Is America Still a Naturally Center-Right Country?

Lesser Sons of Greater Sires and Massive Change from Immigration Centuries Ago

One opinion constantly bandied about online, particularly in mid-brow op-eds, is that America is naturally a “center-right country.”¹ By this, those making the claim mean that America, while it might not be as far to the economic and social right as Pinochet’s Chile, generally embraces Burkean views of what a society ought be.² In other words, they think America is a country in which the majority of people naturally embrace the old concept of ordered liberty (the right to do what one ought), and some sense of hierarchy and tradition. Burke, explaining his position, noted that:

Society is indeed a contract.…[But, a]s the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born….Changing the state as often as there are floating fancies,…no one generation could link with the other. Men would be little better than the flies of a summer.

That view would mean embracing regulation, or more accurately, state-level police powers, only to the extent necessary to stop people from doing what they oughtn’t (the idea of ordered liberty)³ while meanwhile respecting old American myths and heroes and having a natural hierarchy among men that’s largely respected and honored. So, a Burkean society would be one that honors its forefathers, respects their traditions, and focuses on furthering the glory of the nation with conquests and noble deeds. The Roman Republic and its concept of mos maiorum and cursus honorum would be a close comparison, at least in terms of tradition and achievement.⁴ Added to all that is a sense of hierarchy, whether in the form of a gentry, peerage, or both.⁵

Unfortunately, the idea that America is such a country is, at this point in its history, quite incorrect.

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[AUDIO] Is America Still a Naturally Center-Right Country?

The Old Dominion of Center-Right Tradition

America, at one point, was indeed a naturally conservative country. That period largely consisted of the mid-1600s to 1860s period of American history that was largely dominated by the cavalier southern states, particularly the planters of the Old Dominion’s Tidewater and the Scotch-Irish of the South.⁶ Those political leaders were, as David Hackett Fischer shows in Albion’s Seed, largely the descendants of gentlemen. In the case of the Tidewater planters, those descendants were British gentry and aristocracy. In the case Scots-Irish leaders came from, the ancestors were the gentry of Northern England and Southern Scotland, the English warlords who fought the Scots or Scots warlords who fought the English for centuries, in the Appalachian regions. So, the early republic’s greatest men were largely Anglo-Saxon gentlemen like George Washington, Anglo-Norman aristocrats like Robert E Lee, or descendants of Anglo-Scottish gentlemen like Andrew Jackson.

Because of their heritage, those Southern Gentlemen, as they became known, preserved the Burkean socio-political traditions of their ancestors and so the cavalier Southern states, for example, tended to preserve their old English traditions.⁷ In the social sense, that took the like of fox-hunting, living in manor homes surrounded by vast estates, and drinking vast amounts of wine while not on a hunt. In the political sense, it meant lives of military and political service, much like the landed gentlemen of England.⁸ And, in the pace and scenery of life sense, it meant a hierarchy amongst the gentleman-like planters at the top, the yeomen farmers in the respected middle, the poor farmers at the fringes, and the slaves or indentured servants who played the part of peasants and agricultural laborersat the very bottom.

Thus, like in Burke’s England, traditions were honored, military glory was seen as a good thing worthy of the time and resources expended, and the hierarchy amongst the populace was rigid and respected but characterized mainly by good relations between the different parts of the pyramid.

Further, the other bits and pieces of naturally center-right aristocratic life were seen as not just normal, but obvious. For example, it made sense to such men that Washington, D.C. would be built in classical splendor rather than utilitarian drudgery, that men ought dress and speak formally, and that a wrong word from a man of position would mean a duel. Additionally, it meant that ordered liberty was the rule: a gentleman could largely do as he pleased, but was constrained by the state from acting in an overtly anti-social manner and was restrained by his peers, whether by criticism or the threat of duels, from otherwise acting out.

Similarly, it meant that things were natural and so neither tense nor a basis for much action. As Susan Dunn notes in Dominion of Memories and the Southern Agrarians wrote about in I’ll Take My Stand, another of the region’s defining characteristics is that it was somewhat more relaxed and slower-paced than the commercial north. Unlike the Puritan strivers of the Northeast or hard-working German peasants of the Midwest, the Southern gentlemen and yeomen, like their English equivalents, had laborers to do most of the actual work and so could pleasantly relax with their port and madiera. That meant that things were less high-strung, if also less productive, than in the Northeast or Midwest, and so social upheaval was a prospect viewed with horror but also quite rare, and moral laxity, particularly in terms of drink and sex, was somewhat common compared to the Puritinical North and moralistic Midwest.

Altogether, those genteel cultural roots among the political leadership of the Southern states meant that while America was ruled by the gentlemen of the Old Dominion and the Scots-Irish, the leaders of whom were also descendants of gentlemen,⁹ America was a center-right country because it naturally existed in such a way. Tradition, hierarchy, and ordered liberty, the defining aspects of a center-right country were the natural results of a country ruled by frock-coated, estate-owning men on horseback.

However, that was only a section of America, and it was murdered in the War Between the States. Much of the South, but particularly its class of gentlemen, faced near-genocidal human carnage and destruction on so vast a scale that, much like England after World War I, it never really recovered to its pre-war state in terms of influence, culture, or prosperity.¹⁰

The Death of the Old Dominion and the Progressive Phenomenon

With the death of the came its replacement in influence, particularly in the realm of politics. With that replacement came a replacement of the American political regime, which went from naturally center-right in a Burkean way to a constant struggle between economic interests, morality police, and Progressives.

The Yankee Political Bent

In the North, the culture was decidedly non-Burkean. While its wealthy men cared for money and not for social upheaval, those other than most of Mrs. Astor’s New York 400¹¹ were generally commercial-minded¹² new men uninterested in tradition or national glory, and ordered liberty had less stock placed in it than in the Cavalier and Scots-Irish South.

For one, commercialism largely meant that there was more of an economic, and thus social, drift over generations. That lack of a relatively fixed and landed social elite weakened any sense of social hierarchy, and the concept of a “gentleman” was long gone in all but the rarest cases (Henry Adams would be one, at least to some extent). Additionally, the focus on profits above about everything else meant that most men were uninterested in service to national glory in the way that Washington and Lee were; like Teddy Roosevelt’s dad or John Rockefeller, they dodged the war their leaders started and instead focused on ease and wealth.¹³

Further, the squalor of urban conditions due to mass migration meant that progressivism, or the concept of continual reform and prying into private space and property to improve the condition of the supposedly downtrodden, was seen as necessary in a way that it wasn’t in the agrarian South.¹⁴ There, reformers came from the North to pry into its business. In the North, those reformers were homegrown and, with a long Puritan/Quaker tradition of acting in much the same way, not only meddled in everyone else’s business but saw meddling as an intrinsic good.¹⁵ Thus, the Progressivism as a political ideology and social force that still plagues us came out of anti-slavery reform, anti-tenement reform, early unions, and the like.

Once Progressivism was unleashed, it wreaked havoc on whatever lines of thought might have remained in the North and kept America a center-right country. Instead of a sense of hierarchy and respect for those atop it, they got muckraking reporters and constant calls for governmental money to be raised through taxation and spent on this or that cause. Instead of politics that revolved around preventing any social upheaval, Progressivism meant politics that demanded constant social change and upheaval, particularly once the old guard of pre-Revolution elites was replaced by new men, party machines, and popular demagogues. And instead of tradition, they got immigrants pouring into the country to push down industrial wages that brought with them poverty, plague, and calls for ever more social reform, all of which in turn brought still less hierarchy, less tradition, and more social upheaval.¹⁶

Midwestern Populism and Moralism

But by the time the Yankees invented Progressivism, imported those in need of it, and unleashed it on the country, much to our misfortune, they weren’t the only competitor to Southern gentlemen that won out in the wake of the War Between the States. The West also was rocketing up in terms of population and prosperity, particularly the parceled-out Midwest with the building of the Transcontinental.¹⁷

That area was, unlike the Eastern seaboard, not settled by the Heritage American British. Nor was it filled with the impoverished dregs of Eastern and South Europe, or even starving Ireland. Rather, it was full of lower-class German and Scandinavian peasants who fled the chaos of the late 1840s, the wars of the Prussians, the endemic poverty, a lack of opportunity for advancement, and other issues. They brought with them their unique culture, one that has very much influenced broad American culture.¹⁸

In the Midwest, as a reminder, land was largely not bought up in vast, latifundium-style estates that supported the expensive lifestyles of gentlemen, as it had been in the Southeast, nor was it an urbanized collection of disappearing farms and rising factories as it was in the Northeast. Rather, the land settled by roughly the same social class of people was parceled out at low prices in low acreages to that class in exchange for them settling it.¹⁹

Together, the blending of the German peasantry with similarly-sized plats of land meant that the lifestyle and ideology of the South, and thus England, was largely rejected. There weren’t port-quaffing gentlemen hunting foxes on horseback as slaves or laborers farmed the vast estates. There weren’t gorgeous manor homes and country house parties. Rather, there were small shacks on land farmed diligently by the hands of the owners, all of whom saw each other as social equals without much of a history to look back on rather than competing gentlemen whose bloodlines went back to William the Conqueror, if not earlier.²⁰

Thus, there the concept of a landed elite and social hierarchy died. Men were seen as equal and as equals rather than ordered rungs of a hierarchy.²¹ Further, as those poor Germans who farmed the region generally hated the aristocracy that once ruled over them and the history behind it, they were largely hostile to hierarchy and without much of a sense of tradition and continuation of a gentlemanly way of life, again much unlike the Southeast.

Paired with that egalitarianism were the economic values of that group of people. Coming as they did from once-struggling peasant stock, they were thrifty and much more likely to accumulate their small earnings than spend them on attempting greatness, much as the Yankees also were. Rockefeller’s infamous penny-pinching is an example of such non-aristocratic thrift.²²

Receiving their land as they did from the government, often for free, they were less hostile to government involvement than the northern robber barons or Southern gentlemen, at least in that respect. And, coming from much stricter patterns of religious thought than the gentleman-friendly Church of England and its Episcopal American branch, they were far more moralistic, as were the Yankees, than the gentlemen of the South. Finally, they were in a much more precarious position than gentlemen, as they farmed only relatively small plots of land, so economy-induced radicalism and the desire for social upheaval that came with it was the norm rather than the exception.

All in all, in the Midwest, this could be characterized as the idea that the government ought to give you your farm for free, but you ought also to work it every day, egalitarianism is the correct view of society, formality is to be shunned, and your daughter ought not to get knocked up. There’s much to be said for such a view, but it’s not really a Burkean one. The lack of a sense of hierarchy, importance placed on thrift, and moralistic view of life, in particular, mark it as something else.

Modern Nonsense

So, with the fall of the South and rise of the Midwest and Northeast relative to it, a new ideology emerged, one that better fits modern America and its supposed “conservatism.” This was the pairing of Yankee Progressivism and commercialism with the moralism and economic anxiety of the Midwest and is best seen in the anti-gold, economic populism of William Jennings Bryan and near-simultaneous Temperance Movement. A gentleman would never be anti-gold or anti-drink, but a Progressive populist would be, and indeed was.²³

So, when the Yankee North and middle-class Midwest took over the country in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, as shown by the prominence of business leaders like Rockefeller and Morgan, military leaders like Eisenhower and LeMay, and political leaders like Truman and Kennedy, their values took over the country as well. With that, gone are the values and views of southern gentlemen secure in their position, men like Washington and Lee, and in are the values and views of the Yankees and midwesterners. Largely, that shift means there is a lurking sense of economic anxiety, dedication to political Progressivism and all it brings, an egalitarian view of society and resultant creeping informality, and a commitment to commercialism over gentility.²⁴

Altogether, those values are very anti-Burkean. The commercial aspect is paired with modern “conservatism,” but largely is not conservative in the way anyone from the nineteenth century, when conservatism as a view of the world dominated society, meant.

For example, the commercial lobby is often free trade for agriculture, as it means lower food prices for their workers, and protection for industry, as that means they can sell for higher prices. On the other hand, actual conservatives, as the term was originally meant, are pro-agricultural protection, particularly in regard to the products of arable farming, as that is from where a landed elite derives its wealth and income.²⁵

Similarly, the social view of a modern “conservative” is far different from a gentleman. That gentleman sees the utility of the church and its traditions and often quite believes in God, but isn’t particularly moralistic in daily life, particularly when it comes to wine, cards, and women.²⁶ The moralist conservative born from the German Midwest and Puritan Northeast, however, might be less likely to actually believe in Christ or even see the church as a useful societal exercise, but is incredibly strict about whatever moral issue of the day is a prominent one. At the time this became an issue, that was tenement and temperance. Now, it’s pushing LGBTQ+ and/or Black Lives Matter as a religion in the moralist but atheist Northeast and waging a war on abortion in the moralist Christian Midwest, whereas the six-bottle man gentleman would be drunk at a ball or charging in the cavalry rather than pushing moralism.²⁷ To him, things are as they have always been and always should be, and that’s better than pushing for radical change in the name of appeasing some sect that cares a great deal about a minor issue.

But that lack of care, one occasionally glimpsed in Trump, ironically given his New York heritage, but rarely in other men of prominence, is largely what America now is. Instead of not changing since the Revolution, we chance an obscene amount every year, and have done so since Mr. Lincoln sent his imported legions of bluecoats south. ²⁸ So, we constantly have moralistic interest groups agitating for this or that issue, much as their spiritual predecessors poured out liquor with the temperance hags, burned bras with the unmarried suffragettes, and now shriek in public alongside the abortion harpies.

Such is what America now is as a country, and is much different from when it was actually a center-right country. It has conservative roots, to be sure, and the constant simmer of American chauvinism and patriotism implies some sense of continued sense of national glory in the way gentlemen once thought of it. Further, the general resistance to taxes and regulation is a traditional American view that pairs well with the idea of ordered liberty, and so is also taken as a sign of America’s natural conservatism. Those values are as present in the Midwest, generally, as they were in the Old Dominion in its heyday.

But most of the rest of the current political scene and beliefs of the people are far from center-right in the Burkean sense. Few see the importance, or even value, in having a hierarchy amongst men and instead want to be seen as equals and imagine themselves surrounded by equals, the same impulse behind the communist use of “comrade” rather than “sir.”²⁹ Similarly, ordered liberty in life outside taxes has been replaced by libertinism on much of the supposed right and left, with the phrase “I Want Gay Married Couples To Protect Their Marijuana Plants With Guns” being common on the “right,”³⁰ and most leftists only disagreeing insofar as they hate gun rights. As to tradition, statues of ancestors who did marvelous things, such as Washington and Lee, are torn down for being incompatible with today’s ridiculous values and morals, and supposed members of the “right” go along with it, showing both the moralism of the present and its hostility to tradition.³¹

A nation that believes in gay marriage, drug use, tearing down statues of its ancestors, and hates taxes is many things, but it is not a Burkean nation. A people that believes such things is many things, but not naturally Burkean or center-right. So, no, America is not a center-right country.

1. https://theweek.com/articles/500435/america-conservative-nation

2. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/07/29/the-right-man

3. https://www.merriam-webster.com/legal/ordered%20liberty

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mos_maiorum, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursus_honorum

5. Read about hierarchy here:

6. Dominion of Memories is a good book on the early power of Virginia relative to the other states, and Albion’s Seed is an excellent book on the cavalier roots of Virginia

7. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2938072

8.

9. David Hackett Fischer explains this in Albion’s Seed; while the average American redneck wasn’t a cravat-wearing gentlemen, their leaders were largely the descendants of such men and lived in much the same way when they had the means. Andrew Jackson, for example, developed his Hermitage estate as soon as he had the means, living like a gentleman of England.

10. A relatively good article on this subject is this: https://southernstudies.olemiss.edu/study-the-south/more-pricks-than-kicks/; however, more than any article, it is useful to look at the formerly leading cities of the South. Are Petersburg, Vicksburg, Richmond, Charleston, and Savannah leaders now? Absolutely not. They’re backwaters, if anything at all. The once hugely influential cities of the Old South have been destroyed, and never really recovered. Similarly, the Old Dominion was the leading state of the cavalier South given its roots, and Woodrow Wilson is the only post-War Between the States president born in Virginia, but he was more a Yankee in terms of thought than a cavalier. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/presidents-of-the-united-states-from-virginia/

11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Four_Hundred_(Gilded_Age)

12. http://www.caggiasocialstudies.com/AHText/A3A03CAD.pdf

13. https://www.trsite.org/blog/2018/11/06/divided-between-pride-anxiety-the-roosevelt-family-the-great-war; https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1994/winter/civil-war-draft-records.html#:~:text=The%20consolidated%20lists%20show%20these,series%20created%20by%20the%20district.

14. Some sources on the rise of Progressivism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Era#Originators_of_progressive_ideals_and_efforts; https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jacob-riis/riis-and-reform.html; https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/essays/square-deal-theodore-roosevelt-and-themes-progressive-reform

15. Albion’s Seed is a great book on this mindset

16. For a very brief overview: https://www.thecollector.com/gilded-age-america-industrialization-entrepreneurship/

17. For a brief overview of the impact of the Transcontinental: https://www.history.com/news/transcontinental-railroad-changed-america; American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865–1900 covers the settling of the Midwest in some detail; see also: https://www.loc.gov/collections/pioneering-the-upper-midwest/articles-and-essays/history-of-the-upper-midwest-overview/american-but-more-so/

18. See, for example: http://digitalexhibits.libraries.wsu.edu/exhibits/show/2016sphist417/immigration/germans-and-scandinavians

19. https://www.nps.gov/home/learn/historyculture/abouthomesteadactlaw.htm; American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865–1900 covers the settling of the Midwest and the small plots land was doled out in in some detail

20. American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865–1900 covers the culture of settling the area; “Lauck’s description of the Midwest to the Argus Leader, in his home state of South Dakota, may explain why: ‘When you study the Midwest, one of the characteristics that stands out is a sense of egalitarianism rather than privilege or aristocracy. We have long featured an independent spirit that resists external domination. We live closer to our soil, our waters, our forests and grasslands. The Midwest made the Union victory possible, and we still are willingly sending young people into service of country and then welcoming them home with compassion and honor.’” from: https://www.chicagomag.com/city-life/maybe-the-midwest-is-a-state-of-mind/

21. See above

22. Titan by Chernow is a great book on Rockefeller; On the German obsession with thrift: https://qz.com/1241591/why-the-germans-are-obsessed-with-saving-money; and generally on the bourgeoise virtues, which stand in stark contrast to the values of cavaliers: https://www.deirdremccloskey.com/articles/bv/cato.php

23. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_of_Gold_speech; American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865–1900 for more on Bryan; On temperance and progressivism: https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/volstead-act#:~:text=Progressive%20reformers%20also%20took%20to,laws%20at%20the%20local%20level.

24. Tragedy and Hope by Quigley covers this phenomenon of the shift from aristocratic virtues to middle-class ones quite well

25.

26. Albion’s Seed covers this well

27. https://about1816.wordpress.com/2021/05/23/drunk-as-a-lord-the-regency-bottle-men/

28. Battering the battering ram

29. “Lauck’s description of the Midwest to the Argus Leader, in his home state of South Dakota, may explain why: ‘When you study the Midwest, one of the characteristics that stands out is a sense of egalitarianism rather than privilege or aristocracy. We have long featured an independent spirit that resists external domination. We live closer to our soil, our waters, our forests and grasslands. The Midwest made the Union victory possible, and we still are willingly sending young people into service of country and then welcoming them home with compassion and honor.’” from: https://www.chicagomag.com/city-life/maybe-the-midwest-is-a-state-of-mind/; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comrade#Russian_and_Soviet_usage

30. https://x.com/AP4Liberty/status/729103297647398912

31. https://burgess.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=402766; https://www.newsweek.com/confederate-statues-full-list-house-republicans-voted-against-removing-1605439