Mark Lilla on Americans' politics

Americans' assumptions about human nature are basically liberal today. We take it for granted that we are born free, that we constitute society, it doesn't constitute us, and that together we legitimately govern ourselves. Most intellectuals who call themselves conservatives today accept as self-evident the truths enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, which no traditional European conservative could. They are go-slow, curb-your-enthusiasm liberals like Tocqueville, not conservatives like Burke or T.S.Eliot or Michael Oakeshott. As for those like Congressman Ron Paul, who promote a minimal state and an unregulated economy, their libertarianism is actually a mutation of liberalism, not conservatism.