In 1964 Willmoore Kendall laid out five questions about the American Political Tradition that he said the liberals of his day could not answer.1 I think Harry Jaffa was able to definitively answer Kendall’s questions2; can you? Perhaps you may also answer by disagreeing with how the questions are framed. They are framed in a very thought provoking way to say the least. Do this as a 4th of July exercise- and have a jubilee of a day!
Why were the Framers opposed to the Bill of Rights? What reasons did they give for opposing a Bill of Rights, in arguing, as they did, that a Bill of Rights was incompatible with the Philadelphia Constitution? Which is the American Tradition- the political philosophy of the Framers, which opposed the bill of rights, or the principles of the amendments (so they were called) of 1789?
* * *The Declaration seems to be the declaration of a people who wish to make clear above all else their commitment to work the will of God; the Constitution and Bill of Rights seem to be the expressions of a people whose exclusive concern is with the things of this world. Now: What happened between 1776 and 1787? Did there take place some far-reaching shift in the religious sentiments of the revolutionaries? If not, then which is the American political tradition- the religious commitment of the Declaration, or the religious indifferentism of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights?
* * *How do we explain the sudden disappearance, between 1776 and 1787, of natural rights, and of the problem of how natural rights are protected? Had the American people changed their minds, somewhere along the line, about the great issue over which, for so we are told, the Revolutionary War had been fought? In any case, which is the tradition, natural rights and their protection? Or the ends of government set forth in the Preamble of the Constitution?
* * *Equality just disappears from our political vocabulary, disappears as the ink dries on the Declaration of Independence, and is not heard of again, to all intents and purposes, until Abraham Lincoln reminds his contemporaries of the language of the Declaration and begins to insist that America has failed to live up to one of its deepest commitments (though Lincoln himself turns out to have understood by the word equality some rather curious things). And when equality finally reappears in a great public document it does so in the form not of equality simply, but equal protection of the laws, which neither that generation nor the two subsequent generations appear to have interpreted as a promise of equality, at least not equality of the kind that our Supreme Court now seems ready to champion. The question cannot be sidestepped. What is the American political Tradition? Is it a tradition that exalts equality as one of the goods of the good society, or a tradition that, like the Constitution and Bill of Rights, conspicuously avoids the topic of equality- and in avoiding it, seems to repudiate the Declaration of Independence?
* * *
What is the American political tradition? Is it, back beyond 1776, a matter of the traditional rights of Englishmen- so that as we trace the tradition back from our day to its beginnings, it so to speak crosses the Atlantic in 1776 and earlier than that can best be studied not in America but in England? Or should we, in tracing it back, keep to this side of the Atlantic? Might it be that in 1776 there was already a highly developed American (American, not English) political tradition, hazy perhaps on some points but crystal-clear on others, of which the Declaration of Independence is a natural expression precisely because the rights it claims are, if we may put it so, the rights not of Englishmen but of Americans?
I would opine that perhaps some of those liberal historians and political scientists Kendall was considering were not true classical liberals of the tradition but were Beardians with an admixture of Progressive ideology mixed in. Kendall initially said this in lectures at Vanderbilt; they were published along with other material written by George Carey in The Basic Symbols of the American Tradition (1970).
In How To Think About the American Revolution (1976), initially published as “Equality as a Conservative Principle” (1975).
M.E. Bradford came to Kendall’s defense and wrote a rejoinder against Jaffa in A Better Guide than Reason: Studies in the American Revolution (1979), namely a chapter called “The Heresy of Equality”.
Jaffa responded to Kendall’s position again in “Wilmoore Kendall: Philosopher of Consensus?” (1978; you can find it in American Conservativism and American the American Founding) and “The Decline and of the American Idea: Reflections on the Failure of American Conservatives” (which you can find in the new Erler and Masugi edited volume, The Rediscovery of America: Essays by Harry V. Jaffa on the New Birth of Politics).
One day I will walk through all these arguments. To me they are some of the more interesting of Jaffa’s debates- more so than the Straussian inside-baseball debates.
We should do a podcast together to discuss these questions and the answers. You take Kendall's side, and I'll play Jaffa.
I think Kendall is worth taking as seriously as possible when it comes to objections. Not sure we'd even take Jaffa's greater understanding as a follower of Socrates seriously otherwise. I'm also in -- we could do it on my podcast.