[Pelham]

"In fact, I think the term right-wing doesn't properly apply to American conservatism, which upholds what is still the most radical revolution in human history. "

Russell Kirk disagreed completely with that view.

Kirk's view is that the American Revolution was a profoundly conservative struggle. The American colonials were defending their rights as Englishmen against a king who was violating them repeatedly.

[Talisker]

The American colonials were defending their rights as Englishmen against a king who was violating them repeatedly.

Partly true, but those English rights still were subservient to the king. American political theory broke with that by inverting the relationship of power completely through the doctrine of negative rights, which served to intrinsically negate royal sovereignty altogether.

[Jacquerie]

We booted monarchy and established republics. Subjects became citizens. It was radical.

[Sherman Logan]

I agree with Kirk, in a sense.

The American Revolution was a continuation and extension of the Whig Glorious Revolution of 1688. The Whigs were a group of (mostly) nobles and gentry who were basically the heirs of the Roundheads. They believed nobles, gentry and other “free men” had the right to live their lives freely, as they saw fit. The GR to a considerable extent institutionalized these notions in the English system.

America was in an odd situation, because the English class system didn’t really make the trip across the water. The aristos had it pretty darn good in England, and had little motivation to cross. The leading citizens of America, particularly in the South, may have aspired to aristocracy, but by English standards they were at best gentry.

Thus by default the “aristocratic freedom” that was the base of Whig ideology wound up being a “white man’s freedom” in America. Everybody in America expected the freedom that in England was still largely considered as appropriate only for “gentlemen.”

But when America was established, the founding documents didn’t say anything about “white men freedom.” They spoke of “all men,” which be extension over time came to include black men, Indians, women, etc.

All political systems down through history and the revolutions that attempt to overthrow them have had one thing in common: Their purpose is to determine which individual or group gets to dominate and push around everybody else. Till the last century this domination was limited in practice by logistics, but in theory was generally absolute.

Only the American Revolution proposed that no group should be able to dominate the others, that the people should be left alone to live their lives as they saw fit. However imperfectly this principle was at first applied.

That is why I see the American Revolution as both profoundly revolutionary and profoundly conservative. It was revolutionary from the perspective of world history. It was conservative in that it attempted to conserve and in practice extended the revolutionary (whether they realized it or not) of the English Whigs.