In my previous post I linked to a review, by Michael Anton, of a new book on the American Founding by Thomas G. West of Hillsdale College. I have a keen interest in the Founding, and in particular I am, like nearly everyone in the “neoreactionary” community, dogged by the question of just where things went off the rails in the West.

Central to that question is this one: is the decay we see all around us in the early 21st century a result of the principles the American system was built upon, or did it occur in spite of them?

Every social system sturdy enough to achieve maturity faces this question when it reaches, sooner or later, a crisis of doubt and exhaustion. When this happens, there will always arise two factions in bitter opposition. One believes that the problem lies in laxity and infidelity regarding founding principles; the other calls into question the principles themselves. One side will argue that radical change has been foolish and destructive, and will call for a doubling down on original principles; the other will say that those principles are (at best) obsolete, and that the only way out is to double down on change itself. The pattern has repeated itself throughout history in nearly every complex human system, whether political, social, or religious — and in these last years it has brought the United States to the brink of civil war.

In the United States of 2018, the debate is almost entirely between a Left faction that calls for radical and accelerating change, and a Right that seeks a return to strict Constitutionalism, States’ rights, meritocracy, border control, diminution of Federal power, demographic stability, and individual liberty — in general, what today’s academic jargon would call a “re-centering” of the philosophy of the Founders. Listen to any of the prominent voices on the Right — whether it’s the Claremont or Hoover Institutes, or National Review, or Thomas Sowell, or the late Charles Krauthammer, or media personalities like Mark Levin or Rush Limbaugh — and what you will hear is that the nation’s problem is that it has lost touch with the Enlightenment principles enshrined in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence; with the philosophy of Locke and Hume and Montesquieu and Jefferson and Franklin and Madison.

Out here in the remote fastnesses of neoreaction, however, the question goes deeper: Was the Founding itself a wrong turn? Were the axioms and premises behind the architecture of the United States sufficiently flawed as to doom the whole enterprise ab ovo?

For the dominant faction of the contemporary American Right, the answer is simply No, and that’s that. We have strayed, and all of the nation’s contemporary ills are the result.

For the radical Left, the answer is a resounding Yes; indeed the mere fact that the nation was designed by white men, some of whom were slave-owners, is enough to taint the whole thing beyond any hope of redemption. It all has to go, root and branch.

The question is also an open one, though, for those of us to the right of the Right. Clearly we have strayed from the Founding, a very long way indeed, with many injurious consequences. But was this inevitable? Is it irreversible? What is the way forward? (What, exactly, do we want, anyway?) Look at the Declaration of Independence, which has been, up until my time at least, the American equivalent of Scripture. It is a stirring document, but it is also an article of revolutionary propaganda, arguably containing many testimonial falsehoods. More to the point, though, its preamble, which has reverberated throughout the history of the American nation, declares as “self-evident” a set of propositions that a rational observer could not only call into question, but believe to be self-evidently false. Upon how solid a philosophical foundation, then, was the American nation actually erected? These questions give me little rest.

Our commenter Jacques is troubled by them as well. In a reply to my post, he wrote:

Unfortunately there is the same old unthinking assertion of “equality’. We’re told that everyone is “naturally’ equally “free and independent’. Well, if those concepts have any real content it’s just not true. The highly intelligent, for example, are naturally more free and independent in many key respects than people who are borderline retarded. And if it’s not about any ordinary notions of freedom and independence, it’s not clear what it means. Probably nothing but it sounds nice. As evidence, I guess, we’re told that nature has not “delineated’ some humans as “natural rulers’ and others as “natural workers or slaves’. Really? It sure seems that way if you allow yourself to admit what you actually observe. I’d say Trump or Hitler or Napoleon seem far more naturally suited to ruling and leading than some other people I’ve met. Men generally seem to be natural leaders, and women seem to be generally naturally inclined to follow men. He then says we can confirm this by noting that “no man ever consents to slavery’. But, first, it seems that often men have consented to it; second, slavery is not the only kind of “work’ or subordination to another person. (If this point is meant to rebut the idea that there is a natural hierarchy, it’s a straw man or equivocation.) Lots of people seem quite happy to fall in line and obey some charismatic guru or boss or dictator or priest or psychiatrist or”¦ These arguments are paper-thin. The upshot is supposed to be that “No man may therefore justly rule any other without that other’s consent’. But what does that even mean? How can I consent to be ruled by you? Once consent is given, and you’re in charge, presumably at that point I don’t get to be in charge anymore. If the consent has to be ongoing, that would seem to require that you’re not really ruling over me”“I always have a veto. But if it doesn’t have to be ongoing, what does it matter whether way back when it was initially given? If it’s legitimate for you to _now_ decide for me, even if I don’t agree or don’t like it, why couldn’t it have been legitimate for you to just take charge without my initial consent? It’s all just a big mess. What do you think Malcolm? Doesn’t it seem like, on these key points, the reviewer and author are just re-asserting some very dubious liberal-modern claims? It really does seem like the usual empty “propositionalism’ despite their disavowals.

Jacques’ comment raises, directly or indirectly, these titanic questions:

1) In what coherent sense could Jefferson and the Founders actually have understood men to be “equal”? 2) What does equality mean in the context of liberty? (How can they not be mutually antagonistic?) 3) Does a truly just equality imply different forms or degrees of liberty for different people? 4) How is the concept of consent compatible with any coherent notion of sovereignty? 5) Is there any such thing as natural rights? Where do they come from? Are they even conceivable in the absence of God? 6) What can it possibly mean for rights to be “inalienable”? 7) Was the erosion of the principles of the Founding, and the nation’s decline into its present condition, implicit in those principles themselves? Or was it the result of a decline in the civic virtue of the people? If so, was that inevitable? 8) Whatever one might say about all of that, the founding of the American nation was a wholly unprecedented event in political history, and the men assembled at the end of the war against England had, to put it mildly, a very difficult job to do. They rose to the occasion with, I believe, a collective genius the like of which has not been seen before or since. They set out, in an era of hereditary monarchies — many of them senescent and failing — to attempt a radically new model based on liberty and individual dignity. Ought they not to have tried? Given what they had to work with — a widely heterogeneous assortment of states, economies, Christian sects, and transplanted British subcultures, spread across a vast and variegated landscape, needing to be welded together in the aftermath of a bitterly exhausting general war — could they have done any better? How? 9) What ought we to do now?

If you think I am now about to answer these questions, neatly and precisely, in numerical order, I’m sorry to disappoint you, though I will at least take some of them up in forthcoming posts. To the extent that they are answerable at all — and I think some of them are — doing so has been the work of many lifetimes of study and reflection, and has engendered endless controversy. (I’ve been thinking about them for a long time now, too.) My aim in this post was simply to unpack them and spread them on the table.

Please have a go at them. I will caution you, though, against the temptation to imagine that you already have them all figured out.