It’s important to clear up what we mean by the terms “Left” and “Right.” The political use of the two terms dates back to 1789 and the French Revolution. In the National Assembly in Paris, the partisans of the Revolution sat on the left side and their opponents sat on the right. This is how we got our original “left-wing” and “right-wing.” The term “right-wing” in this context refers to defenders of the Ancien Régime who wanted France to return to the governing alliance of throne and altar that had preceded the revolution. “Conservative” became a description of the old guard who wanted to conserve the monarchy and the prerogatives of the established church against revolutionary overthrow.

So right away we have a problem: if this is what “right-wing” and “conservative” mean, then there are no right-wingers or conservatives in America. America has never had either a monarchy or an established church. Modern American conservatives have no intention to introduce either. In what sense, then, are modern conservatives right-wing? What is it that American conservatives want to conserve?

The answer is pretty simple. They want to conserve the principles of the American Revolution. So while the French Right opposed the French Revolution, the American Right champions the American Revolution. If it seems paradoxical to use the terms “conserve” and “Revolution” in the same sentence, this paradox nevertheless defines the modern-day conservative. The American Revolution was characterized by three basic freedoms: economic freedom or capitalism, political freedom or constitutional democracy, and freedom of speech and religion. These are the freedoms that, in their original form, American conservatives seek to conserve.

As the founders understood it, the main threat to freedom comes from the federal government. Our rights, consequently, are protections against excessive government intrusion and intervention. That’s why the Bill of Rights typically begins, “Congress shall make no law.” By placing fetters or restraints on the federal government, we secure our basic rights and liberties. The objective of these rights and liberties is for Americans to devote their lives to the “pursuit of happiness.” Happiness is the goal and rights and liberties are the means to that goal. Right-wingers in America are the ones who seek to protect the rights of Americans to pursue happiness by limiting the power of the central state.

“An elective despotism,” Jefferson said, “is not what we fought for.”2 Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party preceded our current two-party system, but his sentiment is one that American right-wingers and conservatives would heartily endorse. Even elected governments do not have unlimited power. They must operate within a specified domain; when they go beyond that domain, they become a threat to our freedom and, in this respect, tyrannical. We are under no more obligation to obey an elected tyranny than the founders themselves were obliged to obey the tyrannical authority of the British Crown.

By limiting state power, conservatives seek among other things to protect the right of people to keep the fruits of their own labor. Abraham Lincoln, America’s first Republican president, placed himself squarely in the founding tradition when he said, “I always thought the man who made the corn should eat the corn.” Lincoln, like the founders, was not concerned that private property or private earnings might cause economic inequality. Rather, he believed, as three of the founders themselves wrote in Federalist Paper No. 10, that “the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property” is the “first object of government.”3

American conservatives also seek to conserve the transcendent moral order that is not specified in the Constitution but clearly underlies the American founding. Consider, as a single example, the proposition from the Declaration of Independence that we are all “created equal” and endowed with “inalienable rights” including the “right to life.” This means for conservatives that human life is sacred, it has a dignity that results from divine creation, it is so precious that the right to life cannot be sold even with the consent of the buyer and seller, and finally that no government can violate the right to life without trespassing on America’s most basic moral and political values.

So much for the political Right, what about the Left? The Left in America is defined by its hostility to the restrictions placed by the founders on the federal government. That’s why leftists regularly deplore constitutional restraints on government power, proclaiming the Constitution woefully out of date and calling for us to adopt instead a “living Constitution”—a Constitution adapted to what the Left considers progressive. Indeed many leftists today use “progressive” as their preferred political label. They used to call themselves “liberal,” a term which refers to liberality or freedom; now they use “progressive,” a term which identifies them with the future as opposed to the past.

Progress by itself is a vacant term; we need to know what progressives mean when they use it. What they mean is progress toward greater federal power and federal control. The progressives, in other words, are champions of the power of the centralized state. Two very bad words in modern progressivism are “state’s rights.” Progressives are happiest when the federal government is running things, and when they are in charge of the federal government. That’s what ensures “progress”; any setbacks to this program represent “reaction” and “regress.” No wonder leftists term conservatives who resist expanding government power as “regressive” or “reactionary.”

But why does state power have to be so centralized? While the founders viewed the government as the enemy of rights, the progressive Left regards the federal government as the friend and securer of rights. Moreover, progressives distrust the free-market system and want the government to control and direct the economy, not necessarily nationalizing or taking over private companies, but at least regulating their operations and on occasion mandating their courses of action.

In addition, the Left seeks government authority to enforce and institutionalize progressive values like federally funded abortion and equal treatment of gays and transsexuals. From its abortion stance alone we see that the Left rejects the idea of a transcendent moral order as firmly as it rejects the conservative principle of an inalienable right to life. So if “Right” in America means a limited, nonintrusive government with a wide scope for the individual pursuit of happiness, “Left” in America means a powerful centralized state that implements leftist values and is controlled by the Left.