A Revolution Both Radical and Conservative
The Declaration of Independence reflected more radical and more conservative perspectives, embodied by Thomas Jefferson and John Adams
By Yuval Levin
This article appears in the Summer 2025 issue of the Coolidge Review. Request a free copy of a future print issue.
What we have come to think of as the left/right divide in the politics of free societies began to emerge in eighteenth-century Britain. Politics in England had long been divided into a party of parliamentary power and a party of royal power. But the fracturing of the Whigs in England gradually led to a division between a party of radical change and a party of gradual reform.
The Declaration of Independence was written as this transformation was happening in Britain. But the Declaration shows that the American experience was different. American politics was not partisan in quite the same way in that era, even if it did become so later. The difference mattered—and has continued to matter—in the life of the United States.
THE ORIGINS OF THE LEFT/RIGHT DIVIDE
By the eighteenth century, Britain had come to understand itself as what we now would call a liberal society—a society defined by the rule of law, to some degree by representative institutions, by rights of property and conscience, and by some degree of individual liberty. The divide that emerged in Britain involved an argument about the nature of the liberal society. The argument centered on such questions as: Where did this liberal society come from, and therefore where does it point? What does it require? What does it demand of us as citizens?
On one side of the divide was what we have come over time to think of as something like the left. This side argued that the liberal society resulted from the discovery of new political principles, particularly in the Enlightenment, that pointed toward new ideals and new institutions. The purpose of politics, in this view, was to pursue the ideal society that emerged from these ideas. Such an approach represented a decisive break with the West’s premodern inheritance.
The other side of the divide, the more conservative side, believed that the liberal society was the product of many generations of gradual political and cultural evolution in the West. By the time of the Enlightenment, and especially in Britain, a set of political forms had developed that pointed toward timeless truths in which the life of a society could be grounded. Those truths accounted for the complexities of society and allowed for some balance among freedom, justice, order, and effective government. Liberalism in this view involved the preservation, the gradual improvement, of these evolved forms. It did not represent a break from the Western tradition.
In short, one view understood liberalism as a kind of revolutionary discovery pointing beyond the existing arrangements of society, while the other saw liberalism as an evolved accomplishment to be preserved and enhanced.
These traditions have often existed in tension, as was the case in Britain in the late eighteenth century. But one striking aspect of the American Founding was that the two strands complemented rather than competed with each other.
THE AMERICAN DIFFERENCE
The unity of the more progressive and more conservative understandings of the liberal society is nowhere more evident than in the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration opens with a bold, even radical statement of principle: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.”
In other words, these Enlightenment ideas are the source of the legitimacy of free governments, and violations of those principles as a practical matter justify revolution. That statement reflects the radical Whig view in English politics, which would seem to justify dramatic political change.
But the Declaration then asserts a principle of restraint on these principles of action. It says, without implying any contradiction, that “prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.”
Then comes the Declaration’s statement of grievances, which takes up most of the document. These grievances make the case for why revolution is the prudent step. They show that the Americans were not so much calling for a sharp break as rebelling against a sharp break. The grievances suggest that the colonies moved for independence because the British had acted to deny them the system of government they had long enjoyed. The Declaration accuses the king of “abolishing the free System of English Laws,” of subjecting the colonies “to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution,” and of “taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments.” That is a strange argument for a revolution.
The grievances describe not utopian liberties to be obtained through total revolution but rather practical liberties once possessed and in need of regaining. And they are liberties secured by the right kind of government—a free, limited government charged with advancing the public good and protecting the people’s rights.
The American Revolution did not seek to overthrow a government as much as it sought to reestablish and sustain the forms of government to enable human flourishing. The revolution was simultaneously progressive and conservative.
The way these perspectives came together helps explain how both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams served on the committee that drafted the Declaration. Jefferson and Adams had become exemplars of the more radical and the more conservative forms of Whig liberalism in America. Yet they were not operating as representatives of opposing factions at this point. They had essentially the same goals for essentially the same reasons.
The peculiar immunity to the partisan logic of English politics persisted in America well into the 1780s. It was evident in the drafting and defense of the Constitution.
Consider the extraordinary fact that Publius, the greatest champion of the Constitution, was a hybrid of Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, with a dash of John Jay for adult supervision. Madison and Hamilton were never on the same side of any important question after 1790. They were, in a sense, a Republican and a Federalist par excellence. But at the Constitutional Convention, they understood themselves to be working toward the same goal. How Madison and Hamilton moved apart over time reflects the emergence in America, delayed but undeniable, of the divide between more progressive or radical Whigs and more conservative or traditionalist Whigs.
The fact that this divide came later to American political life than to England’s allowed Americans to establish their two key charters of government, the Declaration and the Constitution, as frameworks for facilitating a politics of intraliberal divisions rather than a politics of liberal and antiliberal parties. As polarized as American politics seems today, we actually agree about a lot. We operate according to a set of shared assumptions. In our politics the debate centers on the nature of the liberal society rather than the desirability of the liberal society.
We begin from a sense that this combination is what we are after and then argue about what it demands of us in whatever complicated moment we find ourselves in. Even some European democracies engage in more fundamental arguments. But there exists a moderation in American political life made possible by the fact that what was happening in Britain in the 1770s was not happening in America in the 1770s. The difference has mattered for us ever since.
Yuval Levin holds the Beth and Ravenel Curry Chair in Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of several books, including, most recently, American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again.
This article appears in the Summer 2025 issue of the Coolidge Review. Request a free copy of a future print issue.