we should not say that the American revolution was all about what we now call liberalism and was all about what we might think of as wiggish ideas in the tradition of the British wigs and American wigs. No, in fact, the American revolution even surprisingly enough has conservative elements within it and indeed, it has certain Tory elements and that might sound surprising because during the American revolution, all of the American revolutionaries, all the patriots think of themselves as wigs and they actually use the word Tory as a term of derision, a term of criticism of the loyalists. The loyalists who are still supporting the King of England who want to see America continue to be part of the British empire. The American patriots call those defenders of the empire, defenders of the monarchy, they call them Tories. But in fact, some of the greatest Tory thinkers of the early part of the 18th century are extremely important in influencing the thinking of people like John Adams and of Thomas Jefferson and in particular, a Tory thinker by the name of Viscount Bolingbroke. So his real name is Henry St. John and he is the Viscount Bolingbroke and he’s very much a Tory. Not only is he a Tory, he’s in fact, the leader of the Tory party at the beginning part of the 18th century and he’s very much sympathetic to France and in fact, Viscount Bolingbroke winds up kind of getting himself in a lot of trouble because he is so sympathetic to France and so sympathetic to the Jacobite line of following from James II who are in exile in France that he actually betrays the Hanoverian monarchy that has taken power in England. Bolingbroke is in exile for a time, he’s an actual traitor, he’s an actual supporter of insurrection and rebellion against the House of Hanover, against George I and George II and this is a big problem for the reputation of Toryism. It’s one reason why the word Tory basically comes to mean traitor and supporter of absolute monarchy not only in England but also, of course, during the American Revolution. That is still the context in which Americans are using the word Tory. It means, well, you’re a supporter of absolute monarchy, you’re an enemy of freedom, that’s what it means to be a Tory and yet as I say, ironically enough, Bolingbroke’s own writings about constitutionalism wind up being very influential to Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and others of our revolutionary generation and our founding fathers and framers of the constitution and this is because Bolingbroke, despite his willingness to betray England for the sake of the Jacobite line who were in exile in France, Bolingbroke is not a believer in absolute monarchy, he’s actually a believer in mixed monarchy, in constitutional monarchy but Bolingbroke’s idea of constitutional monarchy is aware of the danger that radical republicanism or that radical Jacobinism or that radical Protestantism can present. So again, you see a number of thinkers in the tradition of Whigism and liberalism who only ever perceive danger as coming from the right. They see danger as only ever coming from the direction of Tories or absolute monarchy or in the case of the 21st century from systems of government that are not democratic. So there is a whole genealogy, a whole family history of liberal thinkers who take this perspective. They are extremely hypersensitive to threats on the right and of course, these are the same people who are going out and having these No King’s protests, who say that the danger in America all comes from right-wing radicalism, from radicalism among MAGA supporters and whatnot. There is a long, long history of liberals who have that kind of paranoia and that kind of belief and the problem is even though there really are threats that come from the right sometimes, there are also threats that come from the left and Whigs and liberals are historically insensitive to and simply oblivious to threats coming from the left and in fact, oftentimes Whigs and liberals wind up sympathizing with the threats that are coming from the left and the two great examples of this during the French Revolution, the British Whig party comes to be very sympathetic to the Jacobins, the radicals in France and this actually causes a split within the Whig party and it’s part of the origin of conservatism as a school of thought because one of the leading Whigs, one of the leading Whig theorists, an Irishman who is serving in the English Parliament by the name of Edmund Burke, recognizes the danger that’s coming from the left in France. He recognizes the French Revolution as something that could potentially catch fire in England, you could have a French-style revolution in England, you could have the American form of government collapse and become more radical like the French Revolution. So Edmund Burke denounces the French Revolution and he denounces the members of his own party, the Whig party, who are supporters in England of the French Revolution and its ideals and principles and Edmund Burke comes to be seen as the founding father of conservatism as a political philosophy and that’s precisely because he is basically the first Whig who wakes up and recognizes that there’s a real danger coming from the left, coming from the French revolutionaries and the Jacobins, there is a real danger from the left that has to be fought and in fact the danger is not coming primarily from the right, it’s not coming from the ancient regime, it’s not coming from absolute monarchy, it’s not coming from the Catholic Church, it’s coming from revolutionaries on the left. That is the origin of conservatism in the English-speaking world and again there are the majority, the leadership of the Whig party in England at the time of the French Revolution in the 1790s and in the 1800s the Whig party is actually very sympathetic to the radicals in France and they want to see changes brought about in England that are going to make England more similar to revolutionary France. Now think about the situation more than a century later, think about the way that American liberals initially respond to communism in the Soviet Union, not only at the time of the Russian Revolution but even decades later as you get into the post-World War II era. American liberals at first welcome the rise of the Soviet Union, some of them are actively pro-communist, some of them are sympathetic to communism, certainly they are often sympathetic to the ideals of communism if not necessarily to the Bolshevik faction and the actual government of the Soviet Union, but American liberals either are pro-Soviet and pro-communist or they basically say that Soviet communism is not a threat, it’s not trying to export a revolutionary ideology, maybe America can learn a few things from the Soviets, maybe we should be a little bit more like the Soviets ourselves. Certainly the entire world should be a peaceful condominium of liberals and communists living together and that the real danger as far as these even post-war American liberals are concerned is a danger from the right. It’s always coming from people that both the communists and the liberals label as fascists, even if they’re not fascists at all, they’re certainly not sympathizers to Adolf Hitler after World War II, they’re not sympathizers to Adolf Hitler even during World War II. There are a lot of right-wingers who basically are very strongly anti-communist and who basically don’t like Hitler and they do not like Mussolini, they do not like fascism, but they really aren’t all too favorable towards Whigism and liberalism either. Well, these right-wing conservatives who are anti-communists, they wind up being labeled by not only communists, but also by many Whigish liberal types as being dangerous because they’re coming from the right and anything coming from the right is envisioned at one time as being in favor of absolute monarchy and later in the 20th century and now the 21st century, any danger from the right is styled as being fascist and as being in favor of dictatorship. This is all basically a master narrative that has been written by Whig historians and by liberal historians over the course of basically, as I’ve just outlined, about 300 years, so this is not a new thing, this has been going on for a very long time and there is an essential need not only for conservatives to understand their own tradition and conservatives’ own tradition is not this tradition of liberalism, it’s not this tradition of Whigism, it’s actually more of a Tory tradition, although not everything that’s identified with the label Tory is necessarily conservative or good, but conservatives need to rediscover this Tory tradition, even going back 300 years, even a little bit beyond that, in order to know who they really are, where we are really coming from as people who are on the right and who are conservatives. We need to rediscover Edmund Burke certainly, but we also need to rediscover Viscount Bolingbroke and we need to understand this context that helps to inform the American Revolution itself and shows that the American Revolution is not simply a liberal revolution or a Whig revolution, it is in fact very much influenced by the constitutional thinking which one finds even among some of the great Tories as well as among dissident Whigs like Edmund Burke.

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