The Two Political Parties Born in the Same Womb?

Two main kinds of people fled Europe to live in North America in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries: individualists who sought freedom from the political interference they were accustomed to dealing with in Europe; and religious zealots who sought to create and maintain a puritan theocracy on these shores without interference from the selfsame European political authorities who were interfering with the individualists. Some colonists wanted a society in which no one could impose his or her creed on anyone else; other colonists wanted a society in which they could impose their own creed on everyone else. Both the individualists and the puritans can legitimately lay claim to an authentic American pedigree for their creeds.

Jeff Riggenbach, The Libertarian Tradition (Kindle version just $2.99 . . . a steal)