Conservatives dominate American politics because there is no conservative tradition in American political thought. Liberals are powerless because all Americans are liberals. Americans argue with each other so virulently because there is so little about which they disagree. They elect presidents from distinguished families because they detest aristocracies. Their society is so secure that they feel constantly under attack. The more isolationist their instincts, the more likely they are to view themselves as saviors of the world.

It takes a love of paradox to appreciate the work of Louis Hartz, whose pathbreaking book, ''The Liberal Tradition in America,'' is celebrating its 50th birthday. ... Before him, American political thought was viewed through the lens of conflict: Jefferson versus Hamilton, the North against the South, progressives in tension with standpatters. But for Hartz, all such disagreements took place within a broad consensus about American values. His lesson was simple: no ideology outside that consensus -- in particular, not that European import called Marxism -- could flourish on these shores.

The American consensus, Hartz argued, stemmed from the ideas of the British philosopher John Locke (1632-1704). For Locke, equality is natural to human beings because at a minimum all people own the same property: their labor. Freedom is preferable to authoritarianism because the best governments are those that win the consent of the people. Religious toleration is a good idea because faiths that are free will be stronger than those that are coerced. Hartz argued that Locke's liberalism had morphed into the American way of life, creating a consensus around property rights, social mobility, individual freedom and popular democracy so powerful that no one could escape it.

The power of Locke's ideas in America was best demonstrated by the fate of those who might have been inclined to challenge them. Upper-class Federalists and Whigs, unable to justify rule by an elite, turned around and claimed that there was no such thing as class. Southerners like John C. Calhoun argued in favor of slavery, not through divine right or natural law, but by self-defeating appeals to contract and reason. And, Hartz said, because the United States lacked a conservative tradition, it could not have a socialist one. In Europe, feudalism and socialism both appealed to an organic vision of society and fed off each other, but in America, where individualism ruled, neither could take root.

...Hartz got the large picture astonishingly right. It is not just that Republicans praise the sanctity of property rights; Democrats, they claim, represent the elite, while they stand for the common man. Trying to roll back the egalitarian reforms of the New Deal, Republicans describe their goal, with perfect Lockean pitch, as ''an ownership society.'' Not for them such feudal legacies as the filibuster; they demand up or down votes on judicial nominees so that the voice of the people can be heard.

Not all contemporary conservatives are followers of Locke. Adherents of the Christian right, among others, are not likely to be avid readers of Locke's letter on religious toleration (even if Locke justified toleration, not on secular grounds, but on Christian principle). But the fate of today's religious right may well have been foreshadowed by what Hartz called ''the reactionary Enlightenment,'' the effort by Southern thinkers before the Civil War to find a justification for slavery. Because of the lack of a conservative tradition, the opposite of liberalism was fantasy, and so Southern thinkers invented a feudal past of honor and chivalry that never existed.

Similarly, despite the deism of Jefferson and Madison, today's religious right claims that the United States was founded as a Christian republic. Separation of church and state, they contend, is contrary to American ideals -- when it is in fact the perfect expression of them. Like a Southern slaveholder captivated by the novels of Sir Walter Scott, America's Christian conservatives live in a world of their own imagining. Hartz would have understood them perfectly.

[Link added. -- Ed]

I would dispute Wolfe's implication that the apparently populist stance of the right's New Establisment on certain issues is legitimate and sincere. They are, rather, practical tactical choices made to aid in their accumulation of power, which carry with them the ancillary benefit of appearing to be "democratic." However, if the circumstances warranted, and other choices would be more likely to help them gain the permanent power structure they're attempting to build, they would have no compunction about adopting those different choices, because their core ideology is not in any way tied to increasing the power of the people -- exactly the opposite, I would say.