American conservatives seek to conserve the principles of the American founding. In Part One, I discussed one of the Founders fundamental principles: governments are instituted among men, who are possessed of inherent, or ‘natural’, rights, for the purpose of securing those natural rights.
Government so conceived, “conceived in liberty” as Mr. Lincoln so brilliantly distilled it in his Gettysburg Address, necessarily will be government derived from the consent of the governed. Each of us, as individual, free persons, must consent to any curtailment, any ‘government’, of those natural freedoms. Any other political arrangement violates our natural rights. If one accepts the doctrine of natural rights, then logic demands the only acceptable form of government be democratic, i.e. subject to the consent of the governed.
By declaring to the world in July 1776 their belief in the doctrine of natural rights, the Founders had implicitly committed themselves to establishing a democratic form of government. However, the precise form of that government was not otherwise described in the Declaration. It would take another eleven years, many debates and heated arguments, and (mostly) James Madison’s applied genius, to construct and adopt the framework of that government, our Constitution. The design of that Constitution revealed another fundamental principle held by the Founders that is also key to understanding the conservative sensibility.
OUR FIXED HUMAN NATURE
“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”
James Madison, Federalist 51
That men are sometimes devils requires no great intellectual capacity to grasp. A mere casual reflection upon one’s own life and times will supply ample evidence to support the proposition. No, Madison’s words point to an equally self evident truth for the Founders: our fixed human nature. Much like the speed of light, the universal constant at the core of Einstein’s theoretical physics, the universal constant of self-interested human nature is a core principle underlying the Founders thinking about the nature of political arrangements. Any hope for good government needed to incorporate a healthy skepticism about human nature. The Constitution they produced, with its checks and balances of rival powers, its frustrations of fleeting popular passions, and its careful protection of minority rights, is a testament to a political genius that rivals the scientific genius of Professor Einstein.
The conservative sensibility is grounded in this conviction about the fallen state of human nature. From it flows a philosophical worldview that naturally aligns the conservative with the Founders political vision. It also helps inoculate us from being infected by the temptations of alternative visions of society-visions rooted in false hopes of human perfectibility arising from the enlightened, scientific rule of an all-knowing elite.
In part three of this extended meditation on the conservative sensibility, I will discuss American conservatism in relation to its adversaries-those alternative political visions that fundamentally disagree, knowingly or not, with our founding principles.