American Mind: Recovering America: What’s at Stake in the Ahmari-French Debate

Editor’s Note: This is a work in progress.

Ryan P. Williams:

“Both sides, for different reasons, are confused about the “liberalism” of the Founding and its teaching for the Right today.

Ahmari’s libertarian-leaning critics of various stripes seemed most appalled by his suggestion that the Right fight to win: “‘The only way is through’—that is to say, to fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good.” …

In other words, the individual and corporate responsibilities and duties that formed the necessary basis of the common good were not subjectively up for grabs. The “goods,” individual and common—secured and vouchsafed by civic partnership in America at the state and national level—were outlined and circumscribed by a moral and natural law knowable by reason, and aided and secured by certain religious teachings and practices.

Contrary to a certain strand of anti-or-post-liberalism on the Right, the “liberalism” of the Founding does not run in a straight line to Drag Queen Storytime. Americans who still want to be for both God and country have an American political philosophy and tradition from which to draw. …”

This is a good article.

I want to expand though on this last paragraph. I would argue that there is a strand of the American Founding that runs in a straight line to Drag Queen Storytime. Specifically, it runs from the culture of the East to Drag Queen Storytime against the resistance of the South.

The Founding Fathers were not a homogeneous group. There also wasn’t a single American Revolution. There were three revolutions in the South alone – the South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry which revolted over the fear that Britain was going to incite a slave rebellion and Indian attacks on the frontier, Tidewater over its chronic debt to British merchants and real estate speculation in the Ohio Country and the civil war between Patriots and Tories in the Backcountry. The Revolution in New England by Yankees was its own affair and the Middle Colonies were full of loyalists and pacifists.

The true founders of the United States were also the people who settled the American colonies in the 17th century, not their descendants who won the American Revolution and ratified the Constitution. They were the ones who laid down the regional cultures which spread west over the next three centuries. The Founding Fathers created a federation of those cultures called the United States under a republican government, not a single homogeneous European-style nation-state. Lincoln attempted to create such a nation-state during the War Between the States and not only did he fail to do so but he widened the existing cultural divisions. The Great Wave of immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries sealed the divide and made it simultaneously ethnic, cultural, religious and ideological.

The Southern social order was based on republicanism and slavery which made it the conservative and authoritarian section of the United States. It became more conservative and authoritarian over time. In the wake of the American Revolution, free blacks initially had the right to vote in Tennessee and North Carolina, but not only was that later changed but every Southern state outright banned the settlement of free blacks. I’m citing this only as the most obvious example that illustrates how liberty and equality and the doctrine of individual rights did not become a social solvent in the South.

In the East, the social order was based much more on liberalism and free-market capitalism, which is reflected in the fact that Southerners preferred to study the classics while Yankees preferred to study the moderns. Unlike the Southern colonies, the Northern colonies were also founded as utopian societies. They lacked the massive institution that was slavery and white supremacy which made the South authoritarian and counterbalanced the worse tendencies of liberal democracy. The North has a radically abstract, universalist, utopian and egalitarian streak which has never existed in the South.

New York now has the largest Jewish population in the world outside of Israel.