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John Locke identified as life, liberty, and property, with “liberty” encompassing the right to believe in the gods one chooses, or no god at all,
These rights, Locke asserted—and this was what was truly revolutionary—could not be granted by rulers, or even by “the people.” They were inherent in the nature of being human—“natural rights,” as the American founders called them. The purpose of government—the most important purpose—was to protect those rights. Period.
Liberalism is not inherently about progress, therefore, except the progress that comes from the expanding recognition of people’s rights.
The great majority of Enlightenment philosophes
advocated neither liberalism nor democracy. Their main object was to impose the rule of reason on the world; their main enemy was religion. They believed that nothing could improve the human condition except knowledge, which could only be obtained through rational inquiry, through science.
“The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for, among old parchments, or musty records,” Hamilton wrote. “They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.”
To Madison and others, it was clear that the state legislatures were all too responsive to the people’s “transient and undigested sentiments,” with the result that “interested majorities” trampled “on the rights of minorities and individuals.”
A legislature, which governed by the rule of majorities and supermajorities, could not be trusted to look out for the rights of minorities.
The natural laws established by the creator could be observed and understood by human beings using only their reason. The pursuit of truth was a scientific, not a religious, pursuit.
the Bible treated slavery as part of the natural order of things—as a product of divine will—and both Catholics and Protestants had for centuries regarded keeping other men and women in bondage as perfectly consistent with a Christian life.
Scholars have written about the “liberal tradition in America,” but there has also been an antiliberal tradition in America, a powerful and persistent dissenting view that emerged at the very beginning and would shape the course of American history for the next two centuries, right up until our own time.
Indeed, as humans often do when confronted with a clash between interest and principle, it was the principle they jettisoned.
The South demanded “strict construction” of the Constitution, a kind of “originalism” that focused on the language of the Constitution, which protected slavery, against the liberals’ appeal to the Declaration and the “spirit” of the Revolution, which tended to undermine slavery.
The nation was founded not on the principle of “popular sovereignty” but on the belief that all individuals possessed natural rights that could not be abridged even by democratic processes.
The idea of many religions coexisting under the umbrella of a secular government and society was invented by the United States and had previously existed nowhere else in history.
The American academy has been badly damaged by rampant ideological intolerance and by the faculties’ assaults on liberalism itself as somehow being the cause of the nation’s ills rather than the answer.
When a people finally acquire the rights that were denied them, they tend to move on to life’s other problems. When they are less concerned about their own rights, they become less concerned about rights in general.
Threats of nullification and even secession were common in the eight decades following the Revolution.
The United States was founded on the principle that a people may overthrow or sever their allegiance to their government if they believe it is not performing its primary function of protecting their rights.
