Articles and Speeches
The Roots of American Order
Submitted by Admin on Thu, 2006-11-16 07:09America's rich and vibrant history, and her legacy of liberty, exists in continuity with her European past. Historian Clarence Carson made this astute observation,
Americans did not cast themselves off from their past experience, from ideas and practices of long standing, or from older traditions and institutions. In their building they relied extensively upon ancient and modern history and that which had come to them through the ages. What separates this as an epic from abortive revolutions is that these men brought to a fertile junction their heritage—which contained several great streams, namely, the Classical, the Christian, and the English—their experience, and contemporary ideas. The Founders stood on the shoulders of giants, thought it sometimes requires giants also to attain such heights. 1
Therefore, America's remarkable success as a nation, and an experiment in ordered liberty owes to the fertile ground and soil her roots were planted in. In the establishment of the nation, and securing her independence from Great Britain, America did not make a clean break with the past—but stood in continuity with the Anglo-American common law tradition and a broader cultural inheritance from Europe.
In his perennial classic, the Roots of American Order, Russell Kirk elucidated on the roots of order in the United States:
Although the tree of American order has grown in height and breadth during the past two hundred years, it could not have flourished so if those roots had been unhealthy. Those roots go deep, but they require watering from time to time. Whatever the failings of America [presently], the American order has been conspicious success in the perspective of human history. Under God, a large measure of justice has been achieved; the state is strong and energetic; and a sense of community endures... [T]he history of most societies is a record of painful striving, brief success (if success at all), and then decay and ruin. No man can know the future, but most Americans believe that their order will continue to 'bring out in this life the dialectic union of authority and liberty.' That will be true so long as the roots of order have proliferating life in the them. 2
Historically, Americans have not countenanced collectivism to the degree that their modern European counterparts have. Moreover, it may be said that the American mind is fundamentally antithetical to collectivism of all stripes — in spite of the New Deal and Great Society legacies. Historian Mark Puls notes,
The theme of individual liberty became central to the American psyche, manifested in Jefferson's notion of the self-reliant farmer, and carried westward in the rugged individualism of the frontiersman and pioneers. It became the underlying theme of the country's seminal literature, reflected in the works of Washington Irving, Herman Melville, James Fennimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, William James, and countless other writers. 3
- 1. The Rebirth of Liberty: The Founding of the American Republic 1760-1800, (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1973), p. 21.
- 2. Kirk, Russell, The Roots of American Order, (Bryn Mawr, PA: ISI Books, 1974)
- 3. Puls, Mark, Samuel Adams: Father of the American Revolution, (New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan), p. 236
Lincoln, Abraham
Submitted by Anonymous on Sat, 2006-11-18 05:40
Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States, and the first Republican President, is generally held in low esteem by paleoconservatives. Jurist Marshall DeRosa notes,
Lincoln's expansive interpretation of presidential powers made him the most imperial president in American history, thereby setting a dangerous precedent for predisposed successors. The incarceration of approximately twenty-thousand political prisoners, the closing of three hundred newspapers, the interruptions of state legislatures, the blockade of the South, the unilateral suspension of habeas corpus, explicit and implicit defense of the Supreme Court, the sanctioning of the creation of West Virginia, private property seizures, and electioneering/voting irregularities have all been rationalized as necessary war measures. 1Lincoln has been dubbed the American Caesar, and many conservative observers see his war to supress the secession of the southern states as America's journey across the Rubicon. Lincoln ushered in an unprecedented level of corruption, centralization, and usurpation of lawful authority, in flagrant violation of the U.S. Constitution. By his precedents, Lincoln arguably effectuated the wholesale evisceration of the compact nature of the Union and the abdication of the constitutional polity of the American founding fathers under the pretense of saving the Union. The twentieth-century New Deal had its roots in the postbellum Reconstruction of the 1860s. As economists Mark Thornton and Robert Ekelund, Jr. observe:
The flurry of new laws, regulations, and bureaucracies created by President Lincoln and the Republican Party is reminiscent of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, for the volume, scope, and questionable constitutionality of its legislative output. . . . [I]t should not be too surprising to learn that the term "New Deal" was actually coined in March 1865 by a newspaper editor in Raleigh to characterize Lincoln and the Republicans and persuade North Carolina voters to rejoin the Union. The massive expansion of the federal government into the economy led [historian] Daniel Elazar to claim that "one could easily call Lincoln’s presidency the New Deal of the 1860s."2Frank Meyer explained,
Were it not for the wounds that Lincoln inflicted upon the Constitution, it would have been infinitely more difficult for Franklin Roosevelt to carry through his revolution, for the coercive welfare state to come into being and bring about the conditions against which we are fighting today. Lincoln, I would maintain, undermined the constitutional safeguards of freedom as he opened the way to centralized government with all its attendant political evils. 3
- 1. Derosa, Marshall, "M.E. Bradford's Constitutional Theory," A Defender of Southern Conservatism: M.E. Bradford and His Achievements. (Columbia, MO: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1999)
- 2. Thornton, Mark, and Robert Ekelund, Jr. Tariffs, Blockades, and Inflation: The Economics of the Civil War, (Lanham, MD: SR Books, 2004), p. 99
- 3. East, John P., The American Conservative Movement: The Philosophical Founders, (Washington, DC: Regnery Books, 1986), p. 87.
