I've written two previous posts about my first-year seminar at Penn called 'Conservatism in Theory and Practice.' I'm teaching the class a third time this fall, and on this most recent run through the material I'm seeing things quite a bit differently than I did the first two times. In sum, it seems to me that American political history from the time of the founding on down to the New Deal is largely a debate among competing factions of conservatives. This doesn't mean those who took part in those arguments understood themselves as such. I'm speaking from the standpoint of 2026, looking back, and noticing how few people prior to the 1930s are recognizable as modern liberals. Now, there are exceptions, which I'll note below. (Yes, modern liberalism does have antecedents in the American past; it didn't spring fully formed from FDR's 1932 presidential campaign.) Still, it is remarkable to me how assumptions at work on multiple sides of political disputes through late 18th-, 19th-, and...
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