Something many liberals won’t like to hear is that they are in fact quite conservative, even if they don’t know it. As my friend Jessica Bruning wrote here recently, conservatism is a ” … philosophy based on tradition and social stability, stressing established institutions, and preferring gradual development to abrupt change … ” It is unlikely that any reasonable person could find much fault with that. Indeed, reasonable people act conservatively on a daily basis.

For example, if your car’s engine breaks down, you don’t rush out to the nearest dealer and buy the first car you see. Instead, you talk to mechanics about repairs, investigate used replacement parts instead of new, solicit the opinions of friends and family and look at cars in the classifieds, in addition to looking at a few cars on a lot. After you methodically measure your options, you arrive at an educated conclusion. And how about our eating habits? While we may enjoy trying new things on occasion, we all still have comfort foods and favorite restaurants that we return to time and again. This is conservatism in action.

We live in a society prone to emotional frenzy, especially in the wake of dramatic events, so our world is subject to knee-jerk reactions. Such events are typically followed by legislative cries to ban this and regulate that, bomb here and embargo there. Good examples are recent: the PATRIOT Act, the TSA, the bank bailouts, so-called “Obamacare” and so on. These things are the result of some crisis, usually exaggerated, and few in the long run can say that they believe these acts were what America truly needed. Indeed, some of them are unjust or even unconstitutional.

The liberal need to change, the philosophy of “do something!” can have unintended consequences, reinforcing the need for a healthy dose of conservatism in government. However, the mistake most liberals would make at this juncture is to presume the advocacy of an overarching philosophy of conservatism in government at the expense of liberalism. And while there are those out there who hold this belief, sadly often holding prominent positions in our culture, such people are ideologues and thus enemies of true politics. Nothing destroys politics faster than ideology because it eliminates independent thought and the room for compromise.

Ideologues claim that the American Revolution was the embodiment of liberalism, or that the Founders were conservatives, or vice versa. The key concept both are missing is that the Spirit of 1776 was the embodiment of both liberalism and conservatism. At the time of the American founding, there was no separation between them. The formation of separate conservative and liberal ideologies was only much seen after the Revolution had ended and the founders finally had idle time to sit down and try to figure out what it all meant.

Party partisanship as we know it today was born after the war, and this period of party and ideology was as bad if not worse than today. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, a liberal and a conservative who became best friends, ended up attacking each other viciously because of party politics. As a result, they didn’t speak a single word to each other for more than a decade until they eventually reconciled and became best friends again in old age. And let’s not forget Aaron Burr killing Alexander Hamilton over what was in hindsight a minor dispute over their personal and political character.

What Jefferson and Adams eventually realized in their twilight years was what Edmund Burke, considered by most to be the Father of Conservatism, had realized. Burke said “a State without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.” Conservatism and liberalism are two sides to the same coin; a political yin and yang, forever in a state of compromise and balance with one another. Adams and Jefferson hadn’t really left one another politically, they just got fooled for a while by party demagogues that they had.

The grand revelation was that the Revolution was a liberal action (declaring independence from the old country) spawned by the British failure to be conservative (lack of respect for traditional English rights), which lead to the liberal act of forming a new government (the ratification of the Constitution), which was itself conservative in that it restored the rule of law and ensured respect for our natural rights, yet was still liberal because it safeguarded our ability to change and adapt.

The lesson for Americans today is that America neither was, nor is now, exclusively liberal or conservative any more than people have a top half without a bottom half. We exhibit both simply as a necessary condition of our existence, and without one, the other half will quickly die. Conservatism is about continued respect and adherence to the rule of law, our traditions and principles, and gradual, informed change. Liberalism is about individualism, our constant involvement in government, finding our common needs together and meeting those needs in an always changing society.

We simply need both for a healthy nation. If we truly want to restore the spirit of 1776, we must rebuke and cast off the false separation we’ve been shackled with by those who profit from keeping us apart.