To: ConservingFreedom
The right wing of the American Revolution saw itself as restoring traditional English rights of Americans. The left wing believed in universalism. I side with the Federalists like Washington over the Jacobin lovers.
21 posted on
07/22/2014 9:55:35 PM PDT by
rmlew
("Mosques are our barracks, minarets our bayonets, domes our helmets, the believers our soldiers.")
To: rmlew
Doesn't sound like the essentialist Right has much to do with anything that could reasonably be called American conservatism: 'the US was founded in the eighteenth-century as a liberal republic and does not have what Burke called an ancient constitution similar to the one found in Europe. The social world that gave birth to classical conservatism was a lot more ancient or medieval than the society that American conservatives set out to defend.'The right wing of the American Revolution saw itself as restoring traditional English rights of Americans.
I agree - but I think they understood themselves to be accomplishing that end by means of creating a form of government that was new, albeit leaning on English common law and informed by history. If "American conservatism" means anything, it means conserving that then-new creation.
24 posted on
07/23/2014 6:30:17 AM PDT by
ConservingFreedom
(A goverrnment strong enough to impose your standards is strong enough to ban them.)
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