First, the founding principles of America were whatever they were; that is, there were principles stated and then there were principles actually adhered to (and these might be the same): the principles adhered to were the actual founding principles. Second, we are where we are; that is, accelerating on the slippery slope to Hell wearing greased shoes supplied and mandated by the State.

If you want to argue that we are where we are because of what the founding principles were, you have a case. We started from somewhere, and we ended up here. We did not start from some point other than the point we started from. That starting point was the actual founding principles, by definition. We are where we are, by observation. Therefore, there is a path from the actual principles to the point at which we now stand.

If you want to argue that we are where we are in spite of the founding principles, you can still make a case, but you have a much harder time of it. You can say that at some point we abandoned the founding principles, and so necessarily adopted other guiding principles in their place, and from those foreign guiding principles we ended up where we are now. But then you have to explain how the founding principles could not possibly have given way to the foreign principles. But the founding principles did in fact lead to the foreign principles. Even if it is not so the founding principles are exactly synonymous with our current degrading situation, the founding principles did allow the entrance of the foreign principles. The founding principles may not rhyme with our current state, but there is assonance.

Another way is to say the foreign principles were imposed by force, as in a war, by invaders who Believed Differently. There is no historical justification for this. Saying people through time came to a different understanding, and saw a gradual abandonment, of the founding principles is the same as saying the founding principles gave rise to foreign principles, etc. You can also argue, with some force, that no matter what founding principles are started with, any government instituted by men will come to a bad end. But that doesn’t explain how so many governments who have adopted principles which seem to be like ours have come to the same bad end, arriving from more or less the same path.

You can say the founding principles were not really the founding principles, but were something else. This could be so. We adopted as a definition of founding principles the principles that were in place at the founding, whatever they were. But those actual principles might be difficult to tease out. We don’t know what everybody then was thinking. What we do have are direct statements from the founders which say, “These are our founding principles.” That does not mean, of course, that these statements were the actual principles used by the government and people. But they could be, or there could only be overlaps.

That tortuous introduction was necessary to bring us to the current debate on the right about “liberalism”, which is said to be one of the declared if not actual founding principles. If “liberalism” (as yet undefined) was an actual founding principle, then there is a path from liberalism to where we are now. If instead liberalism was only a stated but not actual founding principle, then there was no path, and so it may be a good thing to actually try it.

Vincent Philip Munoz’s NRO article “Defending American Classical Liberalism” is as good an entry point to this deabte as any other. He contrasts “‘radical’ Catholics” (I lost count of the number of times he put scare quotes around radical) with classical liberals like himself. Patrick Deneen, Adrian Vermeule, and others say liberalism was an actual founding principle, and thus the path from it to here necessarily exists and is plain. Munoz, and many others, also say liberalism was an actual founding principle, but that liberalism did not have to lead to where we are. This is a counterfactual argument, meaning any number of premises can make it true. But the problem is, as our second premises insists, we are where we are and we are not where we are not. So really what Munoz has in mind, without understanding it, is that true liberalism was not an actual founding principle.

Munoz says the radicals deny that one of the founding principles was objective truth, and for evidence against this cites the Declaration of Independence which states “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights.” From this it is obvious the founders held the principle of objective truth. Munoz asks “In what sense are men created equal?” and answers quoting Jefferson:

All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.

From this tortured (and generally untrue) paragraph, Munoz concludes “Both the Declaration and Jefferson in his commentary on it ground the truth of human equality in the created order of nature.” Equality and rights are thus claimed to be actual founding principles and to be true.

The radicals agree that equality and rights were actual founding principles, but disagree that those principles are true. Men are not created equal. No set of observations has yet verified equality; it has to be believed by theory alone. Radicals also say that it is more proper to speak of men endowed by their Creator with a certain inalienable nature or essence. This emphasizes duty over rights.

If insisting on equality and rights are what liberalism is, it is also clear that the path from liberalism to now is self-evident. Alexander Solzhenitsyn described the path as well as anybody. The end of the path is reached at Anthony Kennedy infamous words: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” Munoz calls this (what it is) an “abomination”. But it is obvious to radicals, as it is not to Munoz, that Kennedy began with equality and rights and ended at an abomination. Munoz does not offer which principles he believes whence this abomination sprang.

Munoz next claims that it was an actual founding principle, and a theorem of equality and rights, that “consent is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition of legitimate rule of man over man.” In support, he quotes Virginia’s Declaration of Rights: “All men are born equally free and independent…” and thus consent follows. Munoz says “To reject the necessity of consent, which some ‘radical’ Catholics seem to do, is to reject natural equality.”

A radical Catholic would say Rousseau himself could have written Virginia’s Declaration. A radical would therefore agree that consent is a theorem of equality and rights, but disagree that consent is necessary, or even attainable or desirable. Rousseau was wrong: men are not born free nor independent. Children do not (necessarily) consent to be ruled by their parents, nor do the aged, infirm, inducted, imprisoned, mentally feeble always give consent, and the rest of us do not always (and with decreasing frequency) consent to the rule of the State. Yet ruled we still are. Try standing on the street tomorrow and say “I withdraw my consent” and see what happens. (Hint: nothing.)

A difficulty here is it is now next to impossible to envisage a state that is not all-powerful, as ours is becoming. So when you try to imagine a different political system, such as, say, a monarchy, in which consent in the classical sense is absent, you are liable to see it as also all-powerful, and therefore tyrannical. This is an understandable but bad habit that colors all political discussions.

Munoz next claims it was an actual founding principle to distinguish “liberty from license.” The founders, he said, “understood liberty to be the exercise of freedom consistent with the precepts of the natural law; license was understood to be the exercise of freedom contrary to the natural law’s precepts.”

Allowing for differences in interpretations of natural law, radicals agree with these definitions of liberty and license. Radicals say, though, that these were not actual founding principles. They couldn’t be because there is no way to derive equality and our obsession of “rights” from natural law. The two cannot co-exist at the same time and in the same place. It’s one or the other, and the actual choice was equality and rights. Of course, since the natural law is true, and equality are rights are false, the natural law will time and again assert itself, just as gravity does to the man who claims it’s not fair that physical laws restrain him. This is why we can hear the Founders scorn license, but why we everywhere see it. The Founders could claim to adopt natural law as a principle, but without a rigorous explication of what the natural law was and meant, people were free to apply equality and rights to it, and we end up with Kennedy’s definition—which I’d bet he argues follows from what he means by “natural law.”

In Part II, obligations and religion and constitutionalism.

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