A second and related reason why the Founding should remain central to American conservatism concerns the Founding’s realism about the human condition.
By “realism,” I don’t mean pragmatism, let alone cynicism or realpolitik. One key difference between the American founding and the politics of the French Revolution is the former’s attention to the permanent reality of human imperfectibility and its attendant belief that any political system needs to reflect this. Most French revolutionaries made no secret of their confidence that their creation of a new society purged of what philosophes like Voltaire and Rousseau regarded as religious superstition and obscure customs would lead to the emergence of a new humanity.
The Founding’s realism involved recognizing that it was better to develop institutions that directed our fallibility and limitations toward promoting the general welfare rather than seeking to remake human nature. This was not a new idea. One justification for private property, for example, offered by thinkers ranging from Aristotle to Aquinas was that people tend to take better care of what was theirs, and show little concern for things owned in common.
But it was documents such as The Federalist Papers or other writings penned by Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, James Wilson, and others that took into account in a very systematic way the inclinations of individuals, communities, and nations to pursue their self-interest in economic and political affairs. Whether the topic is public finance or foreign policy, this realism shines through in a way that is far less evident in, for example, the utopian schemes of people like Robespierre and his collaborators who tried to guillotine their way toward a more perfect world.
Of course, there were outliers to this. There was more than a touch of utopianism about Thomas Jefferson, and it contributed to his refusal to see for a long time that the French and American Revolutions were ultimately very different affairs. On the other end of the spectrum, figures like his vice president Aaron Burr didn’t hide a cynical view of life. Burr himself plainly understood liberty in essentially hedonistic terms, and was even suspected of secessionist designs.
But outliers are precisely that: outliers. The Founding’s particular integration of the idealism associated with constitutionally ordered liberty with the realism which flows from recognizing that men are not angels is harder to find in other schools of conservative thought outside the Anglo-American world.
That in itself underscores that an American conservatism that subtly or directly marginalizes the Founding is on a fast track to a conservatism — whether of the neo-integralist, MacIntyrian communitarian, or blood-and-soil variety — at odds with America’s very roots. And that is a very strange position for self-described conservatives in America to put themselves in.