Last weekend, a group of conservatives convened the annual Principles First Summit, this one with the theme of “Conserving America’s Liberal Tradition.” I spoke on the opening panel, alongside thinker-journalists William Kristol and Matthew Continetti and historian Francis Fukuyama. As the curtain riser, our theme was essentially the theme of the conference as a whole: “America’s Tradition of Classical Liberalism.” And by “classical liberalism,” of course, what is meant is what once was known as the “liberal tradition” that describes the philosophical framework that, very broadly speaking, guided founders James Madison and Ben Franklin and theorists John Locke and Edmund Burke, among many others. It is that traditional “liberalism,” not modern American political liberalism, that modern Reaganite “conservatives” are determined to conserve.

With the caveat that this was part of a panel discussion in which I was conversing with those three other wonderful speakers, and that therefore only part of this actually was written out while part was ad-libbed, what follows is my best reconstruction of my opening remarks.