Why America’s founding is a conservative touchstone

James Manship, a conservative activist who regularly attends right-wing marches and rallies, wears his politics. 

From the bottom up, he puts on colonial riding boots, stockings, breeches, a white dress shirt, a vest, an overcoat, a white wig, and a tricorn hat. It can be an uncomfortable get-up. But if George Washington could wear it into battle, this George Washington interpreter can wear it in his battle for American values. 

“I didn’t have a Ph.D. or a JD, so nobody was going to listen to me about my understanding of the Constitution,” says Mr. Manship, who lives in Alexandria, Virginia. “But they would listen to the president of the Constitutional Convention.”

Mr. Manship loves his history, and he dresses as George Washington, in part, out of personal interest. It’s also strategic. Mr. Manship is a devout Christian and conservative, active in state politics. In his 30 years of interpreting, he’s spoken to thousands of students and addressed the Virginia General Assembly multiple times. When General Washington shows up, he says, other conservatives want to listen. 

Most people are more subtle in their attire, but right-leaning Americans across the country frequently appeal to the nation’s founding. The fight against big government is one of “patriots” against “tyranny.” In heavily Republican areas, the historical Gadsden flag – with a coiled rattlesnake and the words “Dont tread on me” – has migrated from flagpoles to license plate frames. In response to the 1619 Project, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalistic collection about slavery, there’s now a 1776 Project. 

This iconography has long been a hallmark of the American right, but it’s becoming increasingly important. The uproar about instruction related to race in schools, in particular, often stems from conservatives sensing critiques of the country’s founding, says Amy Cooter, a sociologist at Vanderbilt University. To many, that history isn’t a relic. It’s a fundamental part of conservative identity today. Figuring out how to make issues like race less controversial demands understanding why the founding – and the founders themselves – matter so much to many people right of center. 

Many conservatives “want to believe so badly that we’re a good nation,” says Dr. Cooter. Questioning the founding is “threatening to … who they think they are as people, who they think they are as Americans.”

Founders or founding principles?

People’s sense of themselves as Americans often depends on their view of America. On that topic, the left and right have very different views. 

In a YouGov/Economist survey last December, those who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 were far more pessimistic about America’s relative standing on issues like income inequality and minority rights than those who voted for Donald Trump. A report from Pew Research Center, published a month before, had similar findings. People who identified furthest to the right were far more likely to agree that “The U.S. stands above all other countries in the world” than people furthest to the left – 69% to 1%. 

For some of those conservatives who believe in American exceptionalism, displaying symbols of America’s founding is a way to show national pride. But it’s not the only way, nor are conservatives the only patriotic Americans. In the YouGov survey, independents responded more like Republicans than Democrats. 

“Conservatives or conservative activists might display these symbols the most, but I think the vast majority of Americans are remaining patriotic,” says Donald Critchlow, professor of history at Arizona State University and author of “Revolutionary Monsters: Five Men Who Turned Liberation into Tyranny.” 

In his opinion, the symbols have more to do with political organizing than patriotism. Movements need a shared language and iconography, and conservatives have long used that of the founding. When Franklin Roosevelt tried to pack the Supreme Court in 1937, he says, protesters arrived in Washington dressed as Minutemen. 

Still, despite the different strains of the American right and the many symbols they could rally around, there’s something specific about the founding that resonates. In part, it’s a natural fit with conservative thought. If you want the country to remain true to the way it started, then you’re more likely to celebrate those who started it. It also reflects a specific view of the country’s founding popular among the right.

“The understanding of the country as something based on a creed of rational principles has always stood in contrast to a point of view which said, no, it’s not based on what these guys wrote. It’s based on who they were,” says Lawrence Rosenthal, chair and lead researcher of the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. 

People on the left, he says, are much more likely to value the principles of America’s founding documents – things like individual rights, democracy, and equality. People on the right also value those documents but tend to emphasize the identity of the founders who wrote them, particularly their race or religion. The latter view, says Dr. Rosenthal, has grown more popular than ever since Mr. Trump’s presidency.

“They really see themselves as acting in the lineage especially of the Founding Fathers,” says Dr. Cooter.

Consulting the Constitution 

Mr. Manship thinks that way.

His reverence for the Constitution started at the age of 10, when a former editor of the Atlanta Constitution told him to treasure the nation’s founding documents. Later, he pledged to “defend the Constitution of the United States from all enemies, foreign and domestic” when serving in the Navy. Protecting the Constitution is largely how he views politics today. Like many conservatives, he thinks it’s under threat. 

In a November 2021 poll by the Public Religion Research Institute, Republicans were more than twice as likely as Democrats to agree that “today, America is in danger of losing its culture and identity.” A more recent poll shows Republicans generally feel more pessimistic about the country’s direction.

Appeals to the founding can be powerful forms of reassurance for conservatives who feel threatened – especially as narratives of American history grow more inclusive, and often more critical. In last year’s school board races, some candidates opposed to instruction related to race, signaled their positions by signing an online 1776 Pledge.

The founding is “more appealing to conservatives because we do have this view of limited government,” says John Eidsmoe, a former staff attorney with the Alabama Supreme Court and outspoken conservative. “We’re concerned about government getting too powerful, about taking too much of our tax money, about using it for purposes that we think would be immoral.”

But the founding doesn’t appeal to all on the right the same way. 

Brett Ames frequently consults the Constitution when thinking about political problems today and proudly traces his American ancestry back to Braintree, Massachusetts, in 1632. He’s a conservative and respects fixtures of America’s founding, but he doesn’t consider them all sacred. The founders were just men, he says.

“I don’t think that they personally, if they saw how revered they were to this day, that they would be comfortable with it,” says Mr. Ames. 

Still Mr. Ames, a former IT employee, flies two flags off his porch in Buckhall, Virginia: the Marine Corps flag and the Gadsden flag. The first is for his son, who serves in the military. The second is in honor of Revolutionary War naval commander John Paul Jones, who allegedly flew it from his ship. Those two reflect his love of country, but he says they’re more about his own values. 

In his own way, Mr. Manship would agree. Dressing as George Washington can be a signal to other conservatives, but not just conservatives. He wants people to know how much he cares about the Constitution. What better way to show it, he says.

“They see the image of a George Washington. ... They see and feel the passion,” says Mr. Manship. “That’s going to communicate a love for this Constitution better than if I come before them in a coat and tie or a T-shirt.”