Brave fellows: cultural explanations of the American Revolution do justice neither to history nor to America.

IF conservatives could have read John O'Sullivan's "After Reaganism" a year sooner, Bob Dole might be President, Newt Gingrich might have been a good Speaker, and Jack Kemp might have been a good speaker. It seems churlish to argue with it, especially since my only disagreement concerns the tail end, and a reference to the eighteenth century. But in America the eighteenth century is always in the news. Getting it wrong is a worse mistake than ignor- ing focus groups.

In Prospect Park in Brooklyn stands a column honoring a regiment of American soldiers who fought on the spot on August 27, 1776. They were from Maryland, led by Colonel William Smallwood, and they were known as "macaronis," for their bright scarlet and buff uniforms ("stuck a feather in his cap, and called it 'macaroni'"). But on that day, they earned another reputation. The British army besieging New York slipped through an unguarded pass on General George Washington's flank and hit the American front line in the rear. Five hundred Americans died, and a thousand were taken prisoner. More would have been killed or captured if the Marylanders had not stood their ground, cover- ing the retreat to Brooklyn Heights. In the thick of the fight, they sent word to Washington asking for reinforcements. He could not spare any; he had to watch them die. "Good God!" he is supposed to have cried, "what brave fellows I must this day lose!"

Why did they fight? The usual reasons -- courage, honor, good leadership. Another factor in the mix was their belief in their ideals. The Com- mander-in-Chief paid attention to ideals -- he had had the Declaration of Independence read to his troops on July 9, as soon as it arrived from Philadelphia.

This is not a universally accepted interpretation of the Revolution. Early in this century, the Revolution was described as an economic struggle between competing imperial powers, one established, one being born. This view, which fell out of favor with historians in the Sixties, has lately been revived by Theodore Draper and praised by Michael Lind. It satisfies two urges charac- teristic of modern intellectuals -- skepticism about public pronouncements, and a hunger for "realistic" descriptions of human action. Forget what Washington read to his troops, look at his real-estate investments. Follow the money. When you have, you see economic man, hewing to his own self-interest.

John O'Sullivan is neither a skeptic, a pseudo-scientist, nor, in the worse sense, a modern intellectual. Despite the unhappy events of Lord North's government, he has the highest respect for George Washington and the other founders. But, in "After Reaganism," he seems not to put much more stock in their ideals than Draper or Lind. He reads their ideals as an expression of their culture: their mores, norms, and habits of the heart. Dismissing the idealist interpretation of the Revolution as "credal," he argues that the Revolution was an exercise in the self-expression of that culture. Like a tec- tonic plate, one people drifted away from another. Only a renewed attention to our culture now, he argues, will save us from present-day challenges.

He cites as support John Jay in The Federalist #2. "Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people -- descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs." Jay's facts are unassailable -- free Americans in the late eighteenth century were overwhelmingly Protestants of British descent. O'Sullivan, however, misinterprets Jay's statement, which is focused on 1787, not 1776. Jay is arguing that a common culture should sustain American unity now, during the struggle over the Constitution; like a good polemicist, he ignores the fact that a common culture had done nothing to prevent violent divisions during the Revolution. Many Americans, indeed, fought not to become Americans. They called themselves Loyalists; their enemies (the Patriots) called them Tories.

How many were there? In his old age, John Adams estimated that one third of Americans supported the Revolution, a third opposed it, and a third were indifferent. Adams hadn't taken a poll, but the number of Loyalists was sig- nificant. And in most parts of the country, the fissure between Loyalism and Patriotism followed no clear sociological pattern. Culture had nothing to do with it. The Revolution divided families. John Randolph, king's attorney for Virginia, sailed to England in 1775 rather than break his oath to George III; his son, Edmund, served on Washington's staff and later in his cabinet. Staats Long Morris, from a land-owning family in what is now the Bronx, fought in the British army; his half-brother, Gouverneur, wrote the Constitution. Sometimes the Revolution divided individuals. Tench Coxe, a Philadelphia economist who was a Tory in the early days of the war, ended up in the Jefferson Administra- tion. We all know Benedict Arnold's career path.

The existence of large numbers of Loyalists proves that the cultural explana- tion of the Revolution is inadequate. Then why did Americans choose the sides they did? Chance, and calculating the main chance, all played their part. But, as with Colonel Smallwood's Marylanders, ideals played a part too. Patriots responded to their own, while Loyalists were unconvinced. The American Revolu- tion was an ideological war, and the country it founded is ideological.

If the ideology of the Patriot party could be reduced to a phrase, it would be "the rights of man." All Patriots believed in them, from the radical Tom Paine to the liberal Thomas Jefferson to conservatives like Washington, Adams, and Alexander Hamilton. "The sacred rights of mankind," Hamilton wrote in 1774, "are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records; they are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature by the hand of the Divinity itself." Hamilton's bitter enemy, Jefferson, liked these words so much he "borrowed" them in a letter fifty years later.

It is not necessary here to define exactly what "the rights of man" mean. The Founders, it turned out, had different takes on this question. Their arguments inflamed the politics of the 1790s. Their descendants had different perspec- tives too, which led to the Civil War. James McPherson notes that the letters of soldiers in that struggle show a high awareness of the issues involved. They were not yokels fighting willy-nilly. Even a rigid cultural historian must concede that it is a cultural habit of Americans to express their politi- cal ideas in ideological terms.

O'Sullivan wants American conservatives to ignore this salient fact about America because he is reasoning backward from two contemporary crises -- less dramatic than the Revolution or the Civil War, but potentially no less serious in the long run: multiculturalism and unrestrained (and therefore unassimi- lated) immigration. Since the "rights of man" looks to him like a paper bar- rier against these threats, the doctrine must be downgraded. Fortunately, O'Sullivan can get what he wants (and what America needs) from the doctrine he deplores.

The "rights of man" has nothing to do with multiculturalism. It takes a lot of ingenuity to transform "all men are created equal" into "all ethnic groups are created equal (except that groups of color trump whites, Jews trump Christians, and everybody trumps WASPs)." This doesn't mean that the left hasn't tried. But all the left's trying doesn't mean that the counterargument can't be made. When someone tries to steal the family silver, the proper response is to stop him, not to say that it wasn't worth much anyway.

Immigration looks like a more difficult case. If America is a creed, can't anyone who believes it -- or mouths it -- come in?

The Founders had a range of views on immigration, from Washington's remark that he would take "Mohammedan" laborers if they worked hard, to Benjamin Franklin's blast at German "boors." This suggests that there is no "credal" position on immigration, and that the historical practice of America -- alternating periods of openness and containment, depending on prudence -- is in fact right.

But there is a more important point. Who says ideas are easy to learn? The most trivial aspects of culture are much easier to pick up. This, and not political theory, is what makes America a "universal nation." American culture precedes immigration. The wives of the average Iranian mullah probably wear jeans under their chadors, and listen to Michael Bolton -- poor slobs.

Ideals are much harder to internalize. A century ago, the Federalist Papers were popular with nation builders in Germany, Japan, and the Union of South Africa (talk about unsolicited testimonials). A cultural determinist would say that German, Japanese, and South African culture prevented the hopeful souls from getting James Madison's drift. Someone who appreciates the complexity and the gravity of ideals would say, his drift was hard to get. The Founders recognized this by requiring that a naturalized citizen had to wait nine years before he could become a senator, and that he could never become President. Education in citizenship is a tough job. If there are not strong reasons for encouraging immigration, then there is no reason for America to undergo the difficulty.

The doctrine of the rights of man is breathtaking. The Founders thought they knew better than the sages of the past. (Hamilton called the politics of ancient Greece "disgusting.") It is also nerve-wracking, because many of the Founders knew that success was not guaranteed. The wisest of them did not believe in ever-ascending ages of history (Newt Gingrich's error), or the infallibility of the electorate (one of Jude Wanniski's errors). Washington in his first Inaugural called the new regime an "experiment," and experiments can fail. Jefferson wrote years later that Washington had been a man of "gloomy apprehensions." Right you were, Tom, and one of his many sources of gloom was you.

However difficult the doctrine of the rights of man is, American conservatives should try to understand and uphold it, because if they don't, the left will plug some counter-ideal in its place. The non-ideological view of politics has a long pedigree among conservatives, but it is a recipe for getting kicked in the head. This was certainly what the Tories (the British ones, not their American namesakes) found after decades of Palliser-novel guff about managing change slowly, etc., etc. Then came Margaret Thatcher, who announced that some things were right, and others were wrong, and she would do the former. John Major unlearned the lesson. If American conservatives want to avoid his fate, they should shun his example. You can run from ideals, but you can't hide.