Stephen Miller adopts the “five cities” narrative of the roots of the American order from Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, London, and Philadelphia. This is the idea that American civilization emerges from a lineage of Hebrew moral law (Jerusalem), Greek philosophy (Athens), Roman law (Rome), British constitutionalism (London), and the American founding (Philadelphia), which is central to Russell Kirk’s The Roots of American Order (1974), though its intellectual roots long predate him, and derive from a long moral and political tradition of Western historiography. It is not originally Kirkian, but Kirk articulated it as the intellectual foundation of the conservative tradition. William F. Buckley Jr. had broadly accepted the civilizational continuity thesis, but not as systematically as Kirk. Stephen Miller clearly adopts this framework, which possibly reached him through The Heritage Foundation, which based its ideas on the writings of the conservative Russell Kirk. This civilizational genealogy was synthesized and popularized for modern American conservatism against the political Left.
Whether Miller reads or can articulate any of Russell Kirk’s works coherently if pressed on the spot is not known. In this framework, it places the center of the American order in the ideal of Jerusalem, over-emphasizing Jerusalem. This argument has been articulated by classical Christian, Renaissance, Enlightenment, and British Whig historians like Augustine, Eusebius, Edward Coke, William Blackstone, and Macaulay, which frame Western order as emerging from Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome.
For Kirk, America, being the culmination of a long Western moral and political tradition is inherently conservative, advocating an ordered liberty, hierarchy, inherited norms, and religious moral law. This framework is revisionist, omitting other influences of the roots of the Republic, which do not fit the modern Trump Administration or Christian Nationalist narrative. The roots do not originate in Abrahamic religion and do not end with them.
The Left’s political genealogy and mythos being rooted in Enlightenment radicalism, Marxist and post‑Marxist critique, social egalitarianism, anti‑hierarchical movements, post‑colonial and critical theory and emphasis on liberation (not inheritance) leads the political Right to depict their political opposition as against the “American order” which they essentially retrofitted as a conservative order onto the Founders. American conservatism is unusual because the foundations of the American Republic had no throne, no aristocracy, and no established church to conserve. Treating the roots of the American order, which was liberal and republican as a conservative tradition has a great limitation, which is self created.
The American Minervan 