Does your interlocutor believe in a universal moral law binding on all human beings? That single question determines whether political argument will rest on reason or dissolve into pure passion.
A moral predicate is the foundational moral assumption on which all subsequent reasoning depends. Without some shared base, rational debate becomes impossible. The historical foundations of the American republic — Biblical revelation and Natural Law — supplied this predicate. These principles not only undergirded the founding but also defined a political philosophy rooted in an unchanging human nature. Political rationality therefore demands a shared moral foundation.
The American Founders openly grounded politics in a universal and rational moral law — “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” Modern progressivism, by contrast, rejects that premise in favor of historical relativism and emotional intuition, leaving no stable ground for reasoned debate or ordered liberty.
The classical origins of Natural Law, as the Founders received it, trace back to Cicero, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas, who argued that there are knowable moral truths embedded in the nature of things and in human reason itself. Enlightenment thinkers such as Locke, Jefferson, Burke, and Madison then offered a synthesis of faith and reason that shaped the American experiment. The result was a regime premised on universal rights, not on tribe, class, or historical accident.
A rupture came with German Historicism, which treated moral and political principles as products of historical circumstance rather than universal truths. That intellectual turn helped feed both twentieth‑century fascism and communism, which subordinated individual rights to ideological “necessity.” In the United States, this historicist impulse took root in progressive political theory, notably at Wisconsin under Robert La Follette and at Princeton under Woodrow Wilson, where Natural Law was dismissed as outdated metaphysics.
Yet across the centuries, many conservative thinkers — including agnostics and atheists — have embraced something like Natural Law as the only durable basis for political order. Even the so‑called Deists among the Founders appealed to “Nature’s God” and “self‑evident” truths about human equality and rights. Modern writers as different as Ayn Rand and George Orwell presupposed an objective moral standard against which tyranny, lies, and collectivist coercion could be judged.
The economist F. A. Hayek argued that “our moral traditions developed concurrently with our reason, not as its product,” and that we live by rules of conduct we did not invent but must learn. In this sense, the inherited “moral tradition” functions as a bridge between reason and intuition, giving shape to liberty, property, and justice long before any planner’s blueprint. Markets and free institutions, on this view, rest on a prior framework of moral norms that reason can recognize but did not create.
The Founders held that “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” were universal, applying to all people in all times. Reason can discern basic human goods — life, family, knowledge, community, and justice — that no majority vote may rightly overturn. Divine revelation, in the Judeo‑Christian understanding, confirms and elevates what reason discovers, but the core moral claims remain accessible to all human beings. Arguments grounded in Natural Law thus provide a stable moral compass in a pluralistic society and create common ground for both religious and secular citizens.
Two early twentieth‑century presidents came to symbolize rival progressive paths: Theodore Roosevelt, the constitutionalist pragmatist, and Woodrow Wilson, the revisionist. Both called themselves progressives, but only Roosevelt kept the Constitution as his “North Star,” treating it as a binding framework rather than a relic to be overcome. Wilson, by contrast, became the patron saint of those who regard the founding principles as obstacles to modern “administrative” governance.
Wilson’s own words are revealing. In a 1907 writing as president of Princeton University, he argued that “we in modern times are not bound to adhere to the doctrines held by the signers of the Declaration of Independence.” In 1911, addressing the Jefferson Club of Los Angeles, he advised that to understand the Declaration one should “excise” its opening paragraphs, dismissing them as a mere “rhetorical introduction” and “the least part of it.” “If you want to understand the real Declaration of Independence,” he said, “do not repeat the preface.”
The first question for any self‑described progressive or socialist, then, is straightforward: Do you reject those words? If so, what would you put in their place? For the Declaration’s “preface” is not ornamental; it is the heart of the American creed:
“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands… to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them… We hold these truths to be self‑evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…”
To reject Natural Law and Biblical principles without offering an alternative moral scaffolding is to abandon both reason and revelation and to fall back on shifting emotion. Argument grounded solely in sentiment is subjective, mutable, and ultimately impervious to rational refutation. That is no foundation for representative government or a free economy.
Which brings the discussion back to that opening question. Before any serious conversation about politics, economics, or justice, every conservative — indeed, every defender of ordered liberty — should ask: Do my interlocutors believe in a universal moral law binding on all human beings? If they do not, debate will inevitably give way to persuasion by passion, not reason — and the moral foundation of freedom cannot survive on sentiment alone.
