The Whig Case for Toryism
“Tory” is among the worst insults of the American political tradition. Thomas Jefferson used the term, for example, to denigrate his conservative opponents among the Federalists. Later, critics of Andrew Jackson’s unilateral application of executive power would often accuse his populist movement of “Toryism.” In both historical cases, and many others since, the charge was meant to convey an un-American devotion to monarchy, and perhaps even give a whiff of disloyalty – or, worse still, Catholicism.
“Whig,” by contrast, has almost always been a label of high praise. The Founders who fought and won the Revolution, after all, were Whigs. Their vision of liberty was constitutional, in the sense that it valued limits on the state to defend individual rights, and progressive, in that it saw those rights as the culmination of a long historical process. These are the liberal ideals not only of the American Founding, but also the Glorious Revolution of 1688 which inspired it – and they still continue to manifest our identity as a “Whig Republic” today.
But this classical view of liberty seems to be fading from American public life. The revolutionary left seeks to deconstruct the Whig commitment to progress, and the postliberal right maintains constitutionalism is too weak to preserve the nation. Like the great Whig Macauley’s Horatius at the bridge, many able defenders of Whiggism today have nobly remonstrated against both these critiques. And yet their opponents continue to advance almost inexorably. Given these somewhat dismal conditions, how can we hope to conserve the freedom we hold dear?
Tonight, I contend that one way we could is to revive the old tradition of Toryism. Slighted as it may have been throughout American history, the Tory attachment to the permanent things can teach us much about how to protect our inherited liberties. Without necessarily embracing a reactionary royalism, let alone repudiating our Founding, conservatives can learn from our Tory forerunners the importance of reverence and order, realism and romance, and ultimately the poetry that is the soul of our civilization.
Read more in Providence Magazine.
