ABSTRACT

The Liberals and the Democrats had their origins in controversies that began in eighteenth-century Britain and spread outward to the larger Anglo-American world, carried across the Atlantic in the form of religious attitudes, ethnic identities, and an economic revolution that transformed in common the Anglo-American community. The politics produced by this situation contained one arresting feature: the existence of a constellation of outgroups of various kinds banding together in common self-defense behind the Liberal and Democratic banners. The argument between the Liberal-Democrats and their adversary had its eighteenth-century beginnings in the predominating power of England within the British Isles and the empire—and within that England, in the position of a landed aristocracy that was predominantly Southern English, Anglican, and aligned with a business community that received special privileges in return for the building of a great empire. Liberal-Democracy drew much of its strength from those who faced contempt because of their ethnic identity.