Where might a real American tradition of governance be found?

Obama’s Disregard for Our European Inheritance

Imperils American Freedom

by Gerald J. Russello

Our quadrennial spectacle of electing a president brings out the relationship between political order and the nation’s cultural and social order. Take the question of “rights,” which is a concept at the heart of the American experiment.  Based on the nation’s revolt from England, and deeply grounded in the mother country’s common law tradition, rights were seen as simply those claims that exist independently of the state. Citizens have rights because they are human, as part (as Catholic social thought might phrase it) of their human dignity. To “secure” these rights, as the declaration of Independence phrases it, governments are instituted. Of course, how these rights are expressed in a particular cultural or political condition change over time, but in the Anglo-American tradition they are closely bound up with notions of limited government, federalism (and its close cousin, subsidiarity), equality under the law, and other structural features.

However, these structural features must necessarily reflect more substantial cultural and religious suppositions. The historical basis of American culture is that of Europe, and European culture cannot be separated from Christianity and the forms it took in institutions such as the monastic orders, the tradition of chivalry, the cult of the saints and martyrs, and above all the international structure of the Catholic Church. 

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