Would ANY of our "founding fathers" be considered Conservative?

[Toots]

Would any man who signed the Declaration of Independence be considered anything other than Liberal? Reading about those times in our history and using the same terms applied today to activists and politicians, the only ones I could consider to be "conservatives" would be the Loyalists. Every single person that fought for America's Independence and formulated our early government could only be "Liberal" by today's standards. Why should Americans be taught to hate such men's political leanings? Maybe that should be a question that gets asked to Republicans and their pundits. Ask them to describe how they would consider any of those fine brave souls anything other than Liberal. By what measure could anyone justify calling them Conservative? Just one more trivial thing to think about....:shrug:

[Freedom_from_Chains]

1. Well certainly there were Conservatives among the signers of the

Constitution. But you can't compare them to the people who are in power today who could potentially be referred too as a lot of things, conservative, however, is not one of them.

[Jackpine Radical]

2. Hamilton.

[Warpy]

4. You beat me

Hamilton was also a hard headed money man who represented the best the conservative mindset has to offer.

It's a shame that this bunch of neocons, theocons and thieves are giving conservatism a bad name. It's not always bad. It's just WRONG when it tries to interfere in social issues.

[Finder]

13. Hamilton was far from conservative...n/t

[Bucky]

19. He was a neo-mercantalist. He ran up the debt & dabbled w/ a coup attempt

Both in connection w/ slyly encouraging the Newburgh Conspiracy and his unrealized plans to use the army as an instrument of power during the Quasi-War with France, Hamilton showed himself less than fully committed to Washington's idea that the military should always be subservient to the republic.

He had a sound monetary policy--the federal government taking on all the remaining state debts from the revolution and paying off all the bonds at face value was tough on the veterans who'd sold off their Continental notes and sweet on the money-speculators who'd bought up those notes at highly reduced prices. But his plans supported the growth of the country and set the US on the course to being the power that it is today.

His ideas about supporting the development of industry also shows him to be a friend of the monied interest--but also someone who wanted there to be opportunities for new businesses and new technologies. He was a lifelong enemy of slavery, however. He's a mixed bag, like all the Founders. He'd be considered a classical liberal--comparable to Australia's Liberal Party (but is the conservative party in their politics). But I think in the balance you'd have to call him a conservative by today's standards, altho I doubt he'd have much truck with the neocons.

[genie_weenie]

3. IMO, it is incorrect to apply modern labels

to great people of history. It has also been used as propaganda (I am not saying by you in this instance but as a general rule) by people who wish their followers to identify current Leaders with great ones in history.

Washington was an autocrat and the growth of Federal Power would probably be alarming to all of them

[Telly Savalas]

5. Many of them owned slaves.

[Bucky]

20. Yeh, the liberals among them, however.

Mason, Jefferson, Madison, Rufus King, John Hancock...

Those who loved the Bill of Rights best tended to be slaveowners in the south and slave shippers from the north.

It's tough to give 18th century pols 21st century labels. Slavery was an issue on which the country went thru a lot of evolving. We simplify it all at the peril of understanding it.

[Finder]

6. I agree, all liberals, and...

the lack of civics education in this country has allowed the definitions of both philosophical positions to be skewed and misunderstood. Partisanship has confused the defintions even further.

To make the situation even worse, American History is taught differently in certain regions in public school.

[Jcrowley]

7. Wealthy

Land Holders. Labels are often laden with accretions.

Dangerous to lionize. Too many myths are being perpetuated.

[pat_k]

8. Not even Nixon would be considered Conservative these days. nt

[NewJeffCT]

23. Nixon is to the left of "moderate" McCain

Didn't Nixon favor universal health care?

[lumberjack_jeff]

9. No. By any definition, they'd be considered radical dissidents

They're definitely not conservatives, but I wouldn't call 'em liberals either.

[leesa]

10. Well, the current Republicans are loyalists...they would be rooting for

King George as they are now.

[Telly Savalas]

11. How liberal could they be if there were no Founding Mothers?

[Bucky]

21. Look up Mercy Oates Warren, Abigail Adams, Molly Pitcher

Yes, there were Founding Mothers. Your criticisms of the Founders makes about as much since as calling Albert Einstein a Luddite because he rarely used a computer.

[BurtWorm]

12. Adams and Hamilton were pretty right wing.

Adams was accused of being a closet monarchist who wanted to be king. (But he has to be applauded for his principled stand against slavery and enlightened ideas about the rights of women.)

[rug]

14. I can't think of one who was not.

They were anti-monarchists. They can be considered liberal by contrast only.

Slavery survived the revolution. Private property was enshrined. Separation of powers and checks and balances were initiated to prevent a government from undue interference from commerce and freedom of action for those who had the ability to act, the propertied.

Civil liberties were meant for, and applied mainly to, white males of means.

Notwithstanding what was achieved, the modern appellation of liberal is an awkward fit at best.

[BurtWorm]

25. Modern liberals are wussy moderates compared to the founders.

Granted most of their views on slavery were plain awful. In the context of their times, however, guys like Jefferson and Madison were pretty radically left-wing, pro-popular and anti-authoritarian. They had more than their share of visionaries and guys like Paine were the forebears of socialists and anarchists. Modern American leftism, for the most part, is far more bourgeois and genteel than Paine-style radicalism and Franklin's iconoclasm, for instance.

[rug]

28. While you're right about the present, you're wrong about the past.

Only in the context of their times are they progressive. But remember their context was Louis XVI and George III.

I'll give you Paine but they were much closer to their peers than to a single socialist, let alone anarchist.

[BurtWorm]

29. The context of their times is all that matters.

They're part of the path of progress from the Enlightenment to socialism. The American left is off that path, being marginalized and disempowered.

[nealmhughes]

15. They can't be described in our current lexicon as simply "conservative"

or "liberal." They were all "liberal" in the sense of Classical Liberalism, i.e., Parliamentary rule, property rights, privacy, etc. that most Brits espoused then... Pitt the Elder, for example thought they were the "True Whigs"...

Now, there was a "conservative" in the sense of heirarchy that ran through most of them -- voting restrictions, state churches thru the early 1800s, only no Test Act for federal office, preservation of slavery as preservation of property rights, etc.

They were and they weren't radical. The radicals were men such as Paine who went to France and Jefferson who cheered on the Whiskey Rebellion. The "real" radicals were more like Jefferson's student, Jackson, who made the new states bastions of herrenvolk democracy, at least for a while, such as universal white male suffrage, complete disestablishment in Kentucky and Tennessee, etc. Yet they railed at the concept of "internal improvements" being done from the public coffers...

Our labels don't apply to 1776 through the Reconstruction.

[Finder]

16. I think we all have our own definition of what liberal and conservative...

means, unfortunately. Some seem to be using the political or philosophical definition, others an economic and/or social position. This is the root of most of the debate or infighting within political parties and on DU.

[135th]

17. Like most people here have said

it's difficult to apply modern labels to the founders. If I had to I would think most fell between libertarian and conservative. Modern liberal concepts really didn't emerge untill the late 19th century, and are not very applicable to the founders.

[nadinbrzezinski]

18. John Adams comes to mind

strongly in fact

But the label is hard to pin on him since he was a Burkian Conservative, with monarchist tendencies... our modern conservatives don't have anything in common with Burke.

But if you use the labels of the age, Adams was a WHIG... and Whigs were the conservatives of their era

[Bucky]

22. Adams was a Federalist, not a Whig

He was hardly a monarchist. He was culturally conservative. But when Hamilton wanted to use the army as a political tool in Quasi-War, it was Adams who single handedly stopped him. On the issue of slavery, Adams and Hamilton were the liberals and Jefferson the conservative.

[135th]

26. Adams was not a Monarchist,

that comes from slander peices Thomas Jefferson had written about him to help his own drive for the presidency. Jefferson gets a pass for a lot of things he shouldn't. He had no problem using the Sedition acts to attack his enemies as president, untill Hamilton rallied popular support and forced him to repeal the law. The details of this story are almost always forgotten and Jefferson simply gets credit for repealing the Sedition acts.

[Solly Mack]

24. Who would the founding fathers torture?

[Odin2005]

27. Many members of the Federalist Party were quite conservative.

The "Leftists" of the day where the ones most ardently aginst a strong federal government. These early "anti-Federalists" would found the Democratic-Republican party of Jefferson, which would eventually evolve into the Democratic Party.