Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart – Again

by Robert Kagan

Louis Hartz crystallized this thinking in his widely read 1955 book, The Liberal Tradition in America. Hartz argued that there was no genuine conservative dissenting tradition in America, by which he meant no European-style conservatism, because there had never been feudalism and the kind of traditional class structure that had produced revolution in France. American conservatives could not seek a return to the ancien régime, as European antiliberal critics like Joseph de Maistre did in the early nineteenth century, because in America there was no ancien régime to return to. In the United States, the Revolution and the early republic were the ancien régime. The only conservatism in America, in other words, was a “liberal” conservatism—a distinctly American conservatism dedicated to preservation of a distinctly American liberalism.