No, Paleoconservatives Aren't Helping the Left

Michael Anton raises several good points in his brief against Brion McClanahan’s assault on the 1776 Commission and that commission’s yoking of universal equality with the American founding. Anton is perfectly correct that state declarations of the rights of citizens drafted during or after the American Revolution incorporate the natural right phraseology of the Declaration of Independence. Thus, the attempt by members of the Old Right, including Willmoore Kendall (whom I usually follow in these matters), to downplay natural rights language in the American Founding is open to question. 

Anton is also right that at least several of America’s founders opposed slavery in principle, even if such a theoretical opponent as Thomas Jefferson only freed a small number of his slaves. It is of course also true that Jefferson in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) wished to send the emancipated slaves out of his state because of what he thought were intractable differences between the races. Like the signers of the Declaration who went along with what the Claremont Institute understands as the authoritative passage in that document (and not all members of the Continental Congress approved of that wording), we are supposed to assume that all human beings have inalienable rights to life and liberty.

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