One cannot be an American patriot without reverence for the nation’s enabling documents. One cannot be an American conservative without regard for the American tradition of liberty those charters inaugurated. “Conservatives may of course draw from foreign sources — I yield to no one in the admiration due to Edmund Burke, a great friend of America — but they should be read with a view to possibilities in America,” Harvey Mansfield said. “America cannot abandon the great principles of liberalism, above all the principle of self-government and, with it, the constitutional means for achieving and preserving it.”