Among the most subversive aspects of the Enlightenment Project is its insistence on the radical incompatibility of Christianity with the Classical and Germanic traditions. In his Regensburg Address (2006), Pope Benedict correctly insisted that Europe was created by the uniting of the Classical and the Biblical, a process culminating in the conversion of the Germans. As with Classical and Christian, the influencing was a two-way street, described well by James C. Russell as The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity (1994). German art portrayed gentle Jesus, meek and mild, as a warrior chief. Jesus’ lordship was interpreted in the light of German tradition, as we find it in Tacitus’s Germania.

On the field of battle it is a disgrace for a chief to be surpassed in valor by his followers and for the followers not to equal the valor of their chief. To leave a battle alive after their chief has fallen means livelong infamy and shame. To defend and protect him, and to let him get the credit for their own acts of heroism, are the most solemn obligations of their allegiance.

Tacitus’s description is confirmed by the great Anglo-Saxon poem, The Battle of Maldon (14). The English chief allows marauding Vikings to land so that the ensuing battle will be more glorious. After he is slain, a few cowards ride away to everlasting shame, but most of his followers fight to the death in the hopeless but glorious struggle. German converts re-interpreted spreading the faith as following the lord Jesus into battle and understood martyrdom as the German virtue of preferring death to deserting their liege.

Despite the humorous title, David Gless in From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and Its Opponents (1998) makes a powerful case for the validity of a grand narrative informed by the notion that what is distinctive and vital in the West derives from the assimilation and mutual interaction of Classical, Christian, and German. When great periods of creativity and freedom appear in Europe and America, they are often associated with those who value the three traditions, not as inassimilable entities, but as containing complementary elements which are essential for human fulfillment and societal greatness.

All three traditions were formative and creative in the High Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the American Founding. When Dante writes about his political ideas in Monarchia, for instance, he describes an empire that is Roman, Christian, and German. Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967) described the Classical, Christian and German (or Common Law) traditions behind the American Revolution (though he also began the bad habit of privileging one tradition over the others, in his case, English Whig thought.) As Carl Richard noticed in The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment (1994),

To the founders, there was but one worthy tradition, the tradition of liberty, and they would not have understood the modern historian’s need to distinguish between the classical and Whig traditions and to measure the influence of one against the other.

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Thomas Jefferson first came to the attention of his fellow Virginians in 1774 by his essay A Summary View of the Rights of British North America. He based his argument on the fact that the ancestors of the British Americans had twice exercised a “right which nature has given to all men,” that is, emigrating from one land to a new one: the first time when the Anglo-Saxons followed Hengist and Horsa to Britain, the second time the English colonization of North America. The colonists’ position is often explained as a defense of their claim to the rights of Englishmen and this argument does play an important role in the debate. In “A Summary View,” however, Jefferson stakes out a claim to the colonists’ rights not only as Englishmen but as Germans.

The Germanic origin of the English tickled the funny bone of Benjamin Franklin, who composed a bogus Edict from the King of Prussia in 1773, in which Frederick the Great of Prussia makes the same demands on the English that Parliament was making on the colonies. Jefferson took the idea seriously. On July 4, 1776, the Continental Congress appointed Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin “to a committee to bring in a device for a seal for the United States of America.” Jefferson’s suggestion is reported by John Adams:

Mr. Jefferson proposed, the children of Israel in the wilderness led by a cloud by day, and a pillar by night—and on the other side, Hengist and Horsa, the Saxon chiefs, from whom we clam the honor of being descended, and whose political principles and form of government we have assumed.

Jefferson’s suggested seal was devoted to two groups of settlers, the Chosen People of the Bible and the colonists’ German ancestors. For him the American nation was based on the Bible and the German tradition. As Gilbert Chinard wrote, in 1776 “Jefferson’s great ambition was to promote a renaissance of Anglo-Saxon primitive institutions on the new continent.” This was no youthful whim. Jefferson always insisted on and was eventually successful in ensuring that Anglo-Saxon be taught at the University of Virginia. “This is the true foundation of Jefferson’s political philosophy,” Chinard concluded. “No greater mistake could be made than to look for his sources in Locke, Montesquieu, or Rousseau. Jeffersonian democracy was born under the sign of Hengist and Horsa, not of the Goddess Reason.”

The Founders were traditionalists in law, religion, and politics, and they believed in the coherence of the Christian, Classical, and German traditions, supporting and enriching one another. The congregationalism of their Protestant church polity supported the federalism of their secular politics and both were strengthened by the idea of “checks and balances” they derived from ancient history, like Polybius’s account of the Roman Republic. And their idea of a citizen as a farmer-soldier-citizen drew on Greek, Roman and German traditions.

The results of the Germanization of medieval Christianity continued to live in popular as well as learned religious life. When I was a boy, Protestant congregations still sang “Onward Christian Soldiers” to music composed by Sir Arthur Sullivan of Gilbert and Sullivan fame. (Sabine Baring-Gould composed the words.) Today almost every Protestant hymnbook has re-written the words of “Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus, Ye Soldiers of the Cross” to eliminate lines that breathed the spirit of Tacitus’ Germans and the Anglo-Saxons of The Battle of Maldon:

Ye that are men now serve Him against unnumbered foes.
Let courage rise with danger and strength to strength oppose.

That popular hymn presented Jesus as the warrior king He was for the first German converts.

Those days are gone, of course. Today almost every appearance of the words “man” and “men” has been erased from hymnals. This recent phenomenon is an assault not only on masculinity but also on the Christian, Classical, and Germanic traditions. The American way of life can be restored only by a return to the traditions that shaped it. Many forces oppose that restoration, but, as the old hymn used to remind us, men do not retreat before unnumbered foes, whether they stand among the troops of Gideon in the Book of Judges or the Three Hundred Spartans at Thermopylae or on the walls of the Alamo. As Bismarck said of his Germans, “We fear God, but nothing else in the world!”

Gutzman is a libertarian Bourbon, who has “learned nothing and forgotten nothing.” For him “Louis Hartz posited long ago … that America is dominated by a broad Lockean consensus … Hartz was right: there’s one wing in American politics. The question is almost always what kind of Left it will be.”

Gutzman, of course, is right about one thing. As conservatives and right-wingers like Oswald Spengler, Julius Evola, Whittaker Chambers and many others have pointed out for over a century, free marketeers (19th century liberals or modern libertarians) differ from Marxists and democratic socialists (20th century liberals) only superficially, while sharing fundamental traits that range from a commitment to economic reductionism (what Albert Jay Nock and Wilhelm Röpke called “economism”) to a pervasive obsession with globalism. Gutzman is right about himself and his fellow libertarians.  They are left-wingers and do not differ in fundamentals from other left-wingers.

Gutzman is wrong, however, about the United States and the people who created this nation. He asserts that “our visceral outrage” at the treatment of the New Haven firemen “springs from our feeling that their city government has violated our Lockean precept,” not from outrage at the regime’s continuing policy of unfair and prejudicial treatment of white men. There have been a number of contributions to Takimag on this topic and from the first one, by Jared Taylor, the ethnicity of the fireman has been front and center as a concern, the same concern expressed over Judge Sotomayor’s assertion of the ethnic superiority of a “wise Latina woman’s rich experience” over the actual knowledge of our complex legal system possessed by putative white men.

Gutzman notes that the two major parties do not identify themselves racially, but one of the few differences between them is their appeal to different ethnicities. They rarely differ ideologically. Both parties nominated left-wingers for President in the last election and the Republican candidate spent a great deal of the relative pittance allotted to him under McCain-Feingold on sycophantic ads in Spanish addressed to the Latino population. It did him no good.

I find Gutzman misleading when he writes, “Classically, defenders of slavery (Rightists par excellence) favored highly limited federal government (a classical Left attitude).” Neither the French nor the American Left has consistently favored limited government. Slavery is a cultural universal, found in every society, and has no distinctive association with the political movements of Europe and the United States.

Gutzman was talking about the ante bellum American South. I would be interested to hear Gutzman confront directly the relationship of slavery and support for the free market there. The major policy issue that divided the United States in the 19th century was the tariff. As Karl Marx noted in 1848, “the protective system is conservative; the free trade system is destructive.” Whigs and later Republicans, like Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln, agreed with Marx’s analysis and tended to favor the tariff. Southern slave-owners did not. They were, in contemporary terms, classical liberals. This is why English liberals favored the South during the Civil War. The Liberal Lord Acton wrote Robert E. Lee after the war assuring him that for Liberals the Southern cause was the cause of freedom. There is absolutely no historical reason to disassociate the defense of slavery from support for free trade. Some libertarians still defend the ante bellum South.

The real difference, in my opinion, between openly professed left-wingers like Gutzman and mainstream conservatives is the role of tradition in their lives and thought. Was America founded as a traditionalist society or was it founded on liberal principles derived from the writings of John Locke?

Gutzman, of course, thinks the later is the case; indeed, he reasserted the old leftist faith in the distinctively liberal character of the United States: “Louis Hartz posited long ago…that America is dominated by a broad Lockean consensus…Hartz was right: there’s one wing in American politics. The question is almost always what kind of Left it will be.”

There had been similar views expressed before Hartz, most clearly in Lionel Trilling’s great work of cultural genocide, The Liberal Imagination (1950), where Trilling proclaimed, “In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation. … The conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” This comment was published a few years after Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences (1948) and C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man (1947). Despite its language of merely describing “the plain fact,” its result was to legitimize an intellectual purge of conservative and traditionalist teachers and scholars because their research and thinking were only “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” The result is today’s PC university, with its oppressive climate of intellectual conformity and reign of terror against any and every dissent, no matter how mild or faint-hearted. Michael P. Zucker of the flagship Catholic university Notre Dame continues to defend the Lockean character of the United States in Natural Rights and the New Republicanism (1994) and other books. Whatever Trilling’s and Zucker’s intentions, academics took away a fearsome lesson from their writings. If America has never had any other political basis than Lockean natural rights, there is no point in wasting time debating traditionalists. There is nothing wrong in firing or refusing to hire people who do not exist, or whose intellectual position, if they did exist, consists of “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.”

The evidence on the other side is massive and impressive, even if we limit ourselves to works published after Hartz. Willmoore Kendall and George Carey in The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition (1970) traced the American political tradition back to the Mayflower Compact of 1620 and other important documents that pre-date John Locke and could not have been influenced by him, like the Fundamental Order of Connecticut (1638-39) and the Massachusetts Body of Liberties (1641). Kendall and Carey argue that the American political tradition was not “derailed” until Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (1863). Barry Shain’s The Myth of American Individualism (1994) shows the centrality of Protestant Christianity and its communal character, founded in congregationalism. The importance of pre- and non-Lockean religious elements in the American Founding and their continuing importance is developed by Samuel Huntington in Who Are We?(2004):

The importance of pre-Lockean traditions, British, Christian and Classical, has been made over and over again for generations after Hartz by scholars including P. G. A. Pocock, Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood, Carl Richard and many others.  The importance of the Classical Tradition for the Constitution has been documented just last year by David J. Bederman, The Classical Foundations of the American Constitution (2008). Catherine Winterer’s The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780-1910 (2002) has shown that the classical tradition continued to be influential for generations after the founding. The living significance of non-Lockean Christian and British traditions is part of the daily experience of most Americans.

The true atrocity of the leftist regime is not so much this policy or that, but its insistence that the traditions and traditionalists who founded the United States and have kept it as free and creative as it has been do not even exist. The United States was settled by traditionalists and its constitutional regime was molded by traditionalists. The American majority is still deeply traditionalist, and we are not handing our country over to Kevin Gutzman and his libertarian, neocon, and liberal peers without a fight.

UPDATE: Grant Havers, Richard Spencer, Tom Piatak, and Kevin Gutzman have responded to Christian Kopff’s question about America’s unconservativeness.  

For decades conservative warhorse Reed Irvine churned out his newsletter, Accuracy in Media, giving a reality check to the American prestige press like the New York and LA Times and the Washington Post. He later expanded his investigations to higher education by founding Accuracy in Academia. Its monthly Campus Report, now in its twenty-fourth year, publishes articles on campus outrages, but finds space for positive news as well. This “positive” news is often more depressing than the outrages.

In the Campus Report for May, 2009 a brief note entitled “Media Debate on Campus” begins “Has the debate over whether or not the media are liberal finally hit college campuses? Better late than never. Earlier this year, conservative columnist David Brooks mixed it up with liberal scribe mark Shields at a ‘sold-out crowd of about 700 at Texas Christian University.’” The heroic confrontation was recounted in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram (April 2, 2009) in an article on the April 1 Schieffer Symposium, named after and hosted by TCU alum (1959) Bob Schieffer of CBS News. Gene Trainor of the Star-Telegram reported: “Are the news media biased toward President Barack Obama? David Brooks, a conservative columnist for The New York Times, said yes before a sold-out crowd of about 700 at Texas Christian University. Mark Shields, a nationally syndicated liberal columnist, said no.”

You may wonder how the “conservative columnist” made his case. According to the Star-Telegram, Brooks said, “I think the press is pro-Obama. Most of my colleagues are extremely committed to the craft of journalism. So I think most of the bias is unconscious—in framing the issues and what gets paid attention to.”

“The press is pro-Obama,” but “the bias is unconscious,” like the zombies described in Bob Hope’s Ghost Breakers. “A zombie has no will of his own. You see them sometimes, walking around blindly with dead eyes, following orders, not knowing what they do, not caring.” “You mean, like Democrats?” Bob asks. Sure, Bob, or like “committed” reporters for the New York Times, according to “conservative columnist” David Brooks.

On the same day as the Schieffer Symposium, Bill O’Reilly devoted his “Talking Points” memo to allegations that the New York Times had published a generic story on the left-wing connections of the activist group ACORN and spiked a substantive account linking ACORN’s activities directly to the Obama campaign.

The Schieffer Symposium‘s bogus debate is typical of U.S. campuses, where university administrators round up the usual suspects, including neocon lackeys like David Brooks, to head off serious discussion. Meanwhile Campus Report applauds this charade as a step in the right direction, although there was no serious discussion of pervasive media bias and no real conservative was allowed within a country mile of the event.

Bob Schieffer summed up his eponymous symposium in these words, “I myself think the press has done a pretty good job considering the problems that confront this country.”
On May 18, Bill O’Reilly said, “The New York Times is a dishonest publication in business to promote a far-left point of view.” These two positions could be the basis of a real debate, a debate that will not take place, however, as long as Captain Renault’s descendents run America’s universities and Reed Irvine’s epigoni market as “conservative” David Brooks and his absurd whitewashing of the Times’ journalistic malfeasance.