March 22, 2025 in Minding the Campus
Burke’s audience was the House of Commons, not America. To them, therefore, he described America’s spirit of liberty both in flattering terms—and as an objective fact which politicians must account for in their policies.
In this character of the Americans, a love of freedom is the predominating feature which marks and distinguishes the whole; and as an ardent is always a jealous affection, your Colonies become suspicious, restive, and untractable whenever they see the least attempt to wrest from them by force, or shuffle from them by chicane, what they think the only advantage worth living for. This fierce spirit of liberty is stronger in the English Colonies probably than in any other people of the earth …the people of the Colonies are descendants of Englishmen. England, Sir, is a nation which still, I hope, respects, and formerly adored, her freedom. The Colonists emigrated from you when this part of your character was most predominant; and they took this bias and direction the moment they parted from your hands. They are therefore not only devoted to liberty, but to liberty according to English ideas, and on English principles … The people are Protestants; and of that kind which is the most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion. This is a persuasion not only favorable to liberty, but built upon it.
Americans must look back with delight upon this portrait—as flattering to us as Burke’s artistic contemporary George Romney’s portraits were of his noble patrons. Burke also meant to flatter his auditors; Cousin Jonathan over the water was just John Bull distilled. But it was part of a larger argument of prudence and accommodation: Cousin Jonathan loves his liberty, he is one of some swiftly increasing millions three thousand long miles away from the center of our power, and we must govern him accordingly.
Burke advocated that Parliament use the lightest of reins—that it rescind the Boston Port Bill and all other needless—as he saw them—aggravations of the American colonists. Cease to irritate the Americans, and they would return to their natural love of England.
The Americans will have no interest contrary to the grandeur and glory of England, when they are not oppressed by the weight of it; and they will rather be inclined to respect the acts of a superintending legislature when they see them the acts of that power which is itself the security, not the rival, of their secondary importance… for all service, whether of revenue, trade, or empire—my trust is in her interest in the British Constitution. My hold of the Colonies is in the close affection which grows from common names, from kindred blood, from similar privileges, and equal protection. These are ties which, though light as air, are as strong as links of iron. Let the Colonists always keep the idea of their civil rights associated with your government,—they will cling and grapple to you, and no force under heaven will be of power to tear them from their allegiance.
Burke’s speech is magnificent, and there are some great truths in it. Indeed it is true that Americans were greatly imbued with a love of libertyand that the heirs of Oliver Cromwell in New England and of Algernon Sidney in Virginia were not likely to acquiesce for long in coercive English rule. So, too, is it true that a British policy based on loose rein and trust in affection toward Great Britain could work. The entire nineteenth- and twentieth-century British imperial policy of devolution, of Dominion and Commonwealth, was based upon Burke’s a prioris—and worked. In 1939, Britain’s Dominions freely voted to join Britain in war against Nazi Germany—in Canada, in Australia, in New Zealand, even in South Africa, where the Afrikaner voting majority had much reason to dislike the British who had conquered them. A long-term British policy of trust in colonial affection could and did work.
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Yet, Burke’s argument is not entirely persuasive. Set aside that it is a liberal speech in the worst sense as well as the best—a speech that argues for weakness from principle, that shrinks far too readily from the exercise of force in the exercise of the national interest, that urges reasonable men to bend to the will or the unreasonable. Burke does not realize that Cousin Jonathan already had lost too much of his love for Great Britain—and irretrievably. Neither does Burke remark that Cousin Jonathan had also been reading French books, and increasingly he thought of his rights as natural to all mankind, and not just the rights of Englishmen. And then, he is gravely mistaken in his contention that Americans will have no interest contrary to the grandeur and glory of England. Our forefathers in the 1770s had an intelligent appreciation that the entire North American continent north of Mexico was up for grabs and a rational ambition that the empire to come be centered from Boston to Charleston and not from London. In 1775, neither affection nor interest still bound America to Britain.
Burke’s speech was magnificent, wrong-headed—and ineffective.
The majority of Britain’s Parliament was set on confrontation with the colonies. What little affection truculent Cousin Jonathan still had for Britain would leak away with the bloodshed at Lexington and Concord. Perhaps Britain might have succeeded had it set out in 1763 to make America a loving Dominion avant la lettre—but by 1775, such a policy could not succeed. The beauty of Burke’s words could not hold back the British Empire from its trans-Atlantic civil war.
In 2025, we are in the middle of a—more bloodless—civil war across the American imperium.
The Patriot rebels have seized control of the White House—but they face entrenched and mighty opponents in the bureaucracy, the judiciary, half the state governments, civil society, and the Old Regime’s client bureaucracies that rule Europe and our other protectorates. The Patriots’ only true source of power is the American people—but that is a mighty champion.
How do the lines of affection and interest run? When should coercion and confrontation be used, and when should conciliation and the loose rein? The protagonists of our conflicts today must ponder these questions, with Burke’s wisdom only fitfully reliable as a guide.
Perhaps we should substitute the phrase the federal government for England: “The Americans will have no interest contrary to the grandeur and glory of the federal government, when they are not oppressed by the weight of it.” Will Americans be conciliated to our federal government if it is depoliticized? Will they be happy with an expansive federal government purging its woke excrescences? Or is their disaffection so deep that they would rather all grandeur and glory belong to the American people and not to its government?
I hesitate to identify one person as the Edmund Burke of our day—amiable, well-meaning, but ultimately out of touch with the temper of the times. I suspect my own policy recommendations are a mixture of Tom Paine and Edmund Burke, and many of us who start out as Paines end up as Burkes. I do fear that Oren Cass, whom I generally support, and many of whose policies to reform conservative economic policy are revolutionary, may be showing a too-Burkean caution in his recent reservations about the Department of Government Efficiency. But if I name Cass, it is because I see him as I see myself—someone caught off guard by just how swiftly the Patriots of our day have moved to put into effect the American people’s disaffection with a government that has been perverted into an institutionalized conspiracy against their liberty.
I suspect that it is far too late in the day to conciliate the American people to our federal government. But we shall soon discover the truth of the matter.
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