Hello. I’m Matthew Spaulding, vice president of Hillsdale College. I’m at our Washington DC campus where I’m also the dean of the Stephen Amie Van Andel Graduate School of Government. I’d like to speak to you today about our common purpose, about America’s common purpose, the things that are inherently American and that are the heart of American conservatism. In the eyes of many in the world, this every 4 year ceremony we accept as normal is nothing less than a miracle.
Today is the concrete expression of a stunning fact, these 200 years since our government began. In America, we understand that a nation is only living as long as it is striving. We face a hostile ideology ruthless in purpose and insidious in men. Only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. Being an American involves the embrace of high ideals.
We, leaders of inspired idealism, leaders who dream greatly and This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive, and will prosper. Whether we go forward together with courage or turn back to policies that weakened our economy, diminished our leadership in the world, America’s future will be in your hands. There are many things upon which we disagree concerning domestic policy, foreign policy, economic policy. Those disagreements are important, and it’s important that we discuss and deliberate and resolve those disagreements. But those disagreements should not blind us to the things we hold in common, the more important and higher aspects of America’s purpose, but also the things we wish to conserve.
Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton famously disagreed on just about everything you can imagine, especially when it came to important national policies. But they agreed deeply on the most fundamental questions about the rights of man grounded in nature, about the essence of the rule of law and constitutional government. Those are the things that are important for us to understand, because those things, in addition to various policy matters, we as conservatives hold to be true. But those things, the more fundamental things, are the essence, the foundation of conservatism. So I’m not gonna talk about conservatism as much as that we wish to conserve.
Those are the principles that are our inheritance, and those are the principles growing out of the Greeks and the Romans, informed by Athens and Jerusalem, going through British constitutionalism that culminate in America. So as we deliberate and discuss the the policy questions that we need to determine, it is important to keep in mind the larger objective, which is to recover, to restore, to conserve, and to save our country. Every nation derives some meaning from, underlying ideas, from its ethnic background, its character, common religion, and shared history, But this country is is actually different. It was it was founded at a particular time, in a particular place, by a particular people, and it is that rich heritage of ideas, especially those stated in our core fundable documents, that define us still as a nation and as a people. America was revolutionary, but not in the way we normally think of that word, especially if we have in mind the French revolution or the communist revolutions in Russia or Cuba.
It was revolutionary in the sense of ideas. It was in the minds and the hearts of the people, John Adams once wrote. That was a source of the real American Revolution. It was about the ideas upon which a nation was to be established, ideas that are applicable to all men in all times, as Abraham Lincoln once said. And they proclaimed that principle rather than will was to be the ultimate ground of government.
It was at a particular time in history that these universal ideas became the foundation of a particular system of government and a particular political culture. And that revolution culminated not in the guillotine, but in constitutional government, a government that has long endured. Those ideas, which we wanna discuss briefly, are found in the declaration of independence and the constitution. Those ideas still define us as much as they are debated in many parts of our media and culture, and they define us because our system points backward, not merely historically backward, but as a practical matter. Our first law is our highest law, the constitution.
And our system, in principle, is built upon the foundations of the Declaration of Independence. Those ideas, that constitution, still are beacons for everyone in the world. They’re still warnings for despots around the world, and they are still the brightest lights and the greatest inspiration for freedom and liberty in the world, but especially here at home. Although much of our history begins earlier, we can define the American founding period, as encompassing 2 pivotal moments. 1 is between 1775, the opening, the Battle of Lexington, and the Treaty of Paris in 1783, the American Revolution.
And the other is after the revolution in 1785 when it starts earnestly getting a movement towards the constitution, and then perhaps 1797, the constitutional period at the end of Washington’s first administration. And those two periods are dominated by 2 monumental documents, the declaration of independence and the United States constitution. The movement towards the declaration of independence begins in 17/63. America, we can say, begins as a tax revolt. The British, after the French and Indian War, needed revenue, and they sought that revenue by tax bills, taxing the American colonists.
The American colonists objected from the very beginning on the grounds that, historically, all the way back to Magna Carta, they had a right against taxation without representation. The British passed tax bills and then revoked those bills, but always maintained they had the right to pass whatever legislation they wanted in all circumstances whatsoever. After one of those acts, the American colonists got together for the first time in in what is called the Stamp Act Congress. That legislation was also withdrawn, but the British continued to pass various measures, including measures to tax various goods, including tea, which, after all has been withdrawn except for that tax, the Americans dumped into Boston Harbor. That, of course, led to the First Continental Congress.
But something very important happened at the First Continental Congress. They started to debate and discuss the grounds upon which they might need to establish their independence. Up to that time, they had largely acted to defend and and appeal to their rights as Englishmen, rights going back to Magna Carta itself and coming down through British constitutionalism. But they realized that that ground would not not be sufficient to fight a war against the British king, and so they considered other options in a debate at the First Continental Congress. Our charters, our rights before parliament, ultimately, they char chose to ground their claims upon nature, a more philosophically and more fundamental ground that was, a defense of rights behind Magna Carta, behind and beyond the rights of Englishmen to their rights as humans, and so they turned to nature as the ground for the claim of rights, the ground upon which they would make their claims of independence, the grounds upon which they would assert, their rights as independent nation.
And it was this turn to nature that is classically represented in the Declaration of Independence, but seen throughout many of the documents developing from the 17 sixties to 1776. It’s classically stated within the Declaration of Independence by reference to the laws of nature and nature’s god, which is itself an incorporation of, aspects of a much deeper and longer natural law tradition, going back to the Greeks and Romans, but also through English thinking, especially through thinkers like John Locke. That thinking, that grounding, gave the American Revolution a deep and fundamental mooring, a mooring that if it’s lost, turns to more revolutionary ideas, a rejection of truth, a growing sense of relativism, and ultimately a nihilism that there are no truths worth conserving or living for. The declaration of independence, which is, say, the philosophical grounding of the American Revolution, takes an opposite course. It grounds its sense of politics in the laws of nature and nature’s god.
There are truths that are knowable that can be the guide and the ground for politics. These are self evident truths, and the first one is that all men are created equal. We’re not equal in many aspects, size, and shape. We’re equal in the fundamentals in our humanity, which means that none of us have more rights than another. None has a right to rule, and none is condemned to be ruled.
This sense of equality at the center of the Declaration of Independence, grounded in nature, not merely the the whims of rulers, the whims of Congress or the Supreme Court, is what gives meaning to this nation. Out of that grows our equal fundamental rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Our own lives, we fundamentally have a right to. Our liberty as human beings. The founders pre preferred the word liberty, which is an old Latin word as opposed to freedom, a more Germanic word, precisely because it implied that liberty which is inherent to human beings.
And we are right to the pursuit of happiness. They didn’t use Locke’s formulation of life, liberty, and property, but the broader notion of the pursuit of happiness. It includes property. Property is the flooring, if you will. We have a right to our property.
We have a right to to, acquire property, to buy and sell property. We have a right to add to property through the fruits of our labor. But beyond that, we have a higher and more important right, which is the culmination of our happiness, which is a right to come to know the truth about the most important things and especially religious truth, hence the grounding of the right to religious liberty, which we will see expressed most famously later in the constitution itself in the first amendment. I I might note here the great contradiction of slavery. It existed at the time of the founding.
Indeed, the draft of the declaration condemned the slave trade, but great compromises were made with slavery. But most importantly, the seed of its condemnation, the beginnings of the abolitionist movement, actually grow out of the Declaration of Independence and its proclamation that all men are created equal. In addition to the idea of equality and rights, the other great truth that is self evident, according to declaration, is the question of consent. Legitimate governments must grow out of the consent of the governed. Indeed, if we are equal in fundamentals, we’re equally human, we have equal rights, the only way to proceed is through some sense of consent, which in our country is representative forms of government.
Lastly, I note that we have a collective right to alter or abolish our government when it does not do its fundamental purpose, which is to secure these rights. And those cases, we can do something about it if it becomes destructive of those ends. This is oftentimes referred to the right of revolution, but I note that it’s immediately moderated and qualified. There has to be a long trail of abuses, and it’s not to be done for light and transient reasons. We don’t have a right to take the law into our own hands.
And if we have a right to abolish government, we also has have a duty and obligation to institute new government. In short, these ideas, I would argue, that there are truths to be understood in light of the laws of nature and nature’s god, and that evident among those truths are that all men are created equal. They equally possess fundamental certain rights, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The job of government is to secure those rights according to the consent of the governed. Those ideas are the very essence of American conservatism and what we wish to conserve.
They aren’t the gifts of government. They aren’t to be determined by mere majorities. They aren’t based on laws. They are grounded in the very nature and essence of things, which gives conservatism a permanent grounding and a fundamental ground for it to proceed. In addition to those more fundamental principles, we would also add a bedrock concept, which is unstated in many ways, but seen throughout everything growing out of the American Revolution and our constitution, which is the rule of law.
Indeed, the development of the rule of law through history, through British constitutionals into the American founding is one of the greatest accomplishments of western civilization. 1 need only read history or perhaps read Shakespeare to see that throughout much of that history, there wasn’t the rule of law. Indeed, the person who had the most power was the one who determined what the law was. Americans, through their colonial experience, had learned to rule themselves under British constitutionalism, and through that experience of taxation and increasing despotism, had had the experience to continue to rule themselves and took that as a fundamental element of what their founding was meant to accomplish. There had been experiments to do so.
In states, there were numerous failures and great successes. Many states were driven by questions of faction and disagreement. They weren’t protecting rights. The Articles of Confederation passed during the American Revolution were, in many ways, a great accomplishment, but also a great failure in what they were unable to do in terms of creating a nation. And all this led to a great constitutional convention in the spring and summer and fall of 17/87 that created the American Constitution.
That constitution is a great example, perhaps the greatest example, of constitutionalism in Western civilization. And they created what is today the longest national constitution still in use. It’s laid out in core parts and articles, creating 3 branches of government, the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary, starting with the most democratic to the least, beginning with the lawmaking branch. And each three of those branches begins with a vesting clause, which to say the constitution is one of delegated powers. They’re delegated precisely because the declaration has first established the sovereignty of the people.
The people possess rights, not the government. Indeed, according to the American understanding of politics, no government, the federal government, state governments, the dog catcher, possess rights at all. They only have certain powers, and those are laid out very carefully in our American constitutional system, enumerated, especially in the first article, concerning the legislature, and then less so, significantly, concerning the executive and judiciary. The constitution also includes a bill of rights, which importantly, especially in the first and second amendments, protect our most fundamental freedoms, our religious liberty, the right to speech, free speech, and free press, rights to assembly and petition in the first, and the second, the right to bear arms. Those were understood to be fundamental rights necessary to protect in Republican government.
Today, we often see the bill of rights as the constitution. That’s especially how the Supreme Court often looks at it. But it’s important to understand that they were amendments, additions to the body of the constitution itself. The result of all this is a decentralized structure of a strong and energetic but limited federal government, a government that allows for a decentralization of power into the states and to local government, and because of local government, self government. This system of governing, of limited powers at the top, of more powers at the state level, and as many powers as possible, actually not controlled by politics, but allowed to be governed by self governing individuals is what creates the essence of American democracy.
The institutions of civil society, churches, schoolrooms, families, those are the most important political institutions in our system. Those are the ones that play the most important role in shaping our characters and shaping ourselves to be good self governing citizens. The constitution, the federal constitution and the state constitutions, create a framework by which we can govern ourselves. They are meant to secure the rights of the declaration of independence. They are meant to uphold the powers defined in their documents, especially those that are delegated to the federal constitution and limited at the federal level, and they are meant to provide liberty for ourselves and our posterity.
This conception of government, these principles was the American consensus despite a history of great disagreements. And indeed, the one exception proves the rule, and that was when we had a fundamental disagreement over a fundamental question, slavery and the civil war. John c Calhoun famously said that slavery was a positive good. Chief justice Taney said that slaves were property and that they had no rights that we were bound to respect. And even Stephen Douglas, the senator from Illinois, said that this should be solved through the questions of popular sovereignty.
Anything as long as the majority consented. It was Abraham Lincoln who objected to all of these arguments and instead recalled the nation to its founding principles, recalled it to its constitution, but a constitution which was understood in light of the principles of the declaration. These ideas came to be challenged, and our system changed in many fundamental ways after the civil war, especially beginnings of 20th century when a movement, a growing movement of ideas, especially coming from Germany and France and educational systems in Europe, led to what is called progressivism. The progressives had certain antifoundational principles at heart. They did not believe there were any truths or first principles and grounded their system on a sense of relativism.
They also believed that there were no principles that withstood the test of time. There were merely ideas that were historically bound and grounded. They believed that all things would progress and evolve. That led them to a new theory of unlimited government. Indeed, they wanted to change the limited constitutional system that defined our republic to one of a growing, evolving, and living constitution.
The key operational part that they designed was what they called administration, what we today refer to as administrative government. Government would be mostly conducted by experts and bureaucrats who are not within the congress or the executive, at least in terms of being subject to the consent of the governed, they were independent of politics, separated, such that they would conduct government outside of consent. That was also based on a new theory of rights. Job of government was still to to secure those rights, but those rights were no longer those consistent with and defined by our nature as much as created by government, especially by courts based on the demands, demands of groups, claims. What what the progressives wanted was to establish a freedom from nature, a liberation from human nature, such that it becomes the autonomous pursuit of self realization, And so the job of government is to secure that liberation of what the human wills.
An objection to the progressive movement, actually, is the origins of what we today call conservatism. But here, I would actually associate the the actual beginnings of conservatism with a rejection of progressivism. And I and I do so to remind us of the debate here in the American context of these two great alternatives. In particular, in in in the election of 1912, both Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt were pursuing and arguing for progressive ideas. And then later, we associate this argument with, Calvin Coolidge, for instance, began to see that this was a threat to our constitution and behind the constitution to the groundings the philosophical groundings in the declaration of independence.
That pushback, that beginning of conservatism, we see then argued in, especially in the judicial context where it first became became evident. We see it in the pushback against the New Deal that ultimately culminated in, Barry Goldwater’s campaign or in the arguments against the Great Society, which led to the great efforts of Ronald Reagan in the 19 eighties. So how then do we proceed? How do we learn from the principles of the American founding going forward in a in a world of, disagreement, in a world of, particular circumstances informed by those ideas? And here, I actually wanna reintroduce an I an idea that itself is is built upon an older, and more classical understanding of politics.
A world of politics, what I would suggest, the founders had at least one foot in. That is to introduce the cardinal virtue of prudence. It’s it’s in the declaration of independence. If you look at that famous second paragraph, the first part of the paragraph introduces all those abstract ideas. All men are created equal.
These are self evident truths. Governors secure those rights based on consent. But that’s one sentence, and the very next sentence begins, prudence will dictate. That is to say, prudence is this operational virtue, this moral virtue, this central virtue of the statesman, which translates abstract truths, fundamentals, and how how do we apply them in particular circumstances. And and and that is also an essential quality of of conservatism.
Taking a principle, a thing that is does not change, that’s abstract, that’s true, that’s a universal, and applying it in particular circumstances, such that it has an actual reality, also a truth, in that time. Conservatism should not be approached as itself a set of doctrinal ideas that never change. Our policy disagreements are just that, things that change depending on the circumstances. We must be consistent and strong and clear on the principles of the matter, but we must be adaptive and innovative and flexible in practice, and that is itself an essence, an essential quality of conservatism. That allows us to have great agreement in principle and to allow that agreement in principle to then give us the ability to deliberate and build consensus on the particulars.
So what we need in the end is a rediscovery of conservatism, a a reborn conservatism, a conservatism that is grounded in the principles of the declaration of independence and the constitution of the United States. Those truths, those self evident truths according to the laws of nature and nature’s god, of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, of legitimacy of government coming from this consent of the governed. A a a consortium that understands man’s self interest, but also sees his capacity for virtue. A conservatism of the constitution limits government, but it sees that government performs its job effectively and energetically. It refines popular opinion through representation, and it uses the structures of government, the separation of powers, the checks and balances, to keep government limited and secure rights, all through an extended nation of states and a decentralization of power to magnify and strengthen self government.
That understanding of the grounding of conservatism creates a natural fusion. It reminds economic conservatives of a fuller understanding of the human person and prevents the development of that sense of autonomous individualism that we associate so much with modern liberalism. It reminds traditional conservatives of the rational ground, the the the moral principles of their ideas. They’re needed to distinguish between good traditions and bad traditions, without which tradition merely wanders and follows history and its trends. And it gives national security conservatives or national interest conservatives or national conservatives, it gives them the substance they lack by tying nationalism to a particular nation, to to our nation, to this nation, so conceived and so dedicated.
America’s principles were the key to Frank Meyer’s original fusionism in the 19 sixties, which tied together traditionalist and libertarians. Those principles were also the key to Ronald Reagan’s conservatism in the 19 eighties. Those times have passed, but the principles have not. The truths of our founding are today increasingly under attack. They have been for some time in our universities, but are increasingly also under attack in our k through 12 educational system, especially bad history ideas being introduced into those schools, to see our country as systemically racist.
It has its flaws for sure, but it completely misses how its beginnings and aspirations corrected those flaws and led to our great government and great country today. Those ideas are also under attack on our politics itself, especially because of the vast expansion of the modern state of of administrative bureaucracy, which is becoming increasingly ideological in its regulatory actions. And we see this attack throughout our culture and society in various ways all around us. But I just want to remind us that our objective here, our common objective, is to save our country, its underlying principles and way of life. The idea of equal rights for all, special privileges for none.
Under the laws of nature, and nature is god. The rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, a recognition of our rights to property and to the fruits of our labor, but also to our more fundamental right of religious liberty, that government, legitimate government, must be based on the consent of the governed, that all government stems from the rule of law, and that our government is one of delegated powers, a limited constitutional government, all of which is designed to preserve and protect not only the rights which with we are endowed, but our ability to be self governing and to rule ourselves. These principles, these ideas are actually the source of our recovery, our recovery of conservatism, as well as the recovery of our country itself. It’s a true understanding of the nature of man, the nature of politics, and a true understanding of justice, And that makes our country worth saving, worth recovering, worth conserving. Thank you.