Since at least the nineteen-eighties, Americans have had a fairly established pantheon of conservative thinkers and statesmen. Figures such as William F. Buckley, Ronald Reagan, Leo Strauss, and Barry Goldwater have dominated the minds of young Republicans and established intellectuals. A more historically minded conservative would include on this list John Adams and Calvin Coolidge, while someone with no historical memory would likely add Michael Anton and Tucker Carlson. With the exception of Edmund Burke and Alexis De Tocqueville, very few Americans look beyond our borders to understand the history of conservatism. Ron Dart’s recently published work, The North American High Tory Tradition, serves as a corrective to this nationalistic hubris through its brilliant account of Canadian conservatism and its divergence from the American right.
What Is High Toryism
The major goal of Dart’s book is to show that, until recently, Canadian conservatism was starkly different from its counterpart in the United States. This difference can be attributed partly to the fact that many royalist loyalists fled from the United States to the Canadian frontier during the American Revolution, but also to the strong cultural and political ties that continued to exist between Canada and England well into the twentieth century. While American conservatism is the product of thinkers and statesmen like Locke, Jefferson, and Hamilton – all classical liberals – Canadian conservatism was infused with a “tory touch” by thinkers such as John A. Macdonald and Bishop John Strachan.
In a short but insightful preface, Dart outlines the political positions that make up the Tory tradition. The Tory school of politics is usually painted as center-right on social issues and center-left on economic ones. Though this characterization is not untrue, Dart ably shows that this description oversimplifies Toryism. Tory thought traces its origin to the natural law theorists of the Roman Republic and Roman Catholic Church, though this natural law is mediated through the innate moderation of the Anglican church.
At the heart of this political vision is a concern for the common good. This High Tory Canadian vision articulated by Dart argues that only by grounding politics in “certain immutable principles” can societal decay be averted and that both the state and the public have an important role to play in instilling those principles. In practice, this means a powerful, though still restrained, national government that emphasizes the importance of tradition, religion, liberal arts education, community, and the promotion of the economic welfare of all citizens.
The High Tory Critique of America
Throughout his book, Dart juxtaposes the Tory vision with American liberalism. Latent in this comparison is a critique of the American model of politics. Rather than explain the Tory critique of liberalism in a long philosophic tract, most of the North American High Tory Tradition is dedicated to examining the political thought of various Canadian thinkers and their interlocutors in the Anglosphere. Foremost among Dart’s roster of Tory grandees is George Grant (1918-1988). Grant dominated the Canadian philosophic world for much of the twentieth century and his Lament For A Nation (1965) is one of the seminal tracts of Canadian nationalism. Concerned with the importation of American ideas to Canada, Grant’s book is a work of resistance that seeks to show the problems with American liberalism and highlight the virtues of a High Tory Canadian perspective.
Grant contrasted the common good vision of Toryism with American republicanism, in which government has little say about moral issues and the fundamental questions of human life are handled in the private sector. Grant, and by extension Dart, argue that this view inevitably leads to a society consumed with individualism. A society where the common good is forgotten in favor of the accumulation of wealth and the spread of empire.
Is There An American Toryism?
As an American engaging with Dart and the Canadian Tory tradition, two questions spring to mind: how fair is the Tory critique of America, and does America have anything like a Tory tradition? Dart and Grant’s critique of liberal republicanism rings true of certain brands of America’s republican tradition. Alexander Hamilton and other key framers, following the lead of Montesquieu and Hume, created a commercial republic whose motivating force was personal gain and individualism. This principle, which Grant sees at the heart of the commercial republic, was summarized succinctly by Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 23, stating that “money is, with propriety, considered as the vital principle of the body politic.”
Dart and Grant’s condemnation of commercial republicanism is somewhat fair. A republic built on selfishness can only ever create a selfish people with little regard for the common good. However, this vision of American politics is disputable. While some founders wished to build a republic on low but sturdy foundations, most thought morality and piety were every bit as important as rights and institutions in encouraging human flourishing. John Dickinson’s first act as Governor of Pennsylvania was to issue a proclamation encouraging pious virtue, and in the Constitution of Massachusetts John Adams argued that without reverence for a higher being, humans could not gain wisdom. Neither of these is meant to indicate that the United States should have a state religion, but it is clear that there are elements of the American founding that combine the very best of liberalism with the very best of Toryism.
As Adams and Dickinson indicate, the United States does have its own distinct Tory tradition – one infused with the unique principles of the United States and its founding. Commercial republicanism is not the only vision that has shaped American politics. This becomes especially obvious when looking through the history of the nineteenth century. With the rise of Jacksonian populism – and the selfishness it encouraged – figures such as John Quincy Adams brought a different kind of republicanism to the forefront of American political life, one that had always played a part in the ideology of the Federalist Party.
For Adams, the heart of any republic must be virtue. Departing from modern commercial individualism, he argued that “Virtue is the oxygen, the vital air of the moral world. Immutable and incorruptible itself.” Though monarchies, aristocracies, and dictatorships can survive without a virtuous citizenry, Adams contended that republics are different, relying totally upon the character of public officials and private citizens alike. Without virtue, republics are doomed to sink into despotism, consumed by avarice and corruption. He also merrily jettisoned the notion that freedom to live life according to personal whimsy is the highest good, instead advocating for a vision of human flourishing that entailed living in accordance with truth and goodness, though without state intervention to force such behavior. In essence, to be virtuous was to be free.
In order to encourage virtue, Adams argued that republics must downplay the role of individuals and focus instead on the common good by creating an educational system that encourages selflessness and public service through the cultivation of tradition, rootedness, and religion. This required a powerful but restrained government willing to spend money on social programs and overcome sectional divides. This view of republicanism became one of the core ideas of the Whig Party, then carried into the Republican Party by figures such as Lincoln. Since then, Adams’ republic of virtue has become a persistent theme among some American thinkers and politicians. One only need look to the political thought of figures as diverse as Calvin Coolidge, Thomas Dewey, and Franklin Roosevelt to see the continuing influence of this vision in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
This republican vision has a great deal in common with High Tory political thought. Both emphasize the common good as the foundation of the regime and both emphasize tradition, religion, and education as some of the surest paths to securing that foundation. Much of it is rooted in the same sources as Tory thought – Christian thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas and Roman moral philosophers like Cicero. In short, America has its own High Tory republican tradition. One not fully recognized by Dart or a plethora of modern conservative academics. This is not to say that the idea of a virtuous republic is identical to High Toryism, but there is no denying that there is a strong resemblance. In our contemporary moment – one consumed with selfishness, individualism, and a dangerous disregard for tradition – it seems more important than ever that we appreciate the “Tory touch” in Canadian politics and revive Republican Toryism in America. Reading the work of Ron Dart is a great place for a citizen to begin this journey.