Rethinking The Whiggish American Orthodoxy

Michael Davis writes:

Conservative publications, particularly The Imaginative Conservative, have recently published a number of articles defending the principles of the American Revolution.

I suspect it has something to do with reaffirming the idea that the Founding Fathers were good old-fashioned Whiggish conservatives who sought to refine the unwritten English constitutions and secure their traditional English liberties, with the notion of national sovereignty thrown in.

If successful, this would be a compelling case that the American Republic is essentially a conservative body politic.

It is worth noting two potential errors. One, the Left does not really care what the Founding Fathers think; and two, that is bad history.

The first point goes without saying—and, to the Left’s credit, they are right.

C.S. Lewis said, “When I have started a sum the wrong way, the sooner I admit this and go back and start again, the faster I shall get on. There is nothing progressive about being pig headed and refusing to admit a mistake.”

If the American Revolution was incorrect, our wanting it to be correct won’t change that fact. The Left has yet to be so bold as to say, “To Hell with the Revolution,” but they will. Because it doesn’t serve their purposes.

It was, at heart, a Whig’s revolt, and the Left is rapidly departing from the narrow American tradition of Whiggism—that is, the slightly more conservative and slightly more liberal perspectives of Whiggism that have been contending throughout the three party systems and will continue to butt heads until the Left can no longer even pretend at being capitalists anymore.

I wish them the best. We’d all be better off in this country if everyone just said what they meant.

That goes for conservatives, too.

There’s neither the time nor the space to go into much detail, but it ought to be pointed out that the orthodox Triumphalist rendering of that unfortunate period is characterized by two things more: inadequate reporting and lousy politics.

First off, the events themselves.

This information is readily available and time is short, so a quick survey of pre-Revolutionary conditions will have to suffice.

The British essentially collected 0% of the taxes that were on the books in the Colonies. For most of Colonial history, London just did not need the money. They needed New England lumber and Southern cotton and slaves to keep their intercontinental trade system afloat.

II. When they did decide to collect modest taxes on goods such as tea and stamps it was only to pay for the debt incurred by defending the American frontier from skirmishes and wars with the French and Native Americans provoked by ambitious settlers and jumpy militias (e.g. then Col. George Washington’s unprovoked attack on French troops at Jumonville Glen).

III. When the Americans complained, the British withdrew most of the taxes and resorted to establishing a monopoly on the tea trade, which threatened the interests of smugglers like John Hancock.

IV. The very few British troops that had turned up in the colonies were there to fight their skirmishes for them, and for no other reason. The colonies were generally left to their own devices so long as they continued to trade with the motherland.

We also should be inclined to wonder what the chances of those minutemen militias would have been if the British really had been patrolling every urban street and garrisoning in every townhouse from Boston to Savannah.

Remember, too, the American Revolution was a city-dweller’s revolt. The country was overwhelmingly Loyalist; in parts of New York and Georgia up to 90% of farmers are thought to have remained faithful to the Crown.

This is only natural, though: as with all Enlightened rebellions, its power centre was merchants and large landowners, not the humble toilers, whose true agrarian values are never swayed by ethereal ideas.

There was no real tyranny, which is a poor start to motivating a modest and faithful agrarian to leave his family and fight against his king.

Others have made the point better than I will, but it is worth looking into the idea that England’s policies were not nearly as grievous as the Revolutionaries claimed, and it might even be said that the British were immensely conciliatory to the best extent they could have been.

What conservative historians such as Russell Kirk have rightly noted is that ours was a revolt on political principles. The Colonies were, we’ll someday be brave enough to admit, not really oppressed by any common-sense standard.

They were, however, badly oppressed by the standards of Enlightenment Whiggism, a standard I, and I am sure many conservatives, would not be so ready to agree with were it not for the unfortunate circumstances at hand.

The Founding Fathers, we are told, fought generally for self-rule, manifestly by the slogan, “No taxation without representation.” The British did, indeed, tax them without a single American seat in Parliament.

But there is the troubling fact that until 1832 only powerful landowners in England could vote: before the Reform Act of 1832 there were only about 200,000 eligible voters in England.

It might be said that most Englishmen were taxed without representation also.

The logical conclusion is also that the American colonists, if they were indeed fighting for their traditional English liberties, by and large were fighting for the representative rights of the small moneyed classes, not their own.

This follows another Enlightenment idea: that the “self-made” wealthy bourgeoisie, not the monarchical aristocracy, is the most meritorious class and therefore society’s natural aristocracy, as Jefferson put it.

The American Revolution was a bourgeois political act against the traditional institutions of English society for the purposes of promulgating Enlightenment Whiggism, an inherently bourgeois ideology.

They were not defending any sacred rights except those recently won by the middle class, and the only expectation was a big-L, classical Liberal state dominated by bourgeois interests and values—not traditional English values, not Tory or conservative values, but values that were largely conceived in Scotland (Locke) and in France (Rousseau) that traditional English institutions (virtual representation, aristocratic privilege, etc.) interfered with.

And then there is the Constitution, which sheds light further on the untruth of the myth of the American Revolution’s conservatism.

The English Constitutions have two distinguishing features: (a) they are intentionally unwritten and unsystematic, and (b) they are not at all an affirmation of so-called “natural rights”.

As Burke pointed out, one great error of the Jacobins was their sense of entitlement. Rather, he posited the idea of entailed inheritance:

“an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity; an estate specially belonging to the people of this kingdom without any reference whatever to any more general or prior right”.

In short, when our British forefathers felt they had the right to something, they asserted it; if they were prudent, they passed it on to their children; and if their children were not careful, they would lose it.

One would not likely find the phrase, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are…” anywhere in English legal history.

It never occurred to anyone before the Enlightenment that they’d be entitled to such a thing as freedom of speech by simply having been born.

True, the English tended to be leaps and bounds more moderate than their continental counterparts, but those ancient peoples would be hard pressed to forget that any bounty they ever reaped was by the sword.

America, being a British colony, rightly saw itself as part of the British nation and entitled to British rights. What they lost was the British sense of history.

They may well have forgotten that, before the rise of the middle class, no one was entitled to anything.

Peace and prosperity, as neatly every Founder observed, tend to breed forgetfulness. It may be they, however, whose memory had lapsed.

By now it is best to recap what’s known about America’s inheritance of Whiggism: its ideas of power are inherently centred on the middle- and landowning classes, and as such it is plutocratic and materialistic; it is entirely a product of Enlightenment ideas foreign to English thought; it was largely a revolt against traditional English institutions; it was an urban rebellion opposed most overwhelmingly by the modest agrarian class; and it was pressed in the absence of tyranny.

What we have suffered in defending the Revolution verbatim is the loss of the entire intellectual history of Toryism.

Burke, though a member of the Whig Party, was rather a Tory thinker—not a Jacobite, perhaps, but a believer in the aristocratic values and institutions that just will not do in a country like ours that remains so faithful to its Whiggish orthodoxy.

American conservatives are only allowed to “conserve” the moderate bits of the Enlightenment, which is a rather awful lot if you support things like hierarchy, wish we had traditions rooted in ancient institutions, oppose materialist standards of merit, think our country’s history extends well before the mid-18^th century, and are inclined to believe that arguments over entitlement don’t constitute the best of political philosophy.

I tend to think there is a part of every Progressive that wishes they could just call themselves socialists and not have to dance around infamy anymore.

There is something wrong about attacking a term like “socialism” when the supposed socialists would be slandered if they ever presented their ideas honestly.

It is a sort of intellectual smallness that bullies principles into submission rather than refuting them on any sort of merit.

So far as socialism is “a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole,” modern progressives are socialists—and the sooner we let them speak their mind the sooner we can fight ideas with ideas instead of rhetoric with rhetoric.

Likewise I think there is a part of every imaginative conservative that wishes they could be a Tory, some part of them that is sad they may only use the term in a moniker like “Bohemian Tory” when, at heart, they hate the whole business of Whiggism.

Part of them knows there is a chance for freedom without the rigidity of a written constitution, and part of them knows the odds of preserving that freedom are better when they can just say what they mean: not, “God gives me the right to bear arms,” but, “My father, and his father, and his father, and all their fathers before them fought for this right, and I am damn well not giving it up to you.”

There is that great anti-capitalist urge to say, There must be something better—more Christian—more noble—than just the free market. There is an instinctual love of the ancient monarchies of Europe and an irrepressible desire for a founding myth that fills the void of kings and aristocrats, knights and dames.

The Founder’s Whiggism tore the American people from the ages of chivalry and piety and trembling at the powers of nature that came long before George Washington and John Adams. We keep trying to convince ourselves that America was born into this great liberty and understanding, forgetting how our English forefathers fought for millennia for what meagre freedoms we inherited.

We like to think we appeared with a silver spoon in our mouths, forced to suppress the memories of those days when earthy serfs toiled beneath the walls of stone castles and their decadent warrior-kings, the monks in great cathedrals handling books and money and chanting for the souls of the dead—none of them, in their own way, more noble in spirit than the others.

American history, like modern British history, started somewhere in the late 800s with King Alfred of Wessex, the first “King of the Anglo-Saxons”. Conservatives may do well to reclaim that near-millennium for ourselves.

And if we are Tories indeed, we ought to be unafraid to say so.